Grey landscapes, made out concrete and shadows. Also some cracks. No sky no ground. Pictures with no light, no horizon, no vanishing line. No reference, no clue. Nothing that tells us those pictures were taken in the very center of an European capital, one of the brightest and most lively ones nowadays: Berlin.

With his series “2711”, Eduardo Nave wanted to return in pictures the measure of one of the most impressive places of memory in the world: the Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas (Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe).

2711, like the number of stelae forming this monument inaugurated in a space of around 2 hectares in May 2005 after more than twelve years of debates in Germany. Return its measure, i.e. giving us a glimpse of the experience involved. The experience of a kind of uneasiness, oppression, confusion. In only one word: vertigo. Vertigo of feeling you loose your mind in this space ordered however. Vertigo when you think of what the human being was capable of: the Holocaust.

In this way, Eduardo Nave’s pictures remind us where the Holocaust took place. Not only where it was executed: in the concentration and extermination camps where thousands of millions of human beings were exterminated; spaces that, in many occasions, became also places of memory, like Auschwitz-Birkenau. But also where it was designed, thought, organized: on the places of Nazi power and in human brains. The monument in Berlin is only a few meters away from where the Reichstag and Hitler’s bunker used to be. Nowadays, there is a parking lot there. That’s how the memory of the places and the places of memory saturate the urban space; like those stelae pictured by Eduardo Nave saturate our visual field to invade our soul.

Gérôme Truc