Alexander Steinwendtner – Georg Trakl Boulevard (en) - a podcast by CastYourArt.com

Alexander Steinwendtner – Georg Trakl Boulevard
Martin Heidegger called his oeuvre one single great poem, and Rilke was enthusiastic about the rhythm and wording of his verse. They were referring to Georg Trakl, one of the greatest poets in the German language. Hundred years ago, in 1914, Trakl died in Krakow from a cocaine overdose at the age of 27. His poetry was deeply rooted in the city of Salzburg where he was born and raised. On the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of Georg Trakl’s death, the artist Alexander Steinwendtner created a monument for Trakl, consisting of 14 marble steles with images and texts from Trakl’s life – as a memento against silence. The steles are placed in the outdoor area around the University of Salzburg’s faculty of literature. The material and its durability stand for the idea of saving Trakl and his work from oblivion to preserve it for eternity - in marble, a material that changes colours with the weather conditions and thus bears references to Trakl’s poetry, permeated by colours.

The city as a theatre of memories is an essential concept for the work of the artist Alexander Steinwendtner, himself a native of Salzburg.

If the relationship between man and the site was merely random, buildings and cities could be destroyed without a problem. Nevertheless man shows a certain tendency to cling to places he regards as his own, where his memories are stored. A location is an inhabited space that is animated and visited. Therefore a sculptural architectural construction is nothing immovable and timeless. Cities, their buildings and their monuments are, like living organisms, subject to transformations in time and have to be regarded as phenomena of cultural history by the virtue of which memories of people are evoked. Memory is the conscious presence of the past, while the memory of an individual occurs within a determined historical and social context.

In urban space, monuments embody the utmost manifestation of a collective will. They are destined to be beacons in a changing and dynamic surrounding, fulfilling their role as containers of memory and as references to urban cultural history. However, physical locations do not generate meaning on its own terms. Only by an act of narration can the human subject grasp and enounce their meaning. Memory does not appear in a clearly defined shape, it flickers it gleams in fleeting moments, it stammers.

Beyond the implications of the term memento, to recollect certain contents, Steinwendtner creates spaces for thought, traces of remembrances. He establishes poetics of whispering and silence, of fleeting flashes of memories, of traces that awaken the curiosity - in order to transform them into discoveries. Open for multiple readings interpretations, Steinwendtner’s intervention poses questions, like about the relationships between recollection and oblivion, between absence and presence, past and future. By the same token, it bears witness for the close relation between sculpture, space, and memory. Memory and space are closely related. Remembrance can be evoked by conjuring up mental images of what is to be remembered, placing them in an architectural sculptural space.

The monuments are alive as long as they subjects - of contemplation. (written by Cem Angeli)
A portrait by CastYourArt | www.castyourart.com

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