What if? Hypothetical Museum+Archive // Margret Holz, Project Space B74, Lucerne 2020
Discursive Reflection by Jana Avanzini, Lucerne
Steel is her material. And wood. The materials of her daily work. But in Lucerne, Margret Holz shows her other work: the “Hypothetical Museum+Archive,” founded in 1988 in Berlin. A project where Holz mines history.
“I’m working ‘underground’ like a miner. And what I’m mining? A lot of fragments, time as material, and unknown pieces.”
With spontaneous situationist actions, installations, and interventions, Holz reacts on-site to the history of a place. She researches, documents, and reflects on history through time-critical works, actions, and an annual poster.
The origin of the project: Back in the days of the Wall, on Holz’s way to work in Berlin, she noticed some workers. They were searching for ammunition on the grounds of the former Kroll Opera House. A new building was supposed to be built there. Here pointed hardly related to the history. Here there was the most modern aesthetics, new music. Before the Second World War. Here, at the conductor’s podium of the opera, closed by the Nazis, Hitler stood on March 23, 1933, and received free rein. A place of crime, a place of lost future. A place of destroyed culture. ‚Every city is full of such places.‘
Passage Mémoire Paris – Berlin, Station I, II, III
Station III: Experiment Krolloper 2005.
Her pictures in B74 show the faces of the artists who had to flee their cultural home, the Krolloper, in the early 1930s – to Paris and beyond. They show the construction site of the glass pyramid in Paris – and Holz places the artists of the Krolloper at this new location. Holz networks and layers the stations of her museum – across the decades, connected through the Reduit.*
The focus is always on the question: ‚What if?‘ – in the now, in the past, and in the future. It is a political work, the project of the Hypothetical Museum. Also a cultural-political one. Because Margret Holz asks even those responsible for the museums in her work: What if? What if you opened up and rethought the institution? The artist sets foot on Lucerne soil for the first time and is glad to be able to strongly dedicate herself again to her philosophical, political art project through the exhibition on Baselstrasse, alongside her main work in sculpture and plastic arts. She also asks herself what could or should be different. Where could it move.
On the current poster, part of the exhibition – it says „liberated but not free.“ A quote from Meron Mendel from a DP camp – a camp for Displaced Persons. People, freed from war, from concentration camps, from forced labor, but not at home, not free. A historical quote, brought into the present in the Hypothetical Museum. It expresses horror – at the course of history. About how today groups of people quartered and living excluded from our society. An unusually serious statement for Holz, who otherwise likes to open the viewer’s mind with ironic remarks and a bit of a smile. With ‚Can living be a sin?‘, a poster, for example.
*Reduit is Station II of the Paris-Berlin Passage and acts as a hinge between Station I and II.