Pisa, an installation to remember Pisan Jews affected by racial laws

In Pisa , the exterior façade of the San Rossore 1938 Memorial Pole, one of the buildings of the University of Pisa (it houses the teaching activities of the departments of Civilization and Forms of Knowledge and Biology), will be enriched with an installation by Elena Cologni (Bergamo, 1967) to commemorate the shame of the fascist racial laws. It will be inaugurated before the summer and will consist of four hundred and sixteen brass plaques to remember the Jewish citizens officially counted in Pisa in 1938 and affected by the racial laws.

The installation is a project that, 85 years after those measures were signed, aims to reknit the threads of memory and remember the Jewish community of Pisa in its city and its places, where it lived, worked and raised its children. The work is titled 416_SR1938 and is only the first in a series of interventions that, in addition to the facade, will also affect the garden of the University of Pisa’s teaching pole: steps in memory of Jewish professors expelled from the university and an installation in remembrance of the foreign Jewish students who those laws, signed by the king in the San Rossore estate, removed from careers and studies, condemning them, in many cases, to the hell of the Nazi lagers.

“With Elena Cologni’s installation, the message of which the Polo della Memoria - San Rossore 1938 is the bearer is reinforced and the commitment of our community in defense of the values of democracy, freedom and the right to dignity of every human being is renewed,” says Riccardo Zucchi, rector of the University of Pisa. “For all this I thank my predecessor, Professor Paolo Mancarella, who strongly wanted this project, linked to the path he began with the 2018 Ceremony of Remembrance and Apology and continued, more recently, precisely with the inauguration of this Pole.”

“To remember is to reconnect with our past, and this project inevitably reopens deep wounds that are part of social memory,” Elena Cologni explains, “At the same time, however, this project also wants to be the fulcrum of a dialogue that can point to shared paths of communicative memory activation.”

Commissioned by the University of Pisa and curated by Alessandro Melis and Ilaria Fruzzetti - partners in the Heliopolis 21 Architetti Associati studio - together with curator and contemporary art critic, Gabi Scardi, Elena Cologni’s intervention is carried out in collaboration with the Jewish Community of Pisa and the Interdepartmental Center for Jewish Studies of the University of Pisa. The project also had the support of Cambridge School of Art, Anglia Ruskin University and Arts Council England.

Pisa, an installation to remember Pisan Jews affected by racial laws

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