On the grounds of the former Ravensbrück women's concentration camp, vegetation, soil, and trees have outlived the political regimes that shaped them: the camp's operation under National Socialism, its later use as a Soviet military base during the GDR, and its present existence as a memorial site. Nature was never neutral here. Tree-lined avenues and meticulously designed vistas belonged to a political aesthetic that sought to normalize violence through order and beauty. During the camp's expansion, rows of fast-growing poplars were planted; the landscape itself became part of an architecture of power. Today most of these trees lie across the ground as immense trunks.
Since 2023, the artistRotem Bidas has been conducting research at the former Ravensbrück women's concentration camp. Through repeated stays and in dialogue with historians and archivists, she has developed a practice of artistic research that begins from a question: where does memory reside once the last human witnesses disappear? What remains capable of bearing witness? Bidas proposes that we regard the wounded landscape itself as an archive. She approaches the fallen trees not as mere metaphors but as material witnesses: their trunks, roots, and growth rings become alternative sources through which history can be approached. While institutions and narratives changed, the environment has continued to accumulate time, silently, without language, without intention.
At the heart of the site-specific installation is the making of large-scale prints and frottages taken directly from the poplars. The image is created not through representation but through contact between body, material, and place. The works do not document the camp in the conventional sense; they record an encounter, between artist and tree, present and past. The exhibition is completed by the planting of new poplars on the former camp grounds, a gesture that continues to grow into the site's future, beyond the duration of the exhibition itself. In this way the work asks not only what we remember, but understands remembrance itself as an ongoing practice of attention.
The exhibition opens on 13 September at 2 pm as part of Heritage Day (Tag des Denkmals) and will be accompanied next spring by a discursive program of public conversations and workshops.
Information
13 September 2026 – 10 May 2027
Location: Former Waterworks
FREE ADMISSION
