On the grounds of the former Ravensbrück women's concentration camp, vegetation, soil, and trees have outlived the political regimes that shaped them. The landscape was never neutral: linden trees were planted during the camp's construction, and when the camp was extended, the SS had rows of fast-growing poplars planted. Avenues, curated vegetation, and designed vistas became part of a topography of power. Today, most of those poplars no longer stand. Their immense trunks lie across the ground, transformed from vertical markers into horizontal remains.
Since 2023, the Israeli artist Rotem Bidas has been conducting research at Ravensbrück. Her practice of artistic research begins from a question more pressing than ever: Where does memory reside once the voices that carried it are gone? Bidas proposes that we view the maimed landscape itself as an archive. She approaches the fallen trees not as metaphors but as material witnesses: trunks, roots, and growth rings become alternative documents through which history may be read.
Between 2023 and 2026, Bidas transferred the bark and cut surfaces of the trunks onto paper as large-scale direct prints and frottages at a scale of 1:1. The image is not created through representation, but through contact between the body, the material, and the site. The result is a tactile archive that records 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. Remembrance thus appears not only as an act of preservation, but as an ongoing practice of interpretation.
The exhibition opens on Sunday, 13 September 2026, at 1:30 pm as part of the nationwide Heritage Day (Tag des offenen Denkmals). In spring 2027, a discursive programme of public conversations and workshops will accompany the exhibition.
The opening will be held in English, without interpretation. Please register by 12 September 2026 at gedenkstaettearavensbrueckode.
Funded by the Internationaler Freundeskreis der Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück e. V., the Dr. Hildegard Hansche Stiftung, the Cultural Department of the Embassy of the State of Israel and the Weiss-Livnat International Center for Holocaust Research and Education at the University of Haifa. The Brandenburg Memorials Foundation is funded by the Brandenburg Ministry of Science, Research and Culture and the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.
