Die Vergessenskurve / la courbe de l'oubli

have I ever come here ?
When I arrived in Berlin, I first walked in the North, through the city of Buch, where the Plattenbauten are.
Immediately, I have tried to remember this space, tried to get an understading of the memory of the place, of the landscapes.
And yet, I had never been here before.
What I know comes from books, films, photographs, television : from fiction and history.

die Vergessenskurve

The forgetting curve is a language theory developped by the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus. He purports to show that humans tend to halve their memory of newly learned sounds in a matter of hours. The forgetting curve deals with perception, the recalling of perception and the occurrence of events.

memory and monument

When we face a monument, it becomes clearer that we – as a social group- have already come here. Something happened here and we should be able to remember it. Statues are the crowd, the witnesses of days, of stories. They symbolize memory, they are the shadows in the streets, on bridges, in museums but also on monuments.
Cities and statues are carved in the same stone.

I do remember

I do remember now, that it all comes from narration, for example, a renovation work
in progress on a monument shows the reminder of the remembrance of memory.
Streets, cities and domestic space embrace individual memories, silencious lives hidden behind walls.
I do remember the scenery but not what it carries.

Statues have their own cemetery, there, in the North of Berlin’s Gleisdreieck park. An abandonned statue lies on the ground, covered in moss.

Streets are empty but some details show what is imperceptible : the Lesbarkeit – the readability of landscapes.
Behind every landscape, there is a memory. Behind every stone, every piece, every window.

And every memory is threatened to sink into oblivion.