Steinstrasse 21, Berlin, plate 19 from the series "Writing on the Wall"

Memory has always been very important to me. I have also always responded very strongly to spaces and places. Therefore, it is no surprise that as an artist I am most interested in the relationship between place, memory, and identify and how this relationship might be distilled and articulated through visual and aesthetic means. I am particularly concerned with giving visual form to personal and collective memory, and how histories of marginalized and forgotten communities may be visually introduced into the physical landscape of the present.

I use contemporary media to reanimate sizes with images of their own lost histories. For the Writing on the Wall project, I slide-projected portions of prewar photographs of street life in Berlin onto the same or nearby addresses today. By using slide projection on location, fragments of the past were introduced into the visual field of the present. Thus, parts of long-destroyed community life were visually simulated, momentarily recreated. The projections were visible to street traffic, neighborhood residents, and passersby. As much of my art practice is a marriage between photography and installation art, during the course of the installations, I photographed the projections. -Shimon Attie