The Memory and Forgetting Together studio focuses on the Krzemionki area of Krakow, Poland.

Krzemionki is an area of three low limestone hills immediately south of the Vistula River and Podgorze in central Krakow. Krzemionki is a focused but complex landscape palimpsest which has developed over time and notably includes Liban Quarry (where Steven Spielberg built the set for KL Plaszow Concentration Camp for Schindler’s List), Austro-Hungarian fortifications, Jewish cemeteries and Plaszow Concentration Camp itself. The camp site is palimpsest in miniature, with overlying traces of Austro Hungarian fortifications, Jewish cemeteries, camp layout and abundant trees and meadows. 

KL Plaszow was previously one of the few Holocaust landscapes without appropriate memorialisation meaning that for decades it functioned as a de-facto park for local residents and where an uneasy tension encapsulated by memory and forgetting together between those wishing to remember and those choosing to forget existed. The newly formalised KL Plaszow Museum has permanently changed this dynamic and a further potential framing design research question for our studio unit emerges; can this newly formalised memorial landscape continue to function as park, local green space and memorial landscape or does this change require a revised approach elsewhere?

Top images: Derek Fraser, Paul Morsley