Blurriness of Seeing — Maggie McCutcheon

Blurriness of Seeing: Lyon Holocaust Memorial

Architectural Competition in collaboration with Amit Sadik and Roy Schneid - Centre d'histoire de la résistance et de la déportation - Lyon, France

“How did this happen?”

A simple yet potent question. Many people around the world are often faced with this question upon reflection about the Holocaust. One of those people was the applicant himself. At age seven, he questioned his grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, while she wrote her history of escape and noted her grandchildren’s many questions.

That indescribable moment – a Holocaust survivor writing her testimony for her descendants, overlooking the port of Haifa in which she arrived after the war – is one worth preserving. Her voice, like the voices of many other survivors, will last, even as they pass on. There is power in the act of remembrance; powerful enough to alter time. We can imagine the past, reorient the present, and shape the future when we engage in active remembrance. Almost 80 years since the liberation of Auschwitz, we cement survivor’s experiences in other forms. This is the role and responsibility of a public memorial. It is only fitting that this team of applicants between Tel Aviv and Montréal shall build their vision in the middle, the city of Lyon and the centre of French Resistance.

The proposed Holocaust memorial at Perrache Train Station, a site of forced departure, utilizes the language of linearity to create irregular and intersecting boxes that form an experiential pathway, prompting reflection on the act of departure, the act of ignorance, and the act of resistance.