On the occasion of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, on Saturday, January 27th at 5:30 pm, for the seventh edition of "Museums of Memory: Architectures that Tell," the Ezio De Felice Foundation presents the MEIS – Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah in Ferrara conference. Special guest will be Ludovica Di Falco, architect, partner and founder of SCAPE Architecture Paris, and designer of the MEIS museum.
After the greetings of Marina Colonna, President of the Ezio De Felice Foundation, Michelangelo Russo, Director of DiArc University of Naples Federico II, introduces the meeting. The musical intervention entitled The game of memory, between sung words and narrated words with the Youth Choir Le Voci del 48 directed by Salvatore Murru and the reciting voice of Carolina Rapillo, curated by the Centro di Musica Antica Pietà dei Turchini, closes the appointment.
The National Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah, located in Ferrara, was born with the mission of telling over two thousand years of history of the Jews in Italy. From South to North, for centuries Italian Jews have contributed and participated in the evolution of the country, going through phases of integration and exchange and difficult periods, marked by persecution and isolation. The museum bears witness to a common history.
The MEIS is located in Ferrara, a city that hosted one of the oldest and most influential Jewish communities in Europe and played a crucial role in Italian Jewish history. The welcoming policy of the House of Este was decisive, and in particular of the Dukes Ercole I and Ercole II, which culminated in the edicts inviting the Spanish and Portuguese Jews expelled in 1492 to settle in the city. Despite the racial laws and Nazi-Fascist persecution, the local community has managed to resist the impact of time and difficulties and after more than a thousand years is still active.
MEIS, founded in 2003, has as its main objectives the testimony and documentation of the Shoah in Italy through exhibitions, educational workshops, screenings and meetings.
The museum is located in the former prisons of via Piangipane in Ferrara, not far from the ancient Jewish Ghetto, chosen to transform a place of confinement into an open and inclusive space. In the architectural project, the modern structures, symbol of the five books of the Torah, are integrated with the two historic buildings. The book is a metaphor for awareness and reason. The MEIS is conceived as a bridge between past and present, a space dedicated to culture, sharing ideas and freedom.
The MEIS project presented us with a complex and heterogeneous space. It is a museum, but also a place of memory, part of the city and the collective consciousness: a historical monument. In other words, a landscape through which memories flow and intertwine in a highly complex manner; a combination of sedimentations and signs, both physical and immaterial, ordered and imbued with meaning through the architectural design. Like two-faced Janus, the underlying thought process for this project is based on a dual perspective: looking simultaneously to the past and the future. The masonry, typical of a former prison, is transformed into an element from which to regenerate the relationship with the city: transforming closure into openness and distance into proximity. The Museum of Italian Judaism is a museum of the city, a museum for the city, an open space,” explains Ludovica Di Falco, author of the project with Alessandro Cambi.
The Museums of Memory
The Ezio De Felice Cultural Foundation, which carries out and promotes study and research activities in the field of conservation and museography, has been organizing “The Museums of Memory, architectures that tell stories” since 2017, a series of annual conferences, inviting the protagonists of international architecture on the occasion of the anniversary of January 27. The aim is to articulate a path that analyzes those museum structures that already in their architectural expression, even before the educational/exhibition path, announce and anticipate themes that are then articulated and developed inside the museum installation and the exhibition spaces. “Architectures that tell stories”, precisely, that use a symbolic/educational language already from the outside, recovering the iconic value of the built space, a vocation that belonged to the architecture of the past and that today risks being forgotten. Since 2017, guests have included: Andrea Wandel of the Trier University of Applied Sciences who presented the Judische Center in Munich, Paolo Coen of the University of Teramo illustrated Moshe Safdie's architecture at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Andràs Palffy of the Technische Universität Wien presented the project by the Jabornegg & Palffy studio for the Museum Judenplatz in Vienna, Jacques Gubler, Guido Morpurgo and Annalisa De Curtis talked about the Shoah Memorial in Milan, Elena Montanari with the presentation on I BBPR and the museum-monument to the political and racial deportee in the Nazi extermination camps in Carpi, Adachiara Zevi with the meeting Monuments by defect, from the Fosse Ardeatine to the Stumbling Stones.
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