FOREWORD
The City Council of Pulheim extended an invitation for me to work in Stommeln’s synagogue to honour the memory of the innumerable Jews who, in order to rob them of their possessions, were brutally murdered in the 20th century. The result is a work I have called 245m³ in allusion to the empty space of this synagogue, which is no longer used as a place of prayer. 245m³ is a work against the trivialization of our memory of the Holocaust, a work about our chronic and exploited feeling of guilt, about the exploited and their exploiters. Above all, however, 245m³ is meant to be a work about the industrialized and institutionalized Death from which the European peoples of the world have lived and continue to live. All of this in the conviction that this project cannot engender empathy, but only the consciousness and certainty of individual death. It is dedicated to each and every victim of State and Capital.
Stommeln, March 2006
Santiago Sierra
