Three Earths
Earth Pigments, Pit Lime
Gwarna Street and Konstytucji 3 Maja Square, Wrocław
2022
Photos: Filip Morawski
Three Earths marks fragments the historic borders of the destroyed Jewish Cemetery on Gwarna Street in Wroclaw, Poland (former Claassenstrasse in the German city of Breslau).
On Gwarna Street, this temporary work marks the still standing part of the unnamed cemetery wall from 1908 . Looking at the wall, one also turns towards the cemetery site where human remains are still buried. Until the making of the Three Earths, the cemetery was not marked in the city space. Today, two information boards accompanying the artwork bring the story of this place, the story of the pre-war Jewish community and the cemetery.
Facing the former cemetery wall, one can also see the elevated ground - the historic cemetery area - with tennis courts and a sports hall today serving as a refugee shelter.
On Konstytucji 3 Maja Square, which formed the other triangular end of the cemetery, Three Earths marks the ground uncovering the size of the original cemetery area. In this part of the land burials were removed in 1937 and reburied at the main site of the cemetery. In between, there is Dworcowa Street (former Bahnhofstrasse) that in 1908 divided the cemetery in two parts causing the first round of exhumation.
Engaging with the history of the Gwarna cemetery in the topography of the city of Wrocław was by invitation of the Urban Memory Foundation.
To learn more vist: www.urbanmemoryfoundation.org
Three Earths view on Gwarna Street
About Jewish Cemetery on Gwarna Street (former Claassenstrasse)
The 18th and 19th-century Jewish cemetery at ul. Gwarna in Wrocław, formerly known as Jüdischer Friedhof an der Claassenstrasse in the German city of Breslau, operated for almost a hundred years, from 1761 until its closure in 1856. Over 4,000 people from the Jewish community of the city were buried here. It was said to have been one of the most impressive cemeteries in Germany in terms of funerary art.
At the time of its establishment, in the mid-18th century, the area was outside the city walls. Along with the urban development of Breslau/Wrocław towards the south, the Main Railway Station was built in its close proximity in the 1850s, and it became a part of the busy, central district of the city. From the beginning of the 20th century, the cemetery was subject to urban encroachment, which gradually reduced the historic burial area, and subject to further devastation in the 1940s during the Nazi period. The cemetery was formally liquidated in post-war Poland, in the 1950s and 1960s, when the remaining tombstones were removed from its site as part of a wider campaign to transform almost all of the seventy German cemeteries in the city (Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, communal and military cemeteries) into parks, recreational areas, and – in some cases – into land for development.
Read more about this place and the "Places of Remembrance and Forgetting" project at: www.urbanmemoryfoundation.org
Three Earths detail view Gwarna Street
Three Earths view on Gwarna Street
Three Earths view Konstytucji 3 Maja Square
Three Earths view on Gwarna Street
Three Earths view Konstytucji 3 Maja Square
Three Earths view Konstytucji 3 Maja Square