EXP2 - Passages, Portbou 1994.

Passages is the name of the Memorial the Israeli artist Dani Karavan created in Portbou in honour of Walter Benjamin to mark the 50th anniversary of his death.


The Walter Benjamin Memorial in Portbou is a sculptural installation thoroughly integrated into the landscape. Karavan’s extraordinary sensitivity enables him to give the natural and urban spaces in which he works a life of their own. He knows how to capture their intrinsic historicity and set the elements in play so that historicity can flourish. Rather than the work incorporating the landscape, the landscape becomes the catalyst that activates the work. In Karavan’s intervention the cliffs of the Costa Brava and such archetypal natural Mediterranean elements as olive trees, stone and wind weave a story about their past as a place of exile and at the same time enact an exercise in contemporary memory.


The title chosen by Karavan, Passages, refers not only to Benjamin’s fateful passage from France to Portbou, but also to his unfinished last work, the Passagen-Werk or Arcades Project, which he began in 1927, a vast collection of writings on the life of 19th-century Paris and its arcades and reflections on the contemporary urban experience. In creating his memorial, Karavan adopted an approach akin to Benjamin’s own, connecting the traces of past pain, memory and exile with the possibility of a new and better future. In fact, the memorial incorporates a number of the thinker’s concepts most characteristic themselves: the philosophy of history, the necessity of experience, the idea of limit, the landscape as aura and the necessity of memory.


Text taken from:Walter Benjamin in Portbou.

Some of the images were taken by pär hedefält