Anna Maria Tulli - le scatole della memoria

The “Memory Boxes” are the result of a 2018 trip made by the artist to Prague. The visit to the Pinkas Synagogue and the impact with the long list of 77,297 names of men and women exterminated by the Nazi fury, with the drawings of Terezin’s children in the small adjacent museum, acted as a detonator. From the sum of these sensations, a sui generis reportage was born which intends to make the works of those children, some of them budding artists, dialogue on the thread of memory with the works of contemporary artists present in Prague and other cities. The suggestions of a series of contemporary sculptures are flanked by the moving stories told by the drawings of the children of Terezin, a sadly known ghetto and even transformed, for a period, into a kind of holiday village by Nazi propaganda to deceive the inspectors of the International Red Cross . Ghetto from which, via Auschwitz, hardly anyone returned.The shots dedicated to the works of today’s artists are superimposed on the drawings of those children who - under the guidance of an extraordinary teacher, Friedl Dicker Brandeis, theorist of art-therapy - took refuge in that activity to alleviate, even to a minimum extent, the pain of their terrible condition. To preserve this delicate and poignant memory as in a casket, the frames, made of wood, sackcloth, plaster and graphite, become an integral part of the work itself.