Maintenance
Finished editing a small video built from footage and audio gathered in Berlin.
On the day I visited the Holocaust Memorial by the Brandenburg Gates, a crew of men were diligently sanding off the graffiti, scuff marks and stains that had built up or had been applied to the individual components that make up the memorial’s expansive field of horizontal plinths.
I shot some footage and proceeded to walk on towards the Reichstag when a group of musicians in full regalia stepped through the gates and proceeded to parade down the avenue playing traditional tunes. It felt as though I had come upon two incidents of historical and cultural “maintenance”: a memorial being kept impervious to entropy and the markings of temporal and social collision and the spectacle and affirmation of a tradition that exists now in the realm of the performed nostalgic.