Monument of Oblivion: River of Lethe

2025

Sound sculpture,Art in public space
Klosterruine Berlin

I thought I understood this tension the first time I faced Mutter Heimat at Treptower Park. Her empty hands, her bowed head, a staged lesson in shame. The Red Army soldier at the memorial’s apex cradles a child, a forced symbol of futures reclaimed. But the child never grows. The soldier never ages. The mother never unclenches her fists. The memorial’s choreography loops endlessly, a closed circuit of guilt and absolution. Yet its foundation is violence: the land cleared, the narratives erased, the victor’s story cast in immutable material.

Klosterruine refuses such neat arcs. Monument of Oblivion materializes this refusal: blue construction chutes coil into an ouroboros, swallowing their own rubble. The debris falls and falls, never landing, a soundscape of perpetual collapse, each fragment a whisper of what was broken to build, and broken again to unbuild. It mimics history’s absurd rhythm, how we dismantle empires only to build new ones, how we mourn wars while waging them. The installation’s title invokes Lethe, the river of forgetting, yet its form is a torrent without end. No drink from these waters grants oblivion; the cycle spins on.

The Pietà in Neue Wache understands this. Kollwitz’s bronze mother grieves without script. Rain streaks her face; light etches fresh anguish into her features. She is not a lesson but a mirror. Her sorrow is not a monument but a current, one that rewrites its own banks with each visitor. And yet, even her grief is framed by violence: the hollowed-out space of the guardhouse, the weight of history pressing down.

Here lies the failure of stones and steel: Mutter Heimat and the Pietà, for all their power, cannot halt time. Wars relapse. Grief outlives its memorials. We build monuments to end cycles, yet they become cycles themselves. The ouroboros of Treptower Park, the rubble-loop of Klosterruine, the mothers who have wept in stone and bronze for centuries.

from exhibition text
_{https://klosterruine.berlin/de/program/monument-of-oblivion-river-of-lethe}

Photos © Wataru Murakami