LIGHT OF THE FIREFLIES – ARCHAEOLOGY OF MEMORY
Interventions in public space and a mobile app – a bilateral memory culture project with youth in Belgrade (Serbia) and Berlin (Germany) at original sites of persecution and nazi oppression.
“The Light of the Fireflies – Archeology of Memory” project is an international memory culture initiative born out of collaboration between youth from Belgrade and Berlin. Like archaeologists, project participants explore historical sites of national socialist persecution, suffering, and extermination, seeking hidden traces of the past, revealing them, confronting them, and making them visible through public space interventions. They not only create immediate content at memorial sites but also transform these interventions into digital content accessible through the TOTO mobile app.
In this way, these traces of the past remain permanently preserved and accessible to younger generations in schools not only in Serbia and Germany but beyond.
Two groups of young people in Belgrade and Berlin work with the participation and support of representatives from the Roma and Jewish communities, groups of artists, educators, and historians from Serbia and Germany at sites of suffering in both cities. The history of these sites is often poorly visible or completely lost.
The team in Belgrade (students from the XIII Belgrade Gymnasium) focuses on the Topovske Šupe location, the first concentration camp for Jews and Roma in occupied Serbia (August-November 1941). Here, men – Roma and Jews from Banat and Belgrade – were interned and later shot by the Wehrmacht in retaliation actions at execution sites around Belgrade.
The Berlin group (students from Ernst-Haeckel High School in Berlin) investigates the former Marzahn Forced Campsite. It is estimated that between the Berlin Olympics in 1936 and 1945, around 1,200 Sinti and Roma were interned there based on Nazi racial laws, exploited through forced labour, and then deported to concentration camps from which few returned.
During on-site research, the teams in Belgrade and Berlin will exchange information bilaterally about the period of national socialism in their countries, developing new forms of memory culture and critically examining both history and the present. Each group, in its city, develops artistic content and interventions that become part of the mobile application. The TOTO app connects the Topovske Šupe camp and the Rastplatz Martzan, permanently mapping the fates of the persecuted. It enables users to virtually visit both sites of persecution and suffering, and compare the past and present, the fates of the victims, and the current state of society in both countries.
The causes and consequences of discrimination, persecution, and the extermination of thousands of people thus become visible and interconnected in an international context. Artistic interventions and objects intertwine and remain preserved for the future as a transnational virtual monument to the victims of war and persecution.
The “Firefly Light – Archeology of Memory” project continues the successful collaboration between the Free Zone Film Festival Association from Belgrade and the spreeagenten group, artists from Berlin, and partners (CPI Center for Applied History, UDI EUROCLIO) historians and educators. In 2021, together with youth from across Serbia, we realized the “The Light of the Fireflies” project dedicated to marking the eightieth anniversary of the founding of the camp at the Staro Sjamište.
The independent theatre troupe spreeagenten realized the theatrical performance “Rastplatz Marzahn” in Berlin in 2017, a performative reconstruction of the Marzahn Forced Camp based on the memories of surviving witnesses, and this joint project is a continuation of that process.
As in 2021, this time too, virtual walks at the sites of the former Topovske Šupe camp in Belgrade and the Marzahn Forced Camp (Berlin) through the TOTO application will be available to all interested students, teachers, and schools. Additionally, a digital handbook in PDF format will be available. The handbook, like the mobile app, will be available in Serbian, German, and English, to be used by students and schools beyond the borders of our (two) countries.
Light of the Fireflies – Archaeology of Memory is a project by Free Zone Film Festival (Belgrade) in cooperation with spreeagenten (Berlin) with the support of CPI Belgrade, EUROCLIO Belgrade, XIII Belgrade Gymnasium and the Ernst-Haeckel-School Berlin-Hellersdorf.
Funded by the EVZ Foundation, Berlin, as part of the YOUNG PEOPLE REMEMBER program