Memorium is a spectral mirage-palace, which rises up not far from the
Insterburg castle, in the place where once a nice, charming Lutheran
church stood. The fantastic glassy vault of Memorium, which is suspended
to skinny gothic arcades made of stone, is the soul of the building.
This thin haze-shell looks like a giant ironically shaped distorting
mirror and works like a holographic screen in the interior. The visitor
dives deeply into the world of mystery and melancholy being affected by
the holographic images while walking through the hall and the balcony
and observing the carefully collected and exhibited items of the past.
The vault-screen shows the phantoms of the remote past – the memories of
the forgotten epochs. These memories are concealed in the multiple
artifacts dispersed all around the Kaliningrad Oblast’. Each year the
number of these tokens of the past decreases: the old buildings degrade
and the roof tiles fall down like an autumn leaves and cobble-stone
pavements sink into the depths of asphalt. The sensitive tower-antenna
of Memorium captures the every small fact of past disappearance which
are recorded into its memory and after that translated through the
vault-screen. Sometimes the images reconstructed by the metaphysical
interior represent something never seen by anyone here. It happens
because each try to resurrect the remote past in the reminiscences is
not only the result of memory work, but also an operation of fantasy –
the nostalgia for the eternity.