The Romantic Trail and The Concrete House
Floor plan of Haus Esters, urban villa
Designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
Kunstmuseen Krefeld, Museum Haus Esters, Germany
Sharon Ya’ari
The Romantic Trail and The Concrete HouseAll projects
A work process that was created and formulated leading up to an exhibition in the unique space of Haus Esters in Krefeld, Germany, 2020–2021.
Haus Esters, Haus Lange — Two iconic urban villas that were designed by Mies van der Rohe and built at the end of the late 1920s. They distil the essence of the modernist idea and its preservation over time.
In the space of the villa, now a pilgrimage site, the photographs attest to the possibility of another fate for the modernist experiment, in another place and under different circumstances. Their focus is on “small” histories, almost marginal: they seek the intersections between the traces of the modernist idea and the everyday in Israel. An appreciative but questioning gaze searches for the DNA of Western modernism, which has molded the spaces created in Palestine/Israel since the 1930s. Within the photographs’ frame accumulate the by-products of the impossible effort of Israeli place to root itself in the environment, but also to fulfill the illusory utopia of a west in the middle east.
The placement of the photographs in certain rooms evokes not only the rooms’ original function, but also the way the interior is linked architecturally to the large garden area, in which sculptures may be displayed.
