On 16 January 2025, in connection with the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp on 27 January, the Italian Ambassador to Poland Luca Franchetti Pardo inaugurated at the Italian Cultural Institute of Krakow the exhibition Echoes of Hope: Art and Memory of the Holocaust.
The exhibition, curated by art historian and educator Salvatore Trapani, intends to honour the victims of the camp by exploring their memories, resilience and artistic legacy. In fact, the exhibition seeks to link the clandestine art produced in the concentration camps and the art produced by artists who survived them to the subsequent current of so-called “empathic” contemporary artists in their updated re-elaboration of the memory of the Holocaust. Echoes of Hope is therefore a transnational initiative aimed at keeping the memory alive, promoting civic engagement against hatred and intolerance in the present and in the future thanks to a range of eleven contemporary artists of different nationalities (Italian, German, British, Australian, Israeli and American), both living and deceased, with a strong temperament and personality.
“We are perhaps the last generation to have had direct contact with the survivors. We therefore have the fundamental task of remembering and passing on what the direct witnesses have told us,” Ambassador Franchetti Pardo recalled, concluding how “the two dimensions of this exhibition, linked to the past and present, lead us to reflect on how we are the link between the past and the present. Only we can ensure this connection through our sensitivity, our culture and our civil commitment to keeping the memory of the Shoah alive”.
The exhibition, sponsored by the Italian Embassy in Warsaw, was supported by the State Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau and the Museum of Sachsenhausen (Brandenburg, Germany) thanks to the loan of drawings made by prisoners interned in the two camps. The Centro Studi per la Stagione dei Movimenti of Parma and the Goethe-Institut of Krakow are also partners of the project. The inauguration was attended by the Director of the Italian Cultural Institute Matteo Ogliari, the educational director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum Michele Andreola, together with many exhibited artists, the Director of the Goethe-Institut iof Krakow Claus Heimes and the curator Salvatore Trapani.
The exhibition will remain open until 14 March 2025.
