The Nova Synagoga project restoring the New Synagogue in Zilina, Slovakia and transforming it into an arts center will recognize donors to the €1 million project with an art work. The modernist synagogue, designed by the German architect Peter Behrens and built in 1928-31, was long used as a university lecture hall and a cinema and stood empty for years. It was returned to the ownership of the Jewish community, which rented it for a symbolic fee to the Truc Sphérique civic association, which is heading the conversion.
The Slovak Spectator reported in July:
As of the end of June 2013, 1,100 donors gave more than €40,000 to the synagogue. To express thanks to all the contributors, a special artwork will be created which will record the donors’ names for posterity. At a press conference on June 26, the project’s architect, Milan Jančok, and curator Fedor Blaščák, published the plan for the artwork by Ilona Németh: time capsules will bear the name of each donor (and potentially also a message from him or her) and will be personally placed by the donor into the floor in the front of the synagogue.
“In the project, we formally used the details in the floor of the Behrens’ synagogue, the decorative mosaic line, which creates a so-called carpet ornament on the cast terrazzo floor,” artist Ilona Németh said when explaining her design. “The lids of the capsules form a continuation of this mosaic into the public space surrounding the building, and under each lid the name of the donor will be written. This is also how I perceive the horizontal, democratic and de-centralised structure of the initiative around the Truc Sphérique association, which strives to bring new content to this unique monument.”
“For now, we are working with the more than 1,000 names that we already have, but the number of capsules can [keep growing] until the reconstruction is finished by 2014 or 2015,” Blaščák added. A web application with an interactive map of the capsules will accompany the project, and it will be installed in the foyer of the prospective culture centre.
