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Architects: Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center
- Area: 1134 m²
- Year: 2020
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Lead Architects: Maxym Demidenko-Rayzman, Denis Shabanov
Text description provided by the architects. The installation was designed within the framework of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial development, which aims to rebuild the memories of the tragic events that happened in the area on September 29-30, 1941, the largest massacre of the Nazi regime. During those days, over 30.000 Jews were murdered by the German forces, while almost no documentation was left behind. The Babyn Yar Foundation works to bring that memory back and highlight the importance of every victim's life.
The core element of the Mirror Field audio-visual installation is the symbol of the Tree of Life, which is found in most religions and mythologies of the world. The Babyn Yar tragedy shows how easily this tree can be destroyed, and its branches — broken.
Made entirely of stainless steel, the structure features a podium is in the form of a mirror disk with a diameter of about 40 meters, with 10 6-meter-high columns installed on it. The columns and the disk were shot through by bullets of the same caliber that the Nazis used during execution in Babyn Yar.
The installation is available around the clock. During the day, the sky is reflected in it. At night, light and sounds of memory pass through the bullet holes, while rays from the tops of the columns illuminate the sky.
An electroacoustic pipe organ of 24 pipes is built into the podium. An algorithm for translating the names of the victims into sound was developed specifically for this pipe organ. Each letter in the Hebrew alphabet was assigned its own number. According to the gematria principle, the names of the victims have been translated into numbers, which, in turn, set the pitch of the sound. The combination of audio waves of the name numbers creates a sound composition. The main background is overlaid with archival recordings of pre-war Kyiv, unique Yiddish songs of the 1920s and 1930s from the collections of the National Library named after V. Vernadsky restored by the Institute for Information Recording of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Choral and Memorial Christian music, Ukrainian and Roma Memorial songs, works by contemporary Ukrainian composers are performed as well.
