The Shape of the Gap

Between Camp, Field, Excavation and House

15 April - 13 May 2027

This exhibition emerges from a wider research project investigating the changing regimes of land, agriculture and property in Austria. Taking Aflenz an der Sulm, a small town in southern Austria, as its point of departure, the research follows the ground as both material and legal terrain, shaped by agricultural production, cadastral surveying, property law, technological change, extraction and successive political regimes. Through the micro-history of a rural landscape, it asks how land becomes property, and how histories of labour, violence and production remain inscribed within, or disappear from, the systems through which ground is measured, owned and transformed.

The installation concentrates these questions on five cadastral parcels at the north-western edge of Aflenz. Four now contain recently built single-family houses. The fifth, parcel 495/3, remains open: an unfenced piece of grass between the new houses and surrounding agricultural fields. Seventy-five years earlier, this ground formed part of a forced-labour camp connected to an underground armaments factory established in the tunnels of a nearby limestone quarry. From 1944, concentration-camp prisoners and thousands of civilian and forced labourers worked within this small territory of factory, camps, farms and vineyards.

After the war, agriculture resumed. Aflenz’s destroyed property register was reconstructed and ownership re-established parcel by parcel. The resulting files record title, inheritance and wartime death with remarkable precision, while the histories of the camps and the labour performed on this ground remained outside the legal reconstruction of ownership. By the early 1950s, the former camp sites had once again become agricultural land. In 2017, the ground was surveyed for housing and subsequently rezoned and subdivided into five building plots and a new road. An archaeological investigation undertaken during this transformation uncovered a wartime waste pit containing tableware, bottles, work permits and personal and industrial objects. Knowledge of these archaeological findings entered the contracts through which the new properties were sold. Yet the archaeological permit referred to an earlier cadastral configuration. As the ground was subdivided and renamed, historical evidence and contemporary property became administratively attached to different spatial objects. Four houses were built. Parcel 495/3 remains empty.

The Shape of the Gap follows this ground through the systems that have successively made it legible: cadastral maps, land registers, aerial photographs, archaeological evidence, planning documents, contracts and contemporary fieldwork. The installation takes the outline of parcel 495/3 as its spatial figure, connecting documents and images distributed throughout the German Historical Institute. Historical aerial photographs encounter contemporary drone images; cadastral boundaries encounter archaeological traces and contractual language.

In the library, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (2019) extends this investigation into the archive, questioning how institutional categories determine what can be recorded, preserved and recognised as history, and what becomes visible when these categories are read against one another.

The vacant parcel gives the gap between these systems a physical shape. It is neither memorial nor archaeological site, neither agricultural field nor completed house. Legally, it is already a building plot, yet the future designated for it has not materialised. For the moment, parcel 495/3 holds open a space between what happened on the ground, what institutions record about it, and what the ground may still become.