HOUSES OF DARKNESS

Interactive website and exhibition addressing perpetrator perspectives in contemporary Nazi camp memorials

Houses of Darkness is an exhibition spanning 3 locations with an interactive website that helps unpack the contested histories of Europe, initiating discussions and deepening thinking around what makes a perpetrator.

As part of this evocative project, Stand + Stare have created a bespoke website with an online conversational tool that helps visitors to delve deeper into their thoughts and feelings about perpetrator heritage and how the stories surrounding perpetrators are told, preserved or erased. To help explore these challenging questions, we’ve included a suite of creative activities that stimulate people in their own everyday contexts to consider how the misdeeds of the past might still be relevant today.

The Houses of Darkness website also provides an entry point into the interactive artworks of 3 artist teams that have been working directly in the sites of 3 Holocaust Memorial camps. Their work can be experienced on location at each of the Memorial camp sites and online via the Houses of Darkness website.

More about the project

Houses of Darkness (2020-2023) is a culture cooperation project co-funded by Creative Europe and a joint initiative of four partners in Norway, Germany, and the Netherlands: Bergen-Belsen Memorial (DE), Camp Westerbork Memorial Centre (NL), Falstad Centre (NO), and the creative producer company Paradox (NL). 

Addressing perpetrator perspectives at a Nazi camp memorial site is a contested task. After WW2, the extensive system of camps was transformed to a trans-European network of memorials dedicated to remembering the victims of the crimes. Perpetrator spaces, former camp headquarters and commander houses, imply a challenge to memorials’ teaching and curatorial practices. A need to address the memories of these buildings motivated the project. In a time when war is again at Europe’s doorstep, it is crucial not to keep perpetrator heritage in the dark, risking populist voices claiming their ownership to it. Instead of refusing to take perpetrators’ perspectives, Houses of Darkness uses memorial sites as arenas for enlarging them and debating them together. In exploring what it meant to be responsible for war crimes in the past, we also discuss how our choices and actions in the present – as individuals and societies – shape the world we are living in.

The website including the Let’s Discuss feature has been conceived by Stand + Stare, with web development by Fieldwork and brand design by Kummer + Herman.

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