“Eine Friedliche Industrie”

Ali Shrago-Spechler

Art of Creative Unity Award 2020 | Honorable Mention

Eine Friedliche Industrie is a Period Room reconstruction of a secular Jewish home in Karlsruhe, Germany - created through the imagined lens of the family’s matriarch - a feminist, a scientist and mother of three. The period portrayed is 1938, just before the family’s forced and fortunate emigration to the United States. The immersive installation is made entirely of cardboard, papier mache and concrete and filled with life size recreations sourced from archives, myths and memories of resistance and co-existence including: furniture, a wheelbarrow loaded with an unplugged Volksempfaenger (People’s Radio) playing orchestral national anthems, a gramophone, photographs, Jewish ritual objects, various tchotchkes, walls and flooring.