Ground floor
In this installation, the courtyard wall silently repeats the number 174517, the one that the Italian writer of Jewish origin, Primo Levy, had tattooed on his arm during his internment in the Auschwitz concentration camp. A number, six digits, that registered Primo Levi as another victim of barbarity, in direct reference to all the people who suffered Nazi persecution.
Francesc Abad represents this number in a visual, repetitive way, underlining the multiple possibilities of reflecting on the consequences of rejecting any different form of thought. And from it he establishes a parallelism that refers us to “the fragility of man’s poetry”. Seeing 174517 means talking about Primo Levi and the people who, like him, suffered from ideological intolerance. But it also means that, at this time, talking about art and poetry is also a way of surviving.
Primo Levy (Turin, Italy 1919 – 1987) was a Holocaust survivor known for his testimony about the horror of the Nazi genocide. The work Se Questo è un Uomo —translated into Catalan as If This Is a Man ,— is a poignant testimony of life and survival in the hell of German concentration camps in Polish territory during the last years of the Nazi occupation, and is considered one of the most important literary works of the 20th century.
In this installation, the courtyard wall silently repeats the number 174517, the one that the Italian writer of Jewish origin, Primo Levy, had tattooed on his arm during his internment in the Auschwitz concentration camp. A number, six digits, that registered Primo Levi as another victim of barbarity, in direct reference to all the people who suffered Nazi persecution.
Francesc Abad represents this number in a visual, repetitive way, underlining the multiple possibilities of reflecting on the consequences of rejecting any different form of thought. And from it he establishes a parallelism that refers us to “the fragility of man’s poetry”. Seeing 174517 means talking about Primo Levi and the people who, like him, suffered from ideological intolerance. But it also means that, at this time, talking about art and poetry is also a way of surviving.
Primo Levy (Turin, Italy 1919 – 1987) was a Holocaust survivor known for his testimony about the horror of the Nazi genocide. The work Se Questo è un Uomo —translated into Catalan as If This Is a Man ,— is a poignant testimony of life and survival in the hell of German concentration camps in Polish territory during the last years of the Nazi occupation, and is considered one of the most important literary works of the 20th century.
