The Contact-Sheet Synagogue: Transactions in Monuments, Documents, and Archives, 1948–1967.
The Contact-Sheet Synagogue is a PhD research project by Clara Richard Gostynski funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Doc.ch). It investigates early 20th–century historiography of architecture at the intersection of art history and media studies. It questions monumentalization and instead turns to forms that are inherently fragile and fragmented.
The European synagogue, as a historiographic subject, as architectural building, and as political institution, gradually disappeared after 1948. Through extensive photographic documentations, the monuments of diasporas were transformed into rootless objects that were captured, traded, sought for, possessed, sought after, and archived. From monument, to document, to archived object; the buildings became increasingly absent. With the foundation of a Jewish state, their photographs were made a currency of statecraft.
From the 11th–century the central and eastern European synagogue underwent constant morphological change. Rather than belonging to a seamless lineage of architectural form, synagogues anachronistically appeared and reappeared in particular moments, when a specific set of circumstances allowed them to unfold into visible, sometimes even ornamented, buildings. Only in periods of political stability were there moments of great formal exercises.
For diasporic forms of life, the synagogue not only presented a place for religious services: Administration, law, taxes, education, and other forms of civic services were no less important in these congregational buildings. Thus, their secular function and meaning has often been underscored by architectural history. However, with the making of modern nation states in the second half of the 19th–century–states that operated on a territorial level–the synagogue’s position with its religious and administrative functions was conflicted.
Less frequented under secular and assimilated societies in Germany, the Russian Empire, and Galicia, it instead emerged as an art historical and ethnographical subject of study during the first decades of the 20th century. With nationalism as an ideology, and photography as technique, the congregational buildings of religious, stateless Jewish societies weretransformed into a valuable material heritage for modern state construction.
My project argues that a longue durée history of the European synagogue still needs to be written. It reflects upon the way the synagogue has eluded architectural history and yet presents a case for the study of a non-territorial, multiplied, copied, fragmented and disseminated object, which failed to be classified, escaped formalist description, and resisted the perpetuation as a national monument.