Designed by Mateo Arquitectura, the purpose of the Leipzig Freedom and Unity Memorial is to commemorate the “Peaceful Revolution” of 1989 that made Leipzig a decisive place for the fall of the Berlin wall with the construction of this monument. The memory they aim to commemorate is that of a peaceful mass change, with no hierarchies, that we see in historic photos as points of light, changing like a surging sea. Formally and conceptually, the architects decided that their intervention here should address surface rather than volume; it should be horizontal rather than vertical. More images and architects’ description after the break.
There is an axis that runs through our place and ends at the monument to the Battle of Leipzig. Two monuments to remembering: an old battle represented by a kind of mountainous mass, and a peaceful uprising, the movement of people, lights in the night that draw out a flat figure of changing pixels. As opposed to the mountain of the Völkerschlachtdenkmal (Battle of the Nations monument), we were the sea that steadily wears down the hard rock and turns it into sand.
