How to pass on memory across architecture and european identity ; what are the feelings of our teenagers today ? Erasmus Project

Project Title

How to pass on memory across architecture and european identity ; what are the feelings of our teenagers today ?

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : School Exchange Partnerships

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2019

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: EU Citizenship, EU awareness and Democracy; Pedagogy and didactics; Teaching and learning of foreign languages

Project Summary

Our project is on first hand part of a linguistic exchange with Germany and on the other hand part of an interdisciplinary vision. We would like indeed to give the opportunity to 14/15 years old pupils living in Perpignan and surroundings on one side, and in Berlin on the other side, to work on the memorial architecture, thanks to the Walter Benjamin memorial based in Port-Bou (about 30km from Perpignan) and the Sinti and Roma memorial based in Berlin, on one hand the memorial to pay tribute to Walter Benjamin wo dies on the 26th of September 1940 in Port-Bou (situated at about 30 kilometers from Perpignan) when he tried to escape the German Nazism. This sight is called “Passages” and it is a metaphor of this great Jewish German writer and philosopher’s painful and difficult journey .
On the other hand, the memorial to Sinti and Roma who were killed in the Nazism period was inaugurated on the 24th of October 2012 in Berlin near by the Reichstag. It was built by the same architect and represents one of the connections between our visits.
Those two memorials have indeed, as a common point, their architect, Dani Karavan. Moreover, the Rivesaltes Camp, about 15km away from Perpignan, will also be at the core of the project. This place was a space of internment and relegation in the 20th century and became a scientific, artistic and cultural center that invites to remember this pile of memories in a more sensible way, and to think carefully about it with today’s world. Its unusual underground architecture was built by Rudy Ricciotty, a famous french arcitecte who did not want to interfere in the interpretation of the landscape: “It is an architecture of silence. The memorial is silent and heavy. It rests under the ground and straight along the road from the islet F, with a calm and silent determination, monolith of ochre concrete, untouchable, leaning to the sky.
The idea is that all the discovery, thinking and learning work will be done simultaneously in history, litterature, fine arts and German (for Perpignan) or French (for Berlin) courses.
On the French side, 21 pupils will take part to the exchange. Same amount of pupils on the German side. Those children seldom have the opportunity to leave their neighbourhood. This project aims to enable them to discover something else, to go beyond standard stereotypes and to make them think about exile consequences and European identity by making our pupils become aware of their membership in a European citizenship. By making the pupils reflect on a local heritage, we want them to understand the values of respecting human rights, human dignity, freedom and democracy.
Based on this kind of architecture, we want them to understand the mechanisms that lead to intolerance and discrimination. We want to show them that the work of artists does not have any borders and to make them think about stereotypes in order to empower them to react to it.
Through this project and using paradoxally the saddest times of history, we wish to fight against communautarism and against ignorance and to promote a Franco-German cooperation. To reach our objectives, we plan to use very traditional methods such as epistolary correspondence or creation of logbooks, but also some more modern methods such as visio-conferences or collaborative platforms. We would like our french and german pupils to discover simultaneously these parts of history and to be able to share their feelings, discoveries and experiences via all these communication channels. We plan to make them realize, altogether, an exhibition, videos, recordings and articles. Our hope is that, at the end of the project, our pupils will not only have strongly improved their linguistic knowledge and skills, but will also have opened their mind toward their classmates and others in general, extended their curiosity regarding franco-german history and gained new thoughts about identity, not only their own identity but also the one of those, who, at a time of their life, had to choose exile.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 97157 Eur

Project Coordinator

Collège Saint-Exupéry Perpignan & Country: FR

Project Partners

• COLLEGE PAUL LANGEVIN
• Paula-Fürst-Schule Berlin