Brigitte Kowanz installed four neon cubes on the Staatsbrucke in 2011 whose texts name the Nazi period and the people forced to build the bridge. Every person crossing Salzburg's main river crossing walks past them. The work does not announce itself; it is simply there.
The Story
Kowanz worked with light as a material rather than a medium, using neon, mirrors, and glass to occupy physical space in ways that pull language and perception into the same question. Her practice had nothing to do with decoration; the cubes she placed on the Staatsbrucke are deliberately disconcerting to look at, the mirror-faced interiors creating an illusion of infinite depth while the inscribed neon texts bring you back to a very specific moment in history.
The Staatsbrucke is Salzburg's principal bridge over the Salzach, carrying both road and foot traffic and connecting the Altstadt to the newer districts on the right bank. Between 1941 and 1945, it was rebuilt using forced labour under Nazi occupation. Beyond Recall (2011) installs four cubes on the bridge's four pillars, each approximately 1.2 metres tall, each glowing with neon text that addresses the period, the labourers, and the obligation not to erase what happened. The installation is visible every night, free to encounter, with no museum threshold to cross. You simply walk across the bridge and it is there.
The title is a statement about the limits of forgetting. The neon font replicates Kowanz's own handwriting, making the memorial feel personal and publicly exposed at the same time. She represented Austria at the Venice Biennale in 2017 alongside Erwin Wurm, and was one of the three Austrian artists who completed the Walk of Modern Art series in its final year. She died in January 2022. The cubes on the Staatsbrucke remain.
