Omagh Memorial designs go on show / Russia loses a lot of art (Friday 20 July 2007)

compiled by Rachel Simmons

Design teams short-listed for Omagh Memorial

Some time after the Omagh bomb of 15 August 1998, the Omagh Working Group was formed in order to carry out one of the Omagh Fund's objectives: to provide "permanent memorials" - taking the form of gardens, buildings, sites - for victims of the terrorism, stating that they "believe that it is essential to create a memorial which reflects the enormity of the impact of the bomb and which will be valued and respected by the entire community." Recently, in order to carry out this plan, the Omagh Working Group has held a two-part design competition for a memorial to the victims of the Omagh bomb, to integrate together two sites: one a garden at Drumragh avenue and the other a memorial at the bomb site on Market Street. Five design teams have now been shortlisted and invited to submit detailed design proposals, with the successful design to be commisioned in September, and with work beginning on the memorial shortly thereafter.

The design proposal for the Omagh Memorial by Seán Hillen and Desmond Fitzgerald Architects of Dublin, courtesy Omagh Working Group.

To take one example, Seán Hillen and Desmond Fitzgerald Architects of Dublin are among the five short-listed. Their design proposal focuses on light and its unifying qualites – their theme being 'reflection'– and consists of employing a mirror in the memorial park which will "track the sun, and pour a constant beam of sunlight onto 31 small mirrors." These mirrors would be arranged to carry the light onto a cut-glass crystal heart sculpture, housed inside a pillar of glass, at the bomb site, which would nearly always be in the shade and would reflect the light coming from the mirrors in the park, or as they say, "It will sparkle and glitter with the light. It will be a beautiful and remarkable sight. The approach to the art work is that it should attempt to express simply, uninhibitedly and vividly the huge outpouring of compassion for the victims." Their design for the park also focuses on the 'reflection' idea, with "paving [that] is of bright granite flag stones set out so that grass and fragrant herbs such as thyme and camomile will grow through the joints." Silver birches – which are, as they say in their proposal, always the first to grow in disturbed land – bluebells and poppies would be planted and the site as a whole would be natural and low-mainenance; it would not be fenced off from the street and would be "a simple, meditative space."

Others short-listed for the Memorial Design are the Robinson Patterson Partnership of Belfast, Peter Hutchinson of Belfast, FAM Arquitectura y Urbanismo S L of Madrid, Spain, and Shiels Flynn & Making Marks of Norfolk. More information on the project and the design proposals can be found at the Omagh Working Group's site. The designs are being listed for comment in Omagh through July and a document can also be downloaded at the site detailing the short-listed designs.

Source: http://www.omagh.gov.uk/council_online/community_consultation/article/id/4/

Russia discovers that 160,000 items are missing from its museums

Earlier last fall, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a countrywide inventory to be taken of the 50 million artworks estimated to be housed in Russian museums. This order followed the Hermitage Museum's announcement that some 220 artifacts were missing from just one of their departements, including icons, jewelry and other items worth altogether more than 140 million rubles, or approximately 4 million euro. The culprit was found to be a husband/wife team; the wife was a longtime curator at the Heritage and had been systematically stealing items and selling them with her husband to antique dealers and pawn shops in order to buy insulin and medicine for her diabetes. She died of a heart attack near the beginning of the inventory check at the Hermitage and the husband was sentenced back in March to serve five years for the thefts and ordered to pay damages amounting to 7.4 million rubles, or approximately €241,000.

The incident shed light on the the poor security surrounding Russia's art and national treasures, as well as to how underpaid employees of the museums are, both problems due largely to the fact that state funding for museums all but disappeared after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991; CBC News Canada reported that employees were offered huge sums in exchange for stolen artifacts by criminal groups who specialize in exporting stolen goods to lucrative markets in Europe, North America, and Asia.

So now the results of President Putin's inventory are in and more than 160,000 artifacts are missing. The Russian government is now wrapping up the investigation at the Hermitage and first deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedv has recommended closing other investigations and focusing on the probems at hand, such as the lack of security. But he has said that it is very alarming the number of artifacts which are missing, especially as they investigated 500 museums with a total of 20 million artifacts, only a percentage of the nation's total museum collection.

Sources: http://www.cbc.ca/arts/artdesign/story/2007/07/18/russia-artifacts.html; http://www.cbc.ca/arts/artdesign/story/2007/03/15/hermitage-theft-conviction.html

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