Time of Silence – Transporting a stone from the Liberec quarry

22. 3. 2023

The Memorial of Silence has spent the past five years collaborating on coordinating the public spaces adjoining the place of memory at Bubny Station. A series of working meetings for the land-use development of Prague 7 produced plans for a park named after Petr Ginz. Seen from the railway tracks, the park will be dominated by a sculpture symbolizing the passage of time.

On the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Czechoslovak Republic, a hundred-tonne stone block was extracted from a quarry near Liberec. Since then, it has waited for its use in artist Jaroslav Róna’s sculpture Time of Silence.

The sculpture’s shape recalls the fabled ouroboros. Written in braille on its surface are excerpts from Hannah Arendt’s writings on totalitarianism. The stone’s transport from the quarry to the place where it will be transformed into a sculpture over the next two years was an event in and of itself.