Ilit Azoulay: STOPOVER at VILLA STUCK Museum, Munich

For VS, the interim home of the Villa Stuck Museum, Azoulay accepted the invitation to highlight the history of the new and old location with a specially developed art project. Both buildings were constructed in the same years. While Villa Stuck is one of the most unique artists’ houses in Europe, the building in Goethestrasse was initially conceived as a middle-class residence. During the Nazi era, it housed the Pension Patria, a so-called “Zwangsraum” (“forced accommodation”) for dispossessed Jewish families, often used as a transit stop before deportation to a concentration camp. The building was used for various purposes after the Second World War. From 1981 to 1992, the “Rinascita” association, a contact point and cultural center for Italian migrant workers, took up residence there. The German Academy for Psychoanalysis, the previous tenant of Villa Stuck’s temporary premises, then moved in.

Azoulay focuses on the Pension Patria and the biography of its owner Hildegard Musch. As a single, 30-year-old woman, she founded the boarding house in 1932 in order to earn a living. A short time later, the accommodation served the Nazi machinery of horror as a stopover for dispossessed Jewish people. In a fictional documentary style, Azoulay tells the story of Hildegard Musch through an interview that she prepared herself and then filmed with Holocaust survivor Eve Slatner. In the other rooms, historical archive materials meet objects of unclear origin that were found during the 2023 renovation. The artist interweaves them with traces from Musch’s time, such as clips from popular films from the 1930s in Munich. The entire archive and collages, some of which are still in progress, hang on the walls. These are preliminary results that will be presented in the Museum Villa Stuck after re-opening and have now found an interim home—a stopover.