Conceived site-specifically for the Synagogue Stommeln, Paloma Varga Weisz has reconstructed her father's studio: a tiny room on the second floor of his wife's late 19th-century townhouse in Neustadt an der Weinstraße — high up, removed from everyday life. There, Feri Varga lived in his own world, painting, surrounded by memories, with her daughter's childhood bedroom next door. Born in Hungary and relocated to Paris, he fled in 1940 to Cagnes-sur-Mer. Throughout her life, his daughter, Paloma, would hear the stories of how he set aside his Jewish identity by calling himself simply Varga.
In 1961 he followed his wife Leonore from Cagnes-sur-Mer to Neustadt an der Weinstraße. This move to a small German provincial town represented a profound rupture for him — and, as a born Jew, a return to a country with which he was connected in the most traumatic of ways. This silence has become an invisible inheritance, one that has lastingly shaped the life and work of Paloma Varga Weisz.
In the former prayer hall of the Stommeln Synagogue — a place that stands equally for Jewish life, displacement, and survival — this confrontation condenses into a spatial memory. Feri Varga is present, silent and unreachable. The visitor remains on the threshold. They cannot enter the room, just as history can only be imagined but never experienced again. It is precisely in this distance that the work unfolds its true power: the past remains out of reach, yet is fully alive in the present.
Registration for the opening is requested at kulturabteilung@pulheim.de. For more information, please visit the Synagogue Stommeln website.
