Libraryline Trieste Contemporanea
Conversation with Daria Brasca, Annalisa Di Fant and Heidi Specker
alle ore 18
A historical discussion on the themes of the exhibit Liftvan Triest by Heidi Specker
Trieste, Studio Tommaseo, via del Monte 2/1
Monday, 10 November 2025, at 6 pm
Aenne Biermann, without title (Agave), ca. 1929, Neg.Nr.1480, courtesy of Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Gera
Updated 06/11/2025
Trieste Contemporanea is pleased to invite you to Studio Tommaseo on 10 November at 6 pm where, as part of the libraryline activities of the Trieste Contemporanea Library, there will be a conversation dedicated to an in-depth historical analysis of the themes covered by Heidi Specker’s Liftvan Triest exhibition, which will remain open for a few more days at the venue in Via del Monte 2/1 (until 12 November, open hours from 5 pm to 8 pm; read more about the exhibition).
Based on Heidi Specker’s interview with Daria Brasca, Anneliese Schallmeiner, and Albena Zlatanova, held in Vienna last August, the upcoming meeting will continue the discussion had in preparation for the site-specific installation Liftvan Triest for Trieste Contemporanea. The project focuses on the port of Trieste and the confiscation of the property of European Jewish emigrants carried out there by the Nazis during the Second World War. Next Monday’s event will include the screening of the video Wien, Vienna (2025, 11’13”), created by the German artist for the exhibition. There will also be presentations by Specker herself via videoconference, as well as in-person talks by Annalisa Di Fant, curator of the Museum of the Jewish Community of Trieste Carlo e Vera Wagner, and historian Daria Brasca, who will join the symposium from Switzerland.
In the exhibition Liftvan Triest, Heidi Specker reflects on memory, identity and cultural survival through photographic art and historical testimony. The exhibition pays tribute to the work of Aenne Biermann, one of the leading figures of German avant-garde photography in the 1920s. Liftvan Triest is built around two places connected to the photographer’s life: the German city of Gera, where Biermann lived, and the port of Trieste, where one of the shipping containers (liftvans) destined for Palestine and containing Biermann’s entire collection of negatives, was confiscated by the Nazis and irretrievably lost.
Among the contributions made by the speakers to further explore the events in Trieste, Daria Brasca’s will be especially relevant in relation to the Biermann story as revisited by Specker. Brasca is the author of one of the studies from the HERA project TransCultAA, funded by the European Union under the Horizon 2020 programme. The results of her research, already published in Transfer of Cultural Objects in the Alpe Adria Region in the 20th Century, edited by Christian Fuhrmeister and Barbara Murovec (Böhlau, Vienna–Cologne, 2022), appear in the essay The Goods of Jewish Emigrants in the Trieste Free Port during the Second World War. With Brasca’s permission, this essay has now also been republished in Trieste Contemporanea’s libraryline essay series. Both this essay and the publication Heidi Specker. Liftvan Triest, which accompanies the Trieste exhibition and is co-published by Trieste Contemporanea and the Berlin-based publishing house Argobooks with the support of the German Academy Rome Villa Massimo, will be available to the public. The discussion will be held in Italian, while the online contributions will be in English.
