Infinity of Light
Billie Thanner’s Infinity of Light
Votive Church in Vienna is a remarkable structure on any given day, but it has taken on an entirely new dimension with a recent art installation. Infinity of Light is a giant infinity symbol that has been positioned atop the church’s two great spires. Created by artist Billi Thanner, the enormous glowing infinity symbol encircles the two towers of the church. The spires each stand 99 meters tall, parallel to each other and pointed high up towards the sky. The new sculpture links the spires in a way that was never possible before, and with its hundreds of LED lights, illuminates Vienna’s 9th District every night.
The installation is gloriously luminescent, and it has done the seemingly impossible. You have these two magnificent spires growing out of the Votive Church, pointing towards the heavens, parallel with each other, with no chance of them ever meeting. And what does the artist do? She creates this link between them. It's an incredible reminder that, as Thanner says, “We are all connected here.”
Today on Holocaust Remembrance Day, the infinity symbol and the church serve to remind us of what we often forget - that we are all one. When we think of the Holocaust, we imagine Nazis in black uniforms, and chimneys churning out human ash. We are reminded that it was our ancestors who were murdered, and how we suffered. For me, that is more than 50 people in my extended family. My great aunts, uncles, grandparents and great-grandparents, dozens of cousins, many of whom are listed on remembrance websites, and some unnamed, never to be recalled at all.
When we think about The Holocaust, we view it as an epic tragic event, particular in its horror and scale. Never before was there such evil, and never again shall it be allowed!
What we forget is that horror comes in many forms and it impacts all of us. We are confronted daily with the violence in Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, Gaza, Ukraine, and Minneapolis. When we fail to connect the violence of the past and our present, our shared humanity is lost in our singular remembrance. The Holocaust was stunning in its scale cruelty, but so is today’s violence.
My great-grandparents Iganz and Sali Winkler were burned in the pits of Treblinka. Is this any more tragic than Renee Good being shot in the face on a suburban street in the United States? Grandma Fanni was gassed at Chelmno and Aunt Grete was murdered at Theresienstadt. Are their deaths more awful than Breonna Taylor’s? To date, 70,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza. That is more than the number of Viennese Jews who were murdered by the Nazis in WWII. And sadly, more than 6,000 protesters in Iran have been murdered in their quest for liberty.
It brings to mind the famous MLK quote, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” It is yet another reminder of how we are all connected.
I love Votive Church with its neo-gothic beauty, I enjoy that it is contrasted with this very modern-looking, bright infinity symbol. The juxtaposition of these two things, a 146 year-old church created before the widespread use of electricity, and this thoroughly modern LED sculpture. The connection to the church reminds us of our infinite souls, as well as our limitless potential here on Earth. But there's also something in it that resonates, through no fault of its own, of a darkness in the way we seem to go around and round in an endless loop to the same places again and again, a boomerang between war and peace, safety and insecurity.
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
photo credit - vienna.info
My family lived in Vienna and fled to the United States during World War II. They left behind them an unspeakable horror, and they were met with safety and security in the United States. In an act of reconciliation, I was offered citizenship by the Austrian government. Because of the situation in the US, I no longer felt comfortable there, so I came here to Vienna. The patterns repeat.
I've done a lot of research on my family. I was ecstatic to find my ninth great-grandfather, Jakub Singer who was a Royal Court Jew in Cieszyn, Poland. I was astonished that I could go that far back in my family’s history to someone who is practically folk hero in that region. There is not a lot of information available about him, but one thing I was dismayed to discover is that the 30 Years War, the brutal war in the 1600’s in Europe that claimed an estimated 4 to 8 million lives, was the backdrop for his life.
When are we going to escape this? Will we ever understand that all violence is the same? Are we going to be forever in this loop that just keeps going round and round?
The artist’s intent is to honor our shared connection, and each night she does just that. Each night in the darkness a new energy glows with the infinity symbol encircling the historic spires, lighting up an already sparkling city, bridging the old and the modern, and bringing us closer to each other with the longing for a truly shared and uplifted experience.