Dresden 1945 by Marco Brambilla

Dresden 19452025

Video (color, sound)

Marco Brambilla examines how historical events are reshaped through mediated experience, calling attention to the way media informs the way the often disturbing news cycle is consumed today. Filmed inside the Asisi Panometer—a massive 360° static photographic recreation of Dresden after the 1945 Allied bombing—the work centers not on the reconstruction itself, but on the visitors who come to witness it, exploring how trauma becomes spectacle.

Every fifteen minutes, the Panometer simulates the bombing and its aftermath with dramatic light and sound effects. From a central tower designed to replicate the vantage point of Allied bombers, visitors observe—some through binoculars, others filming with their phones. Brambilla's focus on the spectators reveals a ritualized detachment: instead of bearing witness, the audience appears numbed, their engagement reduced to passive consumption. The installation underscores the disconnect between the catastrophic event and the audience’s mediated experience of it.

By allowing the camera to play third party witness to an exchange between the present and past Brambilla crucially takes a step back to examine the treatment of devastation as spectacle. Compelling us to ask: To what degree are our emotions being mediated by present-day media and entertainment and are we no longer able to distinguish between fact and fiction. The spectator is removed from an authentic feeling of the event, not only as a visual documentation of it, but also in the midst of the very site where it occurred.

Dresden 1945 seeks to amplify the surreal combination of the horrors of war with the conditions of a contemporary tourist attraction. The work questions whether our present time, often dictated by news as entertainment has diluted our ability to experience the true gravity of such events. The immersive environment, rather than heightening emotional response, creates distance—what should be unbearable becomes eerily palatable. This intervention urges us to look not only at what is shown, but at how we see—and what it means when the machinery of spectacle replaces the work of memory.