The process of experiencing the European city is one of corrosion, in which the screens of the city are torn away, revealing layers and nodes of history and memory that lie shattered by the trajectories of the twentieth century.
Stephen Barber, Fragments of the European City (Reaktion Books, 1995)

…it is the memory of the past itself which serves as the screen obfuscating the intrusive presence of the stain. This stain undermines the position of the spectator who, from a safe distance, has observed the depicted events… as if something has emerged in this depicted reality which is ‘too strong’ and threatens to break through its frame.
Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (Verso, 1997)