Embedded Files
His name meant lion and it seems funny to me now how consumed I was by the beauty of Lyon exactly a week before his death. Maybe it’s providence that halfway across the world the same flowering trees bloomed a year later.
***
In April 2019, after spending a year across Lyon, Marseille, Paris, Berlin, Frankfurt, Speyer, Worms, Mainz, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv, my research brought me to Kraków, Łódź, and Warsaw. There, I had the intention of visiting nearby concentration and extermination camps to gather archival and photographic materials as complements to my analyses of textual representations of irregular warfare and martial atrocity in the twentieth century.
I only made it to Auschwitz, however, because in Auschwitz I got the phone call that he had died. The person who had been my father, in all facets of that particular choice of verbal phrase. How does one confront the singular personal grief of such an event while visiting a site of mass atrocity ingrained in our common consciousness as a repository of extreme cruelty and blatant inhumanity? Can one harmonize the inner experience of loss with the outer projection, performance of grief, especially at the communal level of mourning? And what happens when those histories - their scales in complete disharmony - intersect?
I decided that a turn to the visual would be the best way to address some of these questions. This page, a small virtual photography exhibit titled "Why I’ll Always Dream of Poland," is an attempt to begin doing so. The photographs found below are a selection of sites of remembrance and commemoration, "Figures," that is, images that can be considered to be archival documents that register traces of WWII and the aftermath of the Shoah. These images are juxtaposed to places that capture personal, seemingly incidental moments. These more intimate frames strive to put into question how one views depictions of historical monuments, in turn recasting processes of memorialization - and what they constitute. The numbers are time stamps leading up to his death (-) and following it (+). 0 marks the event itself.
This project thus more generally underscores my interest in the imbrication of public mourning and personal loss and, specifically, visual representations to do so. Ongoing inquiries related to these broader research interests include:
- Documentation versus representation
- The nature of site versus place
- Visual versus textual representations of grief
- What constitutes an archive (an "academic" archive versus a "personal" collection)
- The ethics of photography
- The aesthetics of mourning
- The temporality of grief and, specifically, its relation to medium
- The role of "sympathy flowers"
- Online versus physical curation
All in all, "Why I'll Always Dream of Poland" reframes the act of writing about wartime death and collecting images of these sites alongside my own experience with loss and grief. It endeavors to reads my positionality as a spectator of personal and communal pain into this theoretical dynamic. This project is a negotiation of public mourning and personal loss, an attempt to bridge the gap between a commemorated site of inhuman violence and the archive of private memories, and, ultimately, through this (web)site, a commemoration of commemoration itself.
***
Figure 1.1
Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin
Peter Eisenman's design, open to the public since 2005, consists of 2,711 concrete stelae.
{inkjet print}
Figure 1.2
Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin
{inkjet print}
- 31
Berlin
{gelatin silver print}
- 30
Berlin
{chromogenic print}
Figure 2
Jewish Museum Berlin
This museum, open since 2001, is the largest Jewish museum in Europe.
{gelatin silver print}
- 29
Berlin
{chromogenic print}
Figure 3
Yad Vashem, Jerusalem
An excerpt from Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poem “Babi Yar” is displayed here.
{chromogenic print}
- 16
Jerusalem
{chromogenic print}
- 14
Tel Aviv
{gelatin silver print}
- 7
Lyon
{inkjet print}
- 7
Lyon
{inkjet print}
- 7
Lyon
{inkjet print}
- 7
Lyon
{inkjet print}
Figure 4
Father Jan Skarbek Square, Oświęcim
The first stanza of Wisława Szymborska’s poem “The Three Oddest Words” – “When I pronounce the word Future, the first syllable already belongs to the past” – is engraved on the installation designed by Magdalena Poprawska, Bartosz Haduch, and Łukasz Marjański. The work depicts Tomasz Bereźnicki’s graphic short stories (available in print as Oświęcimskie Historie/Stories from Oświęcim, 2016) and has been located outside Oświęcim’s Jewish Museum and Synagogue since 2015. This Polish town is also the site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camps.
{inkjet print}
0
{gelatin silver print}
Figure 5.1
Monument to the Victims of Nazism
National, Historical and Cultural Reserve Babyn Yar, Kyiv
{inkjet print}
Figure 5.2
Monument to the Victims of Nazism
National, Historical and Cultural Reserve Babyn Yar, Kyiv
The plaque commemorates the more than 100,000 citizens of the city of Kyiv and prisoners of war shot to death by the Nazis at this site from 1941-1943.
{inkjet print}
+ 14
Kyiv
{gelatin silver print}
+ 15
Kyiv
{inkjet print}
Figure 6.1
Center for the History of the Resistance and Deportation, 14 Avenue Berthelot, Lyon
Now a museum, this was a Gestapo torture site headed by Klaus Barbie during WWII.
{chromogenic print}
Figure 6.2
Center for the History of the Resistance and Deportation, 14 Avenue Berthelot, Lyon
The plaque reads: "Here, in 1943 and 1944, the Nazi Gestapo, aided by traitors, tortured thousands of members of the resistance and hostages before their death or deportation. Their sacrifice permitted the liberation of France."
{chromogenic print}
+ 48
Lyon
{chromogenic print}
+ 359
Providence
{gelatin silver print}
+ 363
Providence
{gelatin silver print}
+ 365
Providence
{gelatin silver print}
+ 366
Providence
{gelatin silver print}
Figure 7.1
Rhode Island Holocaust Memorial
The memorial consists of six pillars surrounding a large stone. The latter marks the end of a path, which depicts train tracks. Designed by Jonathan Bonner, the Rhode Island Holocaust Memorial has been open to the public since 2015.
{gelatin silver print}
Figure 7.2
Rhode Island Holocaust Memorial
The inscription, a quote from Holocaust survivor Roman Kent, offers a temporal reflection: "We do not want our past to be our children's future."
{gelatin silver print}
Get art in the mail!
"Why I'll Always Dream of Poland" has been made possible thanks to the generosity of Judaic Studies at Brown University. This support has enabled the creation of art envelopes, which include a piece of this exhibit, delivered to your door, so that you are able to experience a part of this project tangibly.
*Update September 12, 2020: All art envelopes have been sent and with that, the first postal iteration of this project has come to a close. Thank you so much to everyone who reached out to me.*
Postscript 1
March 2020
The current COVID-19 crisis presents a harrowing case of communal loss and grief. As such, it marks a particular moment at which to view such an exhibit.
While so many are mourning the death of loved ones who have passed, contemplating global and personal loss has become an inevitable process - one that is both timely and exceptionally difficult. My hope is that "Why I'll Always Dream of Poland" can offer a moment of pause and reflection on questions that are so very salient to our upended world.
Please stay safe, be well, and take care.
Postscript 2
February 2022
I've lost track. Our up/ended world.
Please stay safe, be well, and take care.
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