I am not angry to be German. I am also German, and, on most days, I do not feel the need to hide it. I do not feel the need to justify it. When I was eighteen, I visited a Holocaust Museum in Israel together with a group of other young Jewish adults. My friends from that group - North American or Latin-American for the most part - dropped comments and made fun of me for being German. Gave me looks for being German. “You are one of them” is what their actions were implying. It perturbed me so deeply that I couldn’t react except for offering frowns and hushed laughs in return. I looked around at my friends and did not understand.
I am one of you and not one of them.
I do not belong to them who put such unspeakable harm upon you
I do not belong
I do not belong
How crucial is memory in defining Jewish identity? In “Jewish Carpets” British author and Jewish carpet enthusiast Anton Felton claims that the increasing interest in Jewish art that can be observed this century stems from an absence of ‘common culture’ shared by Jews today. Resulting from the desolation of the Holocaust, how much of our culture actually survived and how much is a mere memory of what and of who we once were?
I met R. last week at a mutual friend’s housewarming dinner. The path of our conversation crossed the question of identity and when he heard that I’m Jewish he asked: “Do you also identify with the history?”. It left me slightly clueless. If I identify with Jewish history? I am no one without my history. Remember? “For Jews the past is never dead.” I said I have no choice, yet I find “identify” not the right word to describe my sentiment. What is there to identify with? What happened in our history is, if we like it or not, still so much a part of our existence that it would be impossible to disregard. What would be left of Jewish identity and culture today without Jewish memory? Is it true that “increasingly, for many Jews today, the nexus is only the memory of that common culture, which is given substance and stimulation in memorabilia [?]” 27
I am fearful of the Germans, maybe even to this day. It shows in my inability to say the phrase “I’m German” without feeling something, may it be ever so small, turning in my stomach. I replace them often
with the words “I’m German-French” to soothe that ache inside of me. But I never find myself fully satisfied with either of those options. I’ve come to make peace with it. I don’t need a nation to define me, I’m a sentimental and rich mix of all that has happened to my parents and grandparents and great grandparents and so forth. I carry their stories within me and maybe this sentiment is a Jewish one, but maybe it’s a universal one.
“We are all indebted to our pasts and Jewish identity is not so much a psychological or physiological phenomenon as a social reality which can only be sustained through continual conscious efforts. For Jews the past is never dead. It is not even past. [...] Without memory there is little to restrain the powerful, to comfort the weak, to make the young think twice and to make the old think generously.” 26
– Anton Felton
My mind is not the only place in which I stumble upon frames. A frame in a frame. Just like a single memory is just one frame within a bigger frame that is the sea of memories. This bigger frame is kept within an even bigger frame which is the present; the lens through which we look at these frames of memories.
“It is painful to be consciously of two worlds. The Wandering Jew in me seeks forgetfulness. I am not afraid to live on and on, if only I do not have to remember too much. A long past vividly remembered is like a heavy garment that clings to your limbs when you would run.” 24
– Mary Antin
I once heard someone talk about overthinking your identity to such an extent that you stop living it. Remembering is important, but what if forgetting is just as important? Maybe forgetting is not the right word, maybe we don’t forget, but we let those passed-down emotions become a part of us without them consciously impacting our everyday moves anymore.
It can be a burden to remember, but, on the other hand, isn’t it also a richness
that not everyone is granted? My body is an open case filled with memories
that taste like the abundance of life and of joy, not only my abundance but that
of my parents and my grandparents as well. The memories that the tastes and flavours of their stories have left on my tongue is a mixture as rich as a forest full of trees and an ocean full of salt. 25
How do the stories that I hear of my grandparents impact my identity? Not only stories, but also images. How do the stories of my grandparents influence my memories of my life?
And my memories of their lives? And, again in a wider context, how do the stories we hear of our ancestors impact and influence our cultural identity?
I reply to J.’s text with an enthusiastic “yeees” within 25 minutes. And so, the following evening I sink into a soft, velvety, pastel green chair next to J. in a full dance theatre. During one part of Marco Goecke’s “The Big Crying” a dancer squats, propping his weight up on his bent legs and shoulders. His back is hunched over the rest of the body, the shape reminding me of a spider. With his mouth wide open to form a gaping black hole, he lets out a silent scream, his whole body radiating with pain. This goes on for a couple of minutes and the only thought that circulates my mind in a never-ending loop, like a dog chasing its own tail is:
“Childhood memories don’t determine adult personality; rather adult personality determines what will be remembered from childhood”.19
– John F. Khilstrom
Ask me where my life’s interests and passions were born, and I’ll point you towards my grandmothers’ bookshelf.
This bookshelf fills the entire room, two out of four walls, from floor to ceiling. It has filled me with awe since I was a little kid. It makes me feel like I can finally breathe out, it brings me back to who I am and most importantly, to who I want to be. It is a bookshelf that feels like home to me.
At my grandmas’ place, there is not one room without a carpet and not one room without a bookshelf. The bookshelf displays a mosaic of fractured identities, classic German literature, Jewish history, and philosophy coexisting peacefully with feminist theories, carpet, and art books and many more. A bookshelf that tells a million stories and, at the same time, holds at its core one bigger story; a story of the synthesis of the lives of two women: my grandmother and her wife - two women who have greatly shaped my life and my identity as a woman, a Jewish woman, and a woman who surrounds herself with words.
The shelf is a symbol for home, but it is also the place where we keep, and display memories. What kind of memories do we display on our shelves? Memories of a distant land, memories of a past, of another world? The shelf holds objects from a home that we transported to another home. Who are they displayed for?
When we moved to Germany, my mamie1 was very scared. Her family had been deported to Auschwitz, so Germany to her, was not more than the source of pure evil.
But when my mother moved to Germany, she felt somehow at home, at ease, maybe more than I will ever be able to feel. She said the Bavarian dialect people were speaking
in Munich reminded her of her grandparents, who had fled Poland and used to speak Yiddish2 to each other. So even though she never spoke Yiddish herself and didn’t understand a word of German, when we moved to Munich, a part of her immediately fell at ease.
Memories existing.
Where do memories exist?
Do memories exist in our bodies, our minds, our
brains, our hands and teeth and toenails?
What is my memory and what is yours?
What happens to a memory when it’s shared?
Does it grow, does it shrink, does it gain importance or lose it? Our memories are an intrinsic part of our existence.
How much do memories shape the state of our existence?
How much do memories change through our existence?
A graveyard.
A place and symbol of hybridity between existence and memories. When you visit a graveyard, aren’t you surrounded by the stories and memories of people no longer existing in the form of human flesh that we are so accustomed to? Aren’t you surrounded by your own existence filled
with memories of the people you might be visiting as well as your own?
Memory, are you there?
When I look at that photo of my parents on the right side of my desk, doesn’t it transmit memories? Don’t I hear their laughter, don’t I feel their joy as well as their sorrows? How could I not, as I am their daughter and their lives flow through me with all the memories, they have filled the empty cases of my limbs with throughout my lifetime. And if my parents’ memories flow through me, then their parents’ memories flow through them and therefore through me again. And so forth.
Memory, do you live only within me, or also outside of me? Are you in fact everything around me?
When I look at myself in the mirror, I radiate with your joy, your sorrow, your love and pain, your worries, and your life’s hiccups.
My grandmother passed when I was fifteen years old, but I hold a rich sea
of memories about her in my heart. I see the pink carpet floor of her small apartment in a little town on the outskirts of Paris. I see Wednesday mornings accompanying her to the market down the street. I see that Escher painting of the black and white birds crashing into one another, framed in white, hanging on the wall opposite of her bed.
It’s that same Escher painting, that I am looking at now. It came to me in the form of a poster, about to be thrown into the bin, before M. handed it over to me, jokingly. “Do you want this?”, she asked. “I’m going to throw it out, it belonged to one of the former roommates here.” I took the poster out of her hand and unrolled one edge. When I realised which image it was, I tightened my grasp. “I will take it.”
And so, this same image that I used to stare at from my grandmother’s bed, is hanging above my door now and I stare at it from my own bed, especially on those nights and mornings when sleep is hiding so well, that I can’t even find it in the smallest, darkest corners of my room.
Do I know of this pain because I have seen it? I have seen it in the eyes of my grandmother, it was all over her fragile body when dad and I visited her in the hospital that day and she told me that her son’s death had broken her heart. How else could I have felt that pain through the body of an unknown dancer? A photograph might be able to convey emotions, yet the physical and intuitive reaction I felt through that performance is unique to its medium. I might not know it, but I do know of that pain because I have felt it through my grandmother. If our memories and our pain are only ours, how could that connection have been made? How could that deeply buried memory, one I haven’t thought about in years, have resurrected while writing and thinking through this performance again?
I remember the vitrine at my maternal grandmother’s apartment, it held all kinds of little ‘objects with sentimental value’. Some religious, such as candle holders or little statues of biblical or folkloric stories, and others more arbitrary. We put things on a shelf when they are dear to
us. Putting them on a shelf is an act of attributing significance to objects. Similarly, the frames in family homes work as objects that “store” something dear. A memory, a family member, a place dearly missed...
My mind is filled with frames, and frames within frames within frames. Like the uprooted part of one’s identity that blends into the other part(s) of one’s identity. The memories of a distant homeland, are put into a frame, highlighted, and praised by parents. The colours of the framed memory blend into the colours of a new frame of references, a new environment, but they can never be the same.
“If I were to remember other things, I should be someone else.”3
N. Scott Momaday
I was born a nostalgic chronicler, a body full of questions about the lives that preceded me, the times and the people that shaped me. My nose was often passionately buried in family albums; a habit that I developed during my early teenage years. On the top floor of our house, there is a guest room that my parents both use as an occasional office. In the back of this attic room is a small shelf filled with family albums, that have always fascinated me. One of my favourite pastimes was to go up to this room by myself when no one else was home and I would be sure of a quiet and undisturbed moment. And then I could browse for hours on end, picking up one album after the next, spending more time with some images and less with others. Imagining the stories of the people I didn’t recognize and lovingly gazed at the people I did recognise. Imagining their stories and therefore, imagining my own story.
I came across this quote at the beginning of the fourth and final year of my photography bachelor. It reflects what my practice has become and inspired me to dissect and piece together the
working methods I have developed in the last years at the KABK. At its essence, my work is an effort to place myself and my history within a wider societal, cultural, and historical context. It tries to understand the factors that influenced the circumstances and the locations in which my family has existed, the stories that were told, the ones that were captured in images and the ones that were left out.
This research paper is a collection of reflections and memories that are brought together with other people’s voices encountered in literature and artistic works. They present an effort to understand my emerging artistic practice. The weave of stories that make up my practice reflect
on identity, history, inter-generational connections, and the interplay between photography, writing and memory.
In what ways have I inherited the memories of my ancestors and how do those memories manifest in my photography and writing? What role does memory play in the shaping of identity, especially in my own German-Jewish identity?
These are the questions that led me through the writing of this paper. It is structured into several subchapters in which I analyse the construction of memory and photography, as well as the manifestation of “visual memory” in projects that incorporate sound, image, and writing. Additionally, I explore inter-generational connections in various aspects, such as writing, Jewish identity, personal memories, memories stored in the body, and the influence of ancestry on my craft.
The fragmented texts are loosely bound into two different sections. Those two sections do not differ significantly in content; rather, they broadly mirror each other, overlapping at times, or directly relating to each other in other instances. Both sections and their respective subchapters they contain may be read independently of each other and in any desired order. The presented sequence is solely my personal interpretation of how the multiple threads that make up the overall fabric of my research are interlaced with each other.
To you, dear reader:
What you are about to read is a collection of fragmented thoughts and reflections. You may start the journey with the warps of this paper or decide to look at the wefts first. The choice is up to you.
My contemplations are a conglomerate of the thousands of thoughts that others have reflected upon the field of memory studies and its connection to photography and writing. I thus think of this paper as a product of the collective memory of those who have contributed to this field, combined with my efforts to add to that memory through my writing.
The anecdotes and memories recorded in these pages are personal. A choice inspired by the belief that “our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present [...]”, and to deny these connections is to seclude ourselves from the warmth that settles
in when you recognise your own life as being embedded into a web of complex relationships. Human and nature; we are not born isolated individuals, nor can we exist independently.6
Should you wish for one thread to be painted in red that will serve as a guiding thought while you explore the following pages, let it be this one: Our existences are not merely loose pieces of string , dangling around until someone or something finds a place or purpose for us.
We might consist of different structures, lengths, and materials, but our lives are interwoven. Know that your life as well as
mine was underway long before you took your first
breath, and it will last far beyond your last sigh.
I pick up a delicate booklet from the box filled with things from previous years at the academy that I never look at anymore. Uneven pages stick out. The smell of paper. Traces of usage from passing history and future between multiple fingers and hearts. Single pages held together by a few strings, like memory – fractions of our minds tied together by the strings of our imagination.
This booklet is about my grandmother, Fella Krzentowski. She was kept hidden on a farm in France during the Holocaust. Whenever people asked, they would say she was a cousin from Paris, and she didn’t talk much so that people would dismiss her as simple-minded. It was a good place to hide, my aunt later explained to me, as tall hedges kept the farm invisible to the inattentive passer-by.
This project explores the co-relation of our existences, the fragility and uncertainty of life and the inter-connectedness of generations, personal stories, and historical events.
It dates back two years now and when I look at it, all I see at first glance is the shallow writing and the imperfect binding. But when I take a deeper look, I see how it is the first project that ties into the themes I am still busy with today. It was triggered by the events happening in my family at that time. My aunt, my mother’s oldest sister, had come across the family that saved my grandmother’s life. Through many coincidences, she found and met the granddaughter of the
man who had saved my grandmother’s life by taking her into hiding. These events were talked about a lot in my family. Though I was mostly a passive listener, not being told these stories directly, only hearing them through my mother’s calls with my aunt and her red-lined eyes as she hung up.
I wasn’t brave enough to ask the questions I was curious about. And so, I took this project as an opportunity to ask those questions. I asked my aunt about the history and about how she found these people. She told me all that she had gathered in those past few years; she shared her knowledge and her emotions, with no hesitation.
It was the first time that I became aware of myself as a person within a bigger context through my artistic practice. It became clear to me that I exist on the thin bases of uncertain events. My presence as myself but also my presence as a continuation of my family line, an extremely unlikely continuation of that line. And that is true for many of us, but for us children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, that line of survival is scarce and thin and strained.
It is through the small, embroidered images in the booklet, that I painfully sat with the memories that I am made up of. I remember sitting in my tiny student room, the desk lamp shining into long and late winter nights, my eyes tired and my chest ever so heavy. I remember how often my string would break while I embroidered the outlines of my grandmother, of myself or of the objects found in the images, onto tracing paper. I remember cursing and making tiny knots, praying that it
will all hold together. I remember the little rips in my tracing paper, like the scars of our memories. And I remember stitching them back up as if my delicate and weak string could do anything to soothe the aches of my family.
I remember feeling a presence in all those actions, I remember feeling like I wasn’t alone, I was writing and speaking to my grandmother, and I would feel her be present in all the hidden things. In the blank spaces between the images, in my embroidery; empty shells of bodies on pearly white paper. It is the first work of mine that introduced tactility as a core element. I wanted to make something that could be traced with one’s fingers and be felt in one’s body. I want to hold some sort of evidence in my hand. Evidence that I am living and that I am not merely weak string stitched onto fragile tracing paper. I am more than just an empty shell of limbs, I am flooded with truths and fears of my mother, my father, and their parents.
This booklet is by necessity a product of collective memory, as it has been created after my grandmother’s death and is not only a manifestation of my memories. My grandmother’s story is told through the stories and partial, very vague, and little, blurry, milky memories of my aunt and others, paired with collected material, and my interpretation and interaction with it.
It is incomplete, by nature, because it’s telling a story that might never be fully uncovered. It is full of imperfections and little mistakes because memories are nothing else than interpretations of faulty recollections. How can I be a part of an untold, past story?
Through the making of the project “The light that shines through me”, I altered my own memory of my grandmother.
Growing up with the stories of my great- and great-grandparent’s carpet trading business, I became curious about how a family business functions and the shopkeeper’s connection to their craft. The ‘family museum’ is an idea that Halbwachs explains in “La mémoire collective”. In this virtual, or conceptual, ‘museum’, an age and time is discovered through day-to- day objects and archive. Inspired by these thoughts, I used my Commissioned Work to collaborate with the Spaarnestad Photo Archive. 16 Archival photos do, here and elsewhere in public collections, not only serve as a representation of a specific family’s history, but also reflect the general attitudes of a specific time.17 Looking back at those images, we attribute meaning to them retrospectively, based on what we know today. The archive, then, not only provides a lens through which we can learn about history, but it also teaches us about our present attitudes and ideas. 18
I meet Hamed, the owner of a carpet shop “De Pers” in The Hague’s city centre on a walk through the city while doing research for my graduation project. It takes me at least 15 minutes to bring myself to enter the store that is filled with carpets, and to introduce myself. That same Escher painting that hangs above my bedroom door has found its way into a huge carpet displayed at the front of the store, posing an almost absurd contrast to the rest of Persian and other Oriental carpets. We have a brief friendly talk and Hamed agrees to welcome me back the following week so that I can interview him and ask some questions about his family business and the carpets. This time, it only takes me about ten minutes to get over my shyness and enter the warm-lighted store. He invites me to sit down by the desk. As I hesitantly start interviewing him about his story and the business, I find myself enveloped in a familiar feeling. Sitting among all these carpets, in the midst of all those memories and stories; the smell that is surrounding me, familiar, as if I would be sitting in my grandparents’ apartment.
In “Camera Lucida” (1980) Roland Barthes famously analyses the relationship between photographer and subject, the process of turning subject to object and the question of authenticity in relation to photography. Through posing for a photograph, one loses the ability to stay authentic, as one keeps “imitating” oneself and therefore the photograph “represents the subtle moment when [...] [one is] neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object.” 8
In the following chapter, I will investigate the parallels between Barthes’ analysis
on the subject’s relation to its photograph and French philosopher and sociologist Halbwachs’ explanation of memory. As Halbwachs introduces in “La mémoire collective”, a couple of decades before “Camera Lucida” was published, a memory is a reconstruction of the past. This reconstruction is built upon input and information from the present moment in which a certain memory is evoked. That past, in which the memory plays, is in turn another reconstruction of a further past, which has already been altered by its view from the earlier past. 9
Another decade later, Paul Jay, a professor of English at Loyola University Chicago, reflects on Barthes’ ideas about self-transformation through photographs in his article “Posing: Autobiography and the Subject of Photography.” Through the constant re-imitation of oneself in photographs, one becomes nothing more than a ‘copy of a copy.’ 10
Jay continues: “The problem Barthes’ remarks on posing reveal is that the so- called profound or essential self can never be represented as such.” 11 Just as the ‘essential self’ can never be represented as such through photography, a memory is always recalled through the lens of
the present and can therefore never be “authentic” in the sense that it will never be able to represent the remembered events in full accuracy. Therefore, the “essential past” can never be represented as such through a memory.
To illustrate the idea of memory as a construction, Halbwachs brings in the example of the memory of a first school day. Do you really remember the first day of school that you’ve been told about countless times? That memory you have of your first day of school is, in reality, a memory constructed out of many fractions: the memories of the school days that followed, some memories from the actual first day, the stories you’ve been told and the documentation of
it (diaries, photos etc.). Those can be factual, but also fictional documentations, such as descriptions of the first day of schools in books and movies. 12
To summarise in one sentence how the ideas of Barthes and Halbwachs relate to one another: just as the subject relates to its photograph, the past relates to its memory.
I find that the importance of photography and of memory as
media of the past doesn’t lie in its authenticity or lack thereof.
Though I share Barthes’ view on photography as a constructed
medium, I do not feel the need to defend his perspective, as it has become widely accepted in contemporary discourse that photography is not necessarily bound to authenticity.
However, it is Barthes’ contemplations on authenticity that have influenced my reflections on the role of imagination. Reading Jewish author Mary Antin’s autobiography “The Promised Land” (1912) has shown me that imagination serves a greater purpose than merely filling the gaps of memories. In “The Promised Land” Antin recollects her family’s immigration to the United States of America in the late 19th century.
Her work highlights the importance of personal narrative and imagination in understanding complex historical and social contexts. Moreover, I believe that the illusions we form when remembering our past through writing have an inherent beauty, regardless of, or perhaps owing to, their perceived inauthenticity.
“My illusion is more real than my reality [...] it is real enough, as by my beating heart you might know.” 13
In her biography, Antin refrains from filling in the gaps of her childhood recollections by “facts” or by asking her parents, as her ‘illusion’ - her memory - is of deeper importance to her than the actual playback of the events of her childhood.
“My father and mother could tell me much more that I have forgotten, or
that I never was aware of; but I want to reconstruct my childhood from those broken recollections only which, recurring to me in after years, filled me with the pain and wonder of remembrance.” 14
I believe that once we can accept and move past the matter of (in)authenticity, we can make space for the beauty and the secrets that deep imagination reveals to us.
My present is more than only I remember.
My present incorporates my maternal grandmother because she is with me every day. And by extension, my present is the lives of the people that kept her hidden on that farm, day in, day out. My present is my grandmother’s brother and her father who got deported to Auschwitz and my present is every single person asking about my family’s fate during the Holocaust as soon as they hear that I’m Jewish. My present is the birth of my youngest
cousin, and it’s the passing of his father, my paternal grandmother’s broken heart and my father’s silence that came with it.
In my father’s family, we did not talk about the passing of my uncle, my grandmother’s son, my father’s brother, and my cousin’s father. We did not talk about him for the longest time and therefore, I felt that loss as double. I felt that loss, not only because he stopped being a physical presence in my life, but also because he stopped being a part of my present. I was young and did not understand at the time, but as a family, we put him in our past. It might have been an unconscious act as I tied that golden bracelet he gifted me for my bat-mitzvah15 around my left wrist and decided to never take it off again. But is it that unconscious act that helped me make him part of my present again.
I started tufting and punch-needling in the third year of my studies, born from
an urge to get closer to craft and the materials that were of central importance to my great-grand- and grandparents, who were running a carpet trading business. I like how the process of punch- needling and tufting makes me feel.
I like that my whole body is involved and that my head frees up fully while making.
I like that my knees start hurting while I’m squatting over my tiny piece of fabric, covering its back with latex so that all the strings will hold together permanently. I like that my neck starts to hurt after a while when punch-needling, and that my hand cramps up a little bit. I like that I am whole, to feel that my body is in the work.
Cut-off strings lay side by side next to my finished textile piece. Where do all the scraps of fabric find themselves again?
A graveyard of too long, too short, not the right colour, not the right texture,
not good enough to use. Scraps. What if scraps would make up a piece of their own? I don’t know why, but every time I work on a textile, I feel the urge to keep the scraps. The too-long strings I cut off at the back, the little pieces that are too short to be of use for another work, and the fluff that forms when I smooth over the surface with my tiny scissors. Those little scraps are like strings of memories, interwoven and punched and glued together, some of them lost, others finding their place into the final piece.
What do we choose to highlight and to praise, what do we choose to frame and what do we leave out of that frame? What stays in the frame and what outside of it?
In the next room, I not only encounter frames and shelves, but tables. The exhibition text informs me that the tables in this room are “[...] an invitation to sit down, to reflect or enter into conversation with other visitors, but they also refer to the fact that sharing a meal - certainly in Vietnamese culture - is an expression of love.” 22
Nhu Xuan Hua’s series “Tropism”, which occupies a large part of the exhibition, is based on the same notion coined by Jewish French-Russian writer Nathalie Sarraute (1900-1999). It describes the ungraspable and subconscious emotions of “attraction or repulsion” that are triggered by our heritage. 23
It is that sense of attraction that the tables emit for me, as they remind me of half identities. Broken, or rather divided into two equal parts; functional, yet they can never be whole.
My present is more than only I remember.
My past is all the stories and the events of my ancestors that I do not know of. It’s the stories that haven’t been told to me because no one was there to tell them anymore. It’s the stories that happened far before my time came about. But it’s also the stories that have been chosen to be forgotten about, even if those stories play in a more recent time than the stories that I count into my present. My past is the things I don’t remember, the things that are left in the dark. My present, that is my light, and it doesn’t start with my morning and will not end with my night.
my first day of grade three in the new building that the school had moved to that year. I remember the old building too, where I went to school for the first two years of elementary school. I remember the security guard in his little hut on the right side, buzzing open the heavy black door for us every morning. 20
This leaves me wondering whether the “halves” of my identity can ever match together. What if being Jewish and being German are like two parts of an identity that is an unsolvable puzzle?
“[...] Should you be sitting there, attending to my chatter, while the world’s work waits, if you did not know that I spoke also for you? I might say “you” or “he” instead of “I.” Or I might be silent, while you spoke for me and the rest, but for the accident that I was born with a pen in my hand, and you without.” 7
Mary Antin
I don’t want to throw you away because you are a part of it all. You are a part of this piece and therefore you are part of me. And if you are a part of me, then you are a part of my family and of all the people that I love. And if you are a part of all the people that I love then you are also a part of all the feelings of the people that I love, of their fears and their doubts, of their joys and their tears, of their screams and their thoughts. And if you are a part of the fears of all the people that I love then you are also a part of the object of their fears. And if you are a part of the object of the fears of all the people that I love then you are also part of the things that make my stomach hurt. And if you are a part of the things that make my stomach hurt then you are also a part of the things that make my stomach jump and tingle. And if you are a part of the things that make my stomach jump and tingle then you are a part of me again.
And maybe it’s this inter-connectedness that attracts me so much to fabrics, to carpets and to
the process of punch-needling or tufting. It’s what holds everything together, a carpet that holds together a room, the glue at the back of the carpet that holds every individual string together, making it one unity, holding stories and community.
My mind is not the only place in which I stumble upon shelves. They are also a constant presence in French-Vietnamese artist Nhu Xuan Huan’s work, which I encounter on a visit to Huis Marseille in Amsterdam. The exhibition “Hug of a Swan” displays a large range of the young photographer’s work, blending her fashion photography with her autonomous work in which she explores her Vietnamese heritage, identity, and the displacement of memories.
“At ours, the shelves were filled with objects with sentimental value: souvenirs and prizes. All material references to memories.”21
Through analysing the texts of Roland Barthes and Maurice Halbwachs, I have concluded that the construction of memory is related to the construction of photographs in a question of (in)authenticity. Photography can never represent the essence of a person, just as a memory will never be able to represent the full truth of the past. Nevertheless, once we can learn to look past those matters, we recognise that photography, as well as writing, can be used as tools to give photographs and stories space in the shaping of our identity. Further, those tools serve to elevate the importance of imagination and helped me, personally, understand its central part in the shaping of (my) identity.
Overall, through the writing of this paper, I have come to the conclusion that the relationship of photography, writing and memory lies within all of their relation to the construction of one’s identity. This is why, to me, the act of photography can never be separated from the act of writing, which can, by the very nature of the way I write, never be separated from the act of remembering. And as all three of them are different tools in a box that I like to call “coming into being”, I try to understand and further construct my identity with the tools that this box holds for me. And so, until I have reached new conclusions through new confusions, I will happily remain a little longer in the wonderful circle of photography, writing and remembering that has been holding me warm during these eternal winter months in which I have composed this paper.
Grade nine. I am sitting in a dim and stifling classroom in the basement of my school. I am fourteen years old, and my history teacher eagerly walks into a room full of sullen teenagers. He declares that we will be watching a documentary about the Holocaust today. As the black and white projections on the wall flicker and pass before my eyes, growing increasingly blurry and indistinct, my stomach starts twisting and turning in a disconcerting manner. I pride myself on having a resistant stomach, but on this day in hazy October, for the first time in my high school life, I ache to leave the room and empty the entire contents of my stomach into a sink. But I don’t. My insides stay inside of me, and my outsides might have merely grown a little pale; arms crossed in front of my chest and fingernails burrowed into my ribcage. I cannot understand why I seem to be the only one in my class feeling sick to my stomach.
It could’ve been me
It would’ve been me
In my mind, there is a graveyard that I visit and groom regularly. In that graveyard one can find photographs that have buried themselves; engraved themselves in the graveyard that hides in a corner of my mind. In that corner of my mind, one can find photographs that never existed. So, the graveyard is at the same time a place of grief and of possibility. It is a place of burial, as well as a place of birth. A place of memory, and of ideas. A place of potential, as well as a place of suffocation. A place of nostalgia, ambiguity, melancholy, joy, warmth, comfort, heaviness, and all-drenching golden light. It is a place of contradiction, but it is my place of contradiction.
In my second year of my studies, I set out to do a project trying to reconstruct childhood memories. My idea was to explore the notion of reconstructing a childhood through image making and therefore through memory making in a city “that has never been my initial home.” Somehow, the colour that wove itself into the images was blue.
As I learned through the book of German-American textile artist Anni Albers “On Weaving” (1965), every fabric is made out of two elements: the character of the fibres and the character of the weave itself.36 In this case, the fabric of constructed childhood memories consists of blue “fibres” and the way those blue “fibres” are constructing memories is through photography and intervention in those photographs (drawing on negatives, mixing painting with photographs). Though these are not my actual childhood memories, the following question arises: in what way were those “new” memories informed by my own childhood memories?
In his famous essay “Literature as Equipment for Living” (1937), the American literary critic and philosopher Kenneth Burke argues that literature can be a tool to navigating the challenges of everyday life, helping individuals to better understand themselves and the world around them. Further, he characterises writing as an identity-constructing tool; an “extended act of naming”. Naming in turn is described as a way to give “significance to some observed or perceived image.” 32 Naming and, per extension, writing, becomes a way of attributing significance to things. It becomes “integral to the formation of […] identity.” 33
In Jewish tradition, it is customary to have a brith-milah 34 for new-born boys, a Brit Bat (welcoming the daughter to the covenant) or Simchat Bat (celebration of the daughter) is held for new-born girls. We celebrate the significance of the birth of a daughter by giving her a name.
I remember the last time I waved goodbye to my grandmother. We were driving away from her elderly home in the banlieues of Paris and I remember I knew it was the last time I’d see her, so I engraved that image of her waving goodbye deep in my mind. Because I wasn’t photographing at that time yet, I pulled out my phone and wrote in the note app: “goodbye mamie”. That was my way of capturing this precious moment, my way of engraving this image into my mind.
The audio recordings in Terpstra’s work function similarly to text in my own practice. When presented with no visual input aside from words or audio, the imagery that emerges becomes subjective and unique to each visitor. It stimulates our visual imagination far more than images do, yet the visuals that our minds produce will never be as sharp, clear, or defined as photographs can be. The fleeting and indistinct nature of these images reflects the way our memories occupy our minds. Therefore, I find sound, such as in Terpstra’s “After images”, or words, as in my own work, to be powerful tools when working on projects related to memory. American photographer Deanna Dikeman might have been painfully aware of the finite nature of those moments when her parents were waving goodbye as she drove away. As opposed to Terpestra, she makes sure none of the precious moments were lost over the span of 27 years. I find something deeply touching about her project “Leaving and Waving” (1991-2009) and its simplicity. Dikeman uses photography as a means to hold on to something that we all know is temporary. She is capturing and making memories, at the same time changing those precious moments of goodbye that are usually intimate, our very own. By taking a photograph, a memory is changed, because it changes the way we look at this memory.
How could I not feel their light run through my veins as my existence was attributed significance through the names of my foremothers? As my existence was only a few days old, I had already been interwoven in a complex web of relationships. And as my parents announce their name-giving – or may I say “significance”-giving – celebration in a Jewish newspaper, I became interwoven in an even bigger web of relationships and of community.
“[...] It might have existed, a photograph might have been taken, just like any other, somewhere else, in other circumstances. But it wasn’t...The photograph could only have been taken if someone could have known in advance how important it was to be in my life, that event [...]. But while it was happening, no one even knew of its existence. Except God. And that’s why-it couldn’t have been otherwise the image doesn’t exist. It was omitted. Forgotten. It never was detached or removed from all the rest. And it’s to this, this failure to have been created, that the image owes its virtue: the virtue of representing, of being the creator of, an absolute.” 28
In “Autobiography & Postmodernism” part of the ‘autobiographical act’, as explored through French novelist and filmmaker Marguerite Duras’ “The Lover” (1986), is described as the construction of identity through the “reading of [the] significance” of an image. This “image” though, has never been taken, it exists only in the unconscious. Its significance is merely recognisable in hindsight, informed by the context of the larger history of one’s life. In retrospect, images are created in the unconscious due to later attributed importance to the event these images represent. 29
Photography always occupies itself with the passing of time and therefore, photographs always remind us of our presence. The subjects or moments captured in a photograph might no
longer exist in the same way once we remember them through the photographs. Thus, photography is inherently linked not only to questions of temporality and the passing of time, but also to feelings of nostalgia and loss. 30
The project “After images” (2002) by Dutch artist Rein Jelle Terpstra explores this ‘autobiographical act’ by showcasing the memories of photos never taken by other artists and photographers. He describes those photos that many carry in their memory as “an event or a moment that we saw but failed to capture in a photograph.” The book, collecting the memories of those moments, were later given a new vessel through an audio installation in the Nederlands Fotomuseum, Rotterdam. 31
Home Home Home
is a concept, not a place.
What is
home home home
sickness then?
I used to think that being away from the place you’re supposed to be makes you sick.
Home Home Home
sick.
Sickness is an unnatural state of being. It’s your body indicating that something is wrong.
But where am I supposed to be?
Is there any place in the world where I won’t feel sick?
Home Home Home
Is a concept, not a place.
What kind of concept is that? Did someone come up with it? Who?
What did people use to call their
Home home home
Before they had a word for it?
Was family a synonym for
Home home home?
Did they call their city
Home home home?
Did they call their countries
Home home home?
We call our bodies a
Home home home
We call our lovers a
Home home home
We call our friends a
Home home home
We call our 10 square meter rooms in student houses a
Home home home
We call the room in our parent’s place that has stayed the same since we moved out at eighteen a
Home home home
We call our grandmother’s recipe
Home home home
We call multiple cities and countries at once
Home home home
And is
Home home home
Only one place anyways?
They say it isn’t. they say
Home home home
Is where your heart is.
My heart is located in the middle of my chest, so is the middle of my chest my
Home home home?
Seems kind of small for a
Home home home
How big does something need to be before we can call it a
Home home home?
Home Home Home
Is a concept, not a place.
Is
Home home home
The place your parents tell you about? The place your grandparents have lived the unspeakable truths of their childhoods? What happens if what your grandparents called their
Home home home
Is not what your parents call their
Home home home?
And what if what your parents call their
Home home home?
Is not what you call your
Home home home?
And what if what you call your
Home home home
Is not even what your siblings call their
Home home home?
How can a
Home home home
Change so much, even though the same blood runs through the middle of our chests. This place that is supposed to be the location of all our
Homes homes homes.
“All progress, so it seems, is coupled to regression elsewhere.” 41 - Anni Albers
In order to gain a deeper understanding on the impact of ancestral stories and archival images on my own (artistic) identity, I have turned to fabrics and the concepts of weaving.
Pursuing to deal with similar materials that I know have been of essential importance to my grand- and great-grandparents, the beauty of fabrics and textiles have revealed themselves to me through their ever-connectedness and the unity that is formed by many individual strings. Further in this paper, I have explored how collective and familial memory shapes individual- and particularly Jewish identity. For the latter, I have found memory to be of essential and even existential importance. 45
When we take an alternative, longer view of time, one that doesn’t end or start with our own lives, but one that stretches out in a present which considers our embeddedness in a web of ever-extending relationships, we change the way that we interact with our environment and the people around us.
May those connections feel as omnipresent in your veins and vessels as they feel to me.
This leads to the question whether photographs are a ‘preformulated material’, and by extension how we can use photographs and writing as a ‘material in the rough’? Like stone that still must be formed into shape. How can words be my stone that I’m shaping into an object through the act of writing? What is the “rough material”, the “raw material” that photographs are made of?
If I write the word “belonging” often enough, will I understand what it means? If only I think about it for long enough, will I finally feel?
The photo is a diptych; it consists of two photographs.
In the first of the two, one can see an old woman. She has shrunken in the past years by age and the experience of life. Her back is slightly hunched, yet she radiates with love, warmth, and lightness. In her eyes twinkles the same joy, she exuded when greeting the visitors of that day. The photo depicts the old lady in front of an automatic sliding door. The entrance to what seems to be an elderly home, named after a flower. In front of her, a trail curls up, a path she is done walking. At the end of the trail is a parked car. The aged woman is holding her fragile body by leaning on a cane with her right arm and she is waving with her left arm to a girl and two women who walk to the car parked at the end of the road.
This diptych is buried in my graveyard, and it is the one closest to its entrance. Maybe that is why I end up visiting it so often. The graveyard of photos that never existed is a place I share with that girl in the second photograph I just described. The girl hunched over in the back of the car is a younger version of myself; she is my 14-year-old self. Me and my younger self share this graveyard as we share the photos buried in it. We share it, yet we do not have the same understanding of it, and we cannot see exactly the same graves. It doesn’t matter how many graves the girl who was hunched over in the back of a car all those years ago counts in her graveyard and how many I count in mine today. The graveyard is not a fixed place. Though me and her might not count the same number of graves, nor the same ones, we both have become regular visitors of our little graveyard.
What happens when we stop living only for ourselves and start living in this present that is more than just today? In the Podcast “On Being with Krista Tippet”, Tippet explores Norwegian-American sociologist Elise Boulding’s (1920-2010) concept of a 200-year present. A 200-year present starts with the birth year of the oldest person you knew when you were a child and ends with the death of the youngest person you’ve held in your arms. 35
What happens when I start living not for me but for all that will stretch out in that 200-year present?
I was born a nostalgic chronicler and by that nature, closing off the chapters and the boxes of thoughts that I have opened here, comes with a certain uneasiness. To exempt myself from closing words, I will instead leave you, dear reader, with the wondrous words of Anni Albers on beginnings:
It is this ungraspable feeling that I am reminded of on a grey January afternoon, as I invite J. to come and see the exhibition “It Might be A Mirage” at West, Den Haag with me. 37
As I turn around the corner, I feel as if an ice-cold wind has hit me in the face, making it difficult to breathe in the same way that jumping into cold water makes your lungs fight for air.
In our modern day and age, it appears we have lost our connection to tactility as it is not a skill we need to practice regularly anymore. There are few chances to “handle materials”, as most of the materials that most of us encounter daily come to us in a finished, processed form. And so “we certainly have grown increasingly insensitive in our perception by touch, the tactile sense.” 42
Yet, tactility and touch are something essential to ground us and to take us back to the fundamental experience of being alive.
“We touch things to assure ourselves of reality. We touch the objects of our love. We touch the things we form. Our tactile experiences are elemental. If we reduce their range, as we do when we reduce the necessity to form things ourselves, we grow lopsided. We are apt today to overcharge our grey matter with words and pictures, that is, with material already transposed into a certain key, preformulated material, and to fall short in providing for a stimulus that may touch of our creative impulse, such as unformed material, material ‘in the rough’.” 43
As Anni Albers defines words and pictures as ‘preformulated material’, I have come to wonder how I can use my photographs and my writings within my artistic practice. As opposed to treating them as pre-shaped materials, I wish to treat them as little pieces that yet have to be formed into shapes and objects. This shaping takes place through interventions with historical material as well as my own images, through reconstructions and re-combinations. Just as the conglomerate of memories dancing through our minds shapes who we are as a person, the different “raw” materials that my practice brings together, shape my projects.
Memory does not only show itself to us in archival photographs, family albums or the corners of our minds. It can speak to us unexpectedly, inexplicably, when we visit certain places. It weaves itself into the textiles, photographs, and words that I write. And it demonstrates its strength as it turns our stomachs, wrenches our chests, and restricts our throats. Herewith lies an interesting interplay between photography, writing and memory: Photography and writing serve as documentations of memory. At the same time, a photograph or a word might be the object of memory or trigger a memory stored in our bodies.
Though I might not know the exact stories, the exact pains, and joys that my ancestors have experienced, I do know of these things, as they have been fed to me since my childhood days. They came to me in the shape of stories at long tables filled with an abundance of holiday meals.
In my family, every holiday meal tastes like a memory.
It’s difficult to put words to the intensity with which the work “Träumgutstraße” of contemporary Polish artist Robert Kusmirowski hits me in the chest. It is a recreation of the living room of the Czapski-Raczynski Palace in Warsaw after it had been burned down by the German army in 1939. 38 The Palace played a central role in Warsaw’s social, political, and cultural life from the 1860’s until the beginning of the Second World War. 39
I feel as if I can hear the screams of pain and smell the violently aggressive burning of lives, history, and memories. When they burnt this house down, the Nazis didn’t just arbitrarily burn everything, the girl guiding us through the exhibition, tells us. They pointed at specific things, intentionally eradicating memory and history; the bases of who we are. When I walk around the space, taking pictures with my phone of little details, I feel as if I have walked into a crime scene, taking evidence of what has taken place. As I find myself overwhelmed by my visceral reaction to this work, I think back to that fifteen-year-old girl hunched in her chair of that slightly humid, clammy classroom.
My heart beats and the air in my throat feels restricted, as I feel the “ghosts of the past” come alive, and I feel my sense of self glitch between “different time spans and […] realit[ies].” 40
“Beginnings are usually more interesting than elaborations and endings. Beginning means exploration, selection, development, a potent vitality not yet limited, not circumscribed by the tried and traditional. For those of us concerned in our work with the adventure of search, going back to beginnings is seeing ourselves mirrored in others’ work, not in the result but in the process.” - Anni Albers 46
Andrea Stultiens
Oh! In hindsight it was also even a prelude to the complex entanglement of words and images in your practice?
05.04.23 22:23
“It seems to me I do not know a single thing that I did not learn, more or less directly, through the corporal senses. As long as I have my body, I need not despair of salvation.” 44- Mary Antin
My weave is photography, my fibres are blue. Or maybe more accurately, the weave is my childhood memories and the way I have weaved those memories is by interlacing blue “thread” with photography and painting.
By drawing on the negatives that result in little light scribbles on top of the photograph, I interlace imagination with photography. I use imagination as a tool to access times I want to know more about. In retrospect, I recognise that in the recollection of those “memories”, I have given my imagination a more defining role than factual details. This reminds me of the way that Mary Antin retrieves her life in the poetic recollections that make up “The Promised Land”, similarly unbound by the constraints of factuality or accuracy.
Photographing or re-constructing memories will never be a game of accuracy and so it needs intervention to express the “inaccuracy” it depicts.
One of the photographs that is buried in my graveyard is a photograph of my maternal grandmother. Mamie. It has been taken in the year that I had turned fourteen years old in the first place that was named home to me, long before I could understand what that word meant.
The second photograph of said diptych shows a teenage girl, taller in size than the woman in the first photograph, yet smaller in years and life experience. The girl cannot rid herself of the melancholy and the lightness that simultaneously intermingle and dance in her heart. She is a teenager, sprightly and youthful, yet her eyes and body seem to be carrying an invisible weight. Her view is slightly blurred by tears in the corner of her eyes. She is sitting in the back of a parked car; in the front sit two women who look very similar to one another. The car is standing at the end of a trail leading up to the entrance to what seems to be an elderly home, named after the girl’s least favourite flowers. The girl has put on her seat belt, even though the car is still standing. From the pocket of her coat, she has fetched her phone and types something in it. She writes, because she can feel somewhere inside that this is the last time, she has seen the old woman wave goodbye to her. Writing on her phone is the only way she has learned to give expression to those moments that tend to take control of her body and mind. Those moments that demand an escape outside of that hot-headed teenager’s body, but they don’t know how yet.
The first photo of the diptych seems to have been taken shortly before the second photograph. They existed side by side at the time when both images were captured. Yet, the first photograph of the elderly woman waving now resides in the mind of the teenage girl sitting in the car on that second photograph.
The diptych displays many contrasts. The elderly woman and the youthful girl. The brightness of the photograph of the woman waving goodbye contrasts the darkness in the car, the girl’s face only illuminated by the light of her phone screen. It’s interesting to note that both subjects of the photographs seem to have taken the other person’s characteristics and adapted them to themselves. The woman, waved joyfully, as if she was just a girl, and the girl, in turn is hunched in her seat, becoming small and breathing heavily.
While home during winter break, I pursue one of my favourite pastimes. On the first page of the second family-album I roam through, I find a copy of the announcement of my name-giving ceremony in a Jewish newspaper. At only a few days old, my parents put significance to my existence by naming me. Not just any arbitrary names, but “Clara”, after my father’s grandmother and “Shyfra”, after my mother’s grandmother. It is customary in Jewish culture to name children after relatives that are no longer with us to keep their memory alive. Accordingly, children are usually not named after living relatives.
Staring at myself in the mirror, I can either become part of the crime scene by looking at myself through the unburnt part of it or become part of the erased by looking at myself through the burnt section of the mirror.
Empty and broken frames, shattered.
Tears wiggle their way from my chest through my tight throat and struggle to fall out of my eyes, as J., patiently waiting for me to emerge from the trance-like condition this work has devoured me into, reflects upon the work. By meticulously recreating this place, he contemplates, Kusmirowski gives it back its value. Value that has intentionally been taken away; bringing back to life something that has intentionally been destroyed.
Standing in the middle of this room like I am the only remaining soul, I feel as if something is holding me back from leaving. As if turning my back on this work is betrayal, as though the place is screaming at me: “Feel all that they have done to us”. It is at this moment that I realise: