juliakwinto

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Christian Boltanski

1944–2021

French sculptor, photographer, painter, and film-maker. He is best known for his photography installations and contemporary French conceptual style.

There's a story... by Catherine Grenier

"Right from the start, Boltanski strove to create not actual stories but vehicles for stories that the viewer has to recompose and interpret. Thus, the essence of his work is less narrative than allusive, less literally autobiographical than enigmatic." p05

Examples of work:

Research and Presentation of All that Remains of my Childhood

attempts at reconstruction

scrapbook form / vitrines

claim to be autobiographical

looks like documentary objectivity

incidental annotations

photos are only representation of people rather than actual people

My Deth or Reconstruction of the Gestures Carried out by Christian Boltanski between 1948 and 1954

use of modelling clay to reconstruct everyday objects

parody of reconstruction

reminiscences rather than actual memories

Inventories

artist as an ethnologist displaying his research as it would be done in anthropological museums

each object is annotated and removed from its context to be treated objectively

"(...) the artist, with no attempt at providing a context, presents -- in a manner of a sequence of ethnographic documents -- row upon row of objects and pieces of furniture that once belonged to an anonymous person."

"Exhibiting the same types of family photographs, the same pieces of furniture, these works seem to be telling us that every life is unique, but that each resembles the other. "

How strong is the connection to the Holocaust and the loss of his family? To his obsession with death? How did generational trauma impact the way he tries to reconstruct his life and his story? Personal is universal: the use of nameless figures-- a reference to Shoah

Grenier, C. and Boltanski, C. (2010) Christian Boltanski. Paris: Flammarion. (Grenier & Boltanski, 2010)

"Artist who made his name through a tireless engagement with death in work based around discarded objects and images"

Charles Darwent (The Guardian)

"In 2009, the Tasmanian art collector David Walsh commissioned a piece of work from Christian Boltanski called La Vie de CB. As the title suggested, the completion of this was to take Boltanski the rest of his life. That, in fact, was the point of it."

"Under the terms of their contract, the Australian was to pay the Frenchman, then 64, for the right to film him 24 hours a day for the rest of his life via a live video feed installed in his studio in Paris. The resulting footage would be stored in Walsh’s cave-gallery, the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), outside Hobart. The agreed sum was to be broken down into a monthly stipend: if Boltanski lived more than eight years, then he would be in profit"

"work made from discarded and anonymous images, culled from newspapers, police records and family photograph albums found in flea markets. These Boltanski assembled into narrativeless stories that yet seemed somehow autobiographical, often appearing to reference the Holocaust without ever quite doing so directly."

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NARRATOLOGY

Mieke Bal

"Narratology as a field of study is the ensemble of theories of narratives, narrative texts, images, spectacles and events -- of cultural artefacts that tell a story." (p3)

TEXT

limited and structured, composed of signs

signs can be different: words, sentences, cinematic shots, painted dots, lines etc.

meaning, effect and function of a text is not limited

there is a first and last word, image or frame of a painting

the boundaries are provisional

" A narrative text is a text in which an agent or subject converts to an addressee ('tells' the reader, viewer and listener) a story in a medium, such as language, imagery, sound, buildings, or combination thereof." (p5)

STORY

"A story is a content of that text and produces a particular manifestation, inflection, and 'colouring' of fabula." (p5)

FABULA

"A fabula is a series of logically and chronologically related events that are caused or experienced by actors." (p5)

Other terms:

actors

acting

event

versions

"The basis of this theory's usefulness for analysis is the three-part division it proposes. The assertion that a narrative text is one in which a story is told implies that the text is not identical to the the story, and the same holds for the relationship between story and fabula." (p5)

"Logically speaking, the reader first sees the text, not the fabula. The fabula is really the result of the mental activity of reading; it is the interpretation by the reader, influenced both by the initial encounter with the text and by the manipulations of the story. The fabula is a memory trace that remains after reading is completed." (p9)

"Narrative is a cultural phenomenon, one of the many cultural processes by which we live." (p9)

Bal, M. (2017) Narratology: Introduction to the theory of narrative, Fourth edition. University of Toronto Press.

(Bal, 2017)

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Art and Visibility in Migratory Culture Conflict, Resistance, and Agency

Editors: Mieke Bal and Miguel Á. Hernández-Navarro

NOTES + IDEAS

Travelling exhibition: migration/movement/displacement

Migratory aesthetics (?)

Art's agency comes through its display and audience participation.

Making invisible visible: becoming visible as a migrant.

Migrant as translator.

"In a migratory culture, the people we all call migrants are always translators" Garcia Canclini

Art about migration vs migratory art.

Migratory art is a strategy put together to create transitional meaning (?)

Putting different works together (intentionally or unintentionally) to create new meaning.

Invisible migrant: neglected as a full participant; lacking recognised status in the public sphere.

Migratory aesthetics of art:

Art is material and tangible, and we can interact with it.

Art as a political space (space of disagreement)

Art has an audience and, therefore, is performative

Migration beyond tragedy and glorification

Migration as aesthetic

Speaking not about migration but through it

"We argue in favor of a conflictual nature of social life; the need, to put it politely, to “disagree,” to live in tension with one another." (p10)

The mission of the art is to evoke, suggest, and connote rather than transmit meanings.

The term “migratory” is meant to indicate not a particular population but a state of the culture we share.

"This culture is replete with movement: people on the move, leaving traces and projecting new, provisional destinations. In the context of art and the question of its political agency, “migratory” refers to the sen-sate traces of the movements of migration that characterize contemporary culture. In other words, movement, once we notice its pervasiveness, is not an exceptional occurrence in an otherwise stable world, but a normal, generalized process in a world that cannot be grasped in terms of any given notion of stability." (p10)

"Our world, which comprises the current but also past states of the globe, is on the move. Theoretical and critical discourse cannot quite grasp this movement. They can describe it, but always at a distance; they are always engaged with the other part, on one part of the two or more that continue to intersect and interact. Art, in contrast, can reduce that distance, that divide, and demonstrate how artificially constructed it is."

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Resisting Trauma Story: Ethical Concerns in the Oral History Archive

By Katherine Randall, Katarina M. Powell, and Brett L. Shadle

NOTES:

Collecting oral history and making it public

What are the narratives? What do the narratives do?

The story itself can be seen as an archive: a repository of information about the individual's life, arranged by memory.

Oral history methodology

You learn what is the most important to the subject from their story/their archive.

Western expectations: trauma story

Refugees are used to adapting their stories to Western expectations.

Reductive stories told to fulfil Western expectations become the only refugee's identity.

Refugee: a term that comes with social stigma and negative stereotypes

What are the risks of making refugees' oral history archives available to a potentially hostile public? (p4)

Displaced Voices: A Journal of Migration, Archives and Cultural Heritage. Volume 1 (Summer 2020). ISSN: 2633-2396 / Displaced Voices is an online journal of the Living Refugee Archive. www.livingrefugeearchive.org/

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Richter's Opus Magnum

The Atlas as an archive

Collection of images used as a reference.

Links directly to his creative artistic work.

Visual notes, sketches and collages.

In the exhibition context, Atlas functioned as artwork.

"Do you know what was just great? -- To notice that such a stupid, absurd act, like copying a postcard, can result in painting. And then the freedom to be able to paint what's fun. Deer, aeroplanes, kings, secretaries. Not having to invent anything any longer, forgetting everything one understands by the concept of painting: colour, composition, spatial depth; and everything else that one knew and thought. That was suddenly no longer a prerequisite for art."

Ideas about methods:

Gathering objects and images to change the context of the past.

Painting images/photographs.

Using images and objects to create new images.

References become artworks.

Richter, G. and Friedel, H. (2006) Gerhard Richter Atlas. London: Thames & Hudson.

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ARTS OF MEMORY by ASSMANN

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A Matter of Identity

by Oliver Sacks

"(...) Mr Thompson, only just out of the hospital (...) was still on the boil, was still in an almost frenzied confabulatory delirium, (...) continually creating a world and self, to replace what was continually being forgotten and lost. Such a frenzy may call forth quite brilliant powers of invention and fancy -- a veritable confabulatory genius -- for such a patient must literally make himself (and his world) up every moment. We have, each of us, a life-story, an inner narrative -- whose continuity, whose sense, is our lives. It might be said that each of us constructs and lives a 'narrative' and that this narrative is us, our identities."

(116)

Sacks, O. (2011) ‘A Matter of Identity’, in The Man Who Mistook his wife for a Hat. London: Picador, pp. 114–122.

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Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination

by Annette Kuhn

NOTES

"Family photographs are about memory and memories: that is they are about stories of the past, shared (both stories and past) by a group of people that in that moment of sharing produces itself as a family. But family photography is an industry, too, and the makers of the various paraphernalia of family photography (...)"

(22)

"Language brings us together; it pulls its apart; it makes possible our fictions of the past, and our imaginings of the future"

(25)

Loss written into postwar generation

Loss inherited by the generation

Traces of war that were not experienced first-hand exist in physical surroundings and in daily life; parents' conversations

Memory works allows new possibilities for enriching our understanding of how we use images to make ourselves, how we construct our own histories, and how we position ourselves within wider histories

"None of the essays in this book is a work of autobiography, but they all emerge from a critical interest in a genre of writing that might be called 'revisionist autobiography'."

(147)

Traditional autobiography: written life story with beginning, middle and end; organised narrative; ordered sequence of events

Source materials for autobiography are subject to secondary revision

Narrator and protagonist are one

Stories of different lives, told differently

Self-reflective contemporary socialist and feminist writing vs 'outsider' life stories/ narratives by members of social groups whose stories have traditionally been untold, hidden or silenced

"How do life stories 'from below' -- by women, by former slaves, by working-class men and women, for example-- handle the relationship between life events, the narration of these events, and the narrating subject?"

(150)

"Can questioning of bourgeois or patriarchal notions of identity and a desire to redress social and historical injustices be reconciled in autobiographical writing? If so, how?"

(151)

"Revisionist autobiography is not purely, nor arguably at all, about the lives and times of particular individuals: rather, it is about the relationship between the personal or the individual on the one hand and the social or the historical on the other-- or, to put it another way, between experience and history."

(151)

"(...) images are just as much productions of meaning as words."

(152)

Social history is a source of material to illuminate personal live histories

Democracy of family photography develops: they become treasured mementoes

Through family photography memories are funnelled into specific directions

Family photos can questioned and be read critically which sometimes produces painful knowledge and a new understanding of the past

Depending on cultural conventions, image productions and social context, photographs contain a range of possible meanings

Jo Spence: Putting Myself in the Picture

Using personal photographs as source material for interpretation

Spence calls it visual autobiography

Spence's photos are to be read, deconstructed and interpreted

Photographs that sometimes even lie according to Spence

Spence questions the transparency attributed to photographs and she suggests that photos are based on cultural conventions and specific aesthetic

Photographs don't necessarily tell the 'truth' about 'Jo Spence'

There is 'no peeling away of layers to reveal real self' but rather constant reworking of memory and identity (154)

"The past is unavoidably rewritten, revised, through memory. And memory is partial: things get forgotten, misremembered, repressed. Memory, in any case, is always secondary revision: even the memories we run and rerun inside our heads are residues of psychical processes, often unconscious ones; and their (re)telling -- putting subjective memory-images into some communicable form -- always involves ordering and organising them in one way or another."

(155)

Memory work:

Memory work is an active practice of remembering that takes an inquiring attitude towards the past and the activity of its (re)construction through memory

Memory work questions the transparency of what is remembered

Memory work takes what is remembered and treats it as a material for interpretation

Memory work mediates the past which is rewritten and revised

Memory is already secondary revision

Memory shapes our inner worlds

Memory is an active production of meanings

Memory texts voice a collective imagination

Memory embodies both union and fragmentation

"Telling and retelling their memories is one of the strategies people use not only to make sense of the world, but to create their worn world and to give themselves and others like them a place, a place of some dignity and worth, within it."

(166)

(...) The shared remembering and complicit forgetting that goes on inside families provide the model for other communities -- of ethnicity, class, generation and so on -- and for the idea of nation as family, with its assumption of, or desire for, a past held in common by all its members, a past that binds them together today and will continue to do so into the future."

(167)

"Remembering can be the occasion for cultural difference, even for conflict, as well as for solidarity."

(168)

"Everyday historical consciousness and collective memory overlap, however in stories about the recent past, that past which falls within the timespan of our parents' and our grandparents' memories. Here, remembering of the kind that goes on inside families feeds into the consciousness of a history that transcends the memory of any individual or family."

(168)

Nationhood:

Memory feeds into a conception of a history that is 'ours'

Historical imagination of nationhood: acts of remembering shared by families and other communities

Desire for union and wholeness

"It is in the idea of the homeland, and above all in that of the 'motherland', that all of these aspects of the national imaginary are condensed, and home and nation come together"

(169)

Kuhn, A. (2002) Family secrets: Acts of memory and imagination. London: Verso.

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I began to reverse the process of the way I had been constructed as a woman by deconstructing myself visually in an attempt to identify the process by which I had been put together

Jo Spence

Spence, J. (1988b) Putting Myself in the Picture. Seattle: The Real Comet Press.

Photo source: https://wellcomecollection.org/articles/XVqudxMAACEAxxLK

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BEYOND THE ARCHIVE

ALEIDA ASSMANN

NOTES & QUOTES

"What does not go into the archive will end up on the tip, and what is eventually ejected from the archive through lack of space, for instance, will also land there. But conversely, a part of what is now treasured in the archive may (...) once have been classified as junk."

(369)

"With its loss of practical use, an object naturally loses its function and its value; therefore one can say that rubbish is those things in which society has lost interest and from which it has withdrawn attention. All that remains is the material of which it is composed. Art, however, which has a special regard for the concept of 'uselessness' follows a different economy from that of everyday life, and thus it can focus a different eye on the waste product."

(370) Consider Poles were and are displaced but they choose to forget (?)

Consider Polish women through generations are forgotten? Discarded?

Consider What about materials? How about using old family paintings that are discarded and forgotten?

Culture devaluates and excludes: decides what is waste/rubbish

Art brings light to the invisible/ making and unmaking of cultural values

Artists that use waste to shape counter-memory

Radom rubbish and junk can become "cosmos of knowledge" (372)

Meaningless framed in a narrative can be introduced into ceremonies

Consider inheritance: "Things that have stories alive in them"

Consider objects/things What is their value? We can use art to transform perspective and re-interpret, create new meaning from what was discarded

Consider the world is in fragments. Fragmented world because of displacement / Art puts it back together (Humpty Dumpty)

Consider life broken by displacement Consider naming parts/fragments to put things back together again ; My family archive naming random objects and giving them lost meaning

Consider The brokenness is everywhere, the disarray is universal. Displacement is everywhere, displacement is universal.

Consider The Tower of Babel and the confusion of languages

Consider What signs of displacement are in the family archive?

Consider: Painting objects versus using rubbish objects

Consider ready-made and found object

Consider "God used words to create the world out of nothing"

Assmann about Ilya Kabokov

Kabokov's art is a symbol of an economy of waste and consumerism

Rubbish as a metaphor of the Soviet Union as a 'non-functioning civilization' / defective/ where everything is broken

Rubbish also represents: "loss, transience, forces of disappearance"

Everything disappears and disintegrates, everything decays

Kavokov's discarded rubbish exists forever

Memory hidden in rubbish

Personal waste organised in archives (in different formats)

Sorting, labelling and arranging as techniques for processing personal rubbish

Kabokov imitates the Soviet bureaucracy by every piece of waste from his life

Pointing to state control over private lives

Making clear decision between what is remembered and what is forgotten / what is saved and archived

Keeping object connected to memory; in our memories and recollections everything takes on the same value and importance

"Kabokov is not interested in biodegradables, the offshoots of affluence, or industrial waste; all that concerns him is cultural waste that is biographically relevant and bears the traces of personal, human use and contact. Only this kind of rubbish intersects with the archive."

(378)

"Kabokov's project is not, however, solely about himself. Rubbish for him also underpins a collective Utopia (...) This Utopia hols out the promise that life is stronger than death and that human expression is more lasting than the powers of destruction"

(383)

"Both Western and Easter (European) art, through literary texts and artistic installations, have discovered the importance of waste. Authors and artists have created a cultural memory with their rubbish archives, their hoard of the forgotten and the rejected. In this memory art, which paradoxically remembers forgetting, ars memoratvia and ars oblivionalis merge together."

(384)

Assmann, A. (2013) Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

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Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Arts of Memory

ALEIDA ASSMANN

Notes & Quotes:

"Consciousness generally develops in terms of what has passed, and this process fits in logically with the retrospective nature of memory, since the latter only begins when the experience to which it refers has run its complete course."

(01)

"Living memory thus gives way to a cultural memory that is underpinned by media-- by material carriers such as memorials, monuments, museums, and archives. While individual recollections spontaneously fade and die with their former owners, new forms of memory are reconstructed within a transgenerational framework, and on an institutional level, within a deliberate policy of remembering and forgetting. There is no self-organizational and self-regulation of cultural memory-- it always depends on personal decisions and selections, on institutions and media."

(06)

"No one today would deny that these memories, based on individual experiences and transformed into collective claims, have become a vital and controversial element of modern culture."

(07)

Memory as a phenomenon transcends many disciplines

There are many approaches to memory

Virginia Woolf: "Memory is inexplicable" (Orlando)

Marcel Proust compares the presence of the past in human consciousness to photographic negative (you can't tell if it will be developed or not)

Second World War and Holocaust as a great shock; traumatic heritage of the mid 20th century

Traditions: potential of memory (mnemotechnics) and forms of identity

Perspectives: individual, collective and cultural memory

Media: texts, images and places

Discourses: literature, history, art, psychology etc

Storing vs remembering

Memory as art

Memory as power

Importance of memory for the formation of identity

Selection aspect of memory and forgetting

Storage vs functional memory

"Individuals and cultures construct their memories interactively through communication by speech, images, and rituals. Without such representations, it is impossible to build a memory that can transcend generations and historical epochs, but this also means that with the changing nature and development of the various media, the constitution of the memory will also be continually changing."

(11)

Media: provides the material for cultural memory

Media: frames and interacts with individual human memories

Images register impressions and experiences and they are independent of language

"After the extended dominance of the print age, the governing principle in the era of electronic writing is now the permanent overwriting and reconstruction of memory. Through information technology and new research into the structure of the brain, we are now experiencing a change of paradigm, by which the concept of a lasting written record is being replaced by the principle of continuous rewritings."

(11)

Body: trauma happens when the violence of experience is so overwhelming that its memory is disconnected from consciousness and is stored within the body with no access to it

Places may confirm and preserve memories. Forgotten traditions may revive when a place is rediscovered

Bodies and places are linked to the sensual quality of understanding

Archive: exists independently, remains abstract and general

Archive: a place where the past is constructed and produced

Construction of past in the archive depends partly on social, political and cultural interests as well as it is determined by media and technologies

Digital age: new forms of processing, transferring and accessing information; large capacity of storage

"(...) The current crisis facing cultural memory is not confined to the problems caused by the new media. This is evident from the work of artists born after World War II who work in the aftermath of a shattered cultural memory. The self-reflective art of these artists highlights the processes of remembering and forgetting".

(13)

Artistic memory: not storage but index; it acts as a reference to human experience; it is a form of communication

"Today the arts have developed new and emphatic ways of focusing on the memory crisis as their theme, and they are finding new forms to express the dynamic movement of cultural remembering and forgetting."

Consider: Poland as a place of post-communist memory crisis

Archive: outside archive waste accumulates

Waste: leftovers and remains of a civilisation that was not collected

Waste: what is dormant in memory

Waste can be utilised and take new meanings at a later time

Waste lies between presence and absence

Waste is structurally important to the archive as forgetting is to memory

Art archives whatever the current culture has rejected

Art brings waste back to our awareness

Memory boxes: spatial concretization of memory

Memory boxes: Middle Ages use of chests to store parchments that were called 'treasure chests'

Memory boxes: the Latin word for a box is arca form which is derived ark as in Noah's Ark

IMAGE

Consider the Written world as the main medium in the past enlightened Renaissance humanists; now images are more prominent

"Under the banner of an integral history of culture, some critics began to distrust the written tradition and to discover new forms of access to the past through pictures and monuments."

(208)

Images show up in memory, especially in the areas that cannot be accessed by verbal processing (precognitive and traumatic events)

Images are both metaphors and mediums (just like writing)

Photo as a lasting impression of a moment gone forever

Photography transcends every proceeding medium for memory

Photography acts as proof of particular past that once existed

Image must impact imagination to be imprinted effectively

"The miracle of photographic emulsion consists in the fact that it gives material form to light radiated from an object."

Consider what about painting? lasting impressions of feelings/emotions gone forever?

"Pictures fit into the landscape of the unconscious in a way that is different from texts: as the boundary between the picture and dream is blurred, the picture is transformed into an internal 'vision' that takes on a life of its own. Once this border is crossed, the status of the picture is changed from being an object of observation to an agent of haunting"

(217)

Assmann, A. (2013) Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

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"The fact is that to be silent is not to be human. As long as I am human, I must speak"

Illya Kabokov

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Tatana Kellner (b. 1950) 71125, Fifty years of silence: Eva Kellner’s Story Paper and plaster, 1992

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Print Collection; Photograph by Robert Kato

source: https://www.nypl.org/events/tours/audio-guides/treasures-audio-guide/item/4100

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Notes on The Generation of Postmemory by Marianne Hirsch

Marked by Memory:

Identification with parents' traumatic experiences can be manifested through bodily mirroring

What is the role of 'historical withholding' in the transfer of trauma?

Hirsch is "particularly interested in exploring the specificity of the role of daughters in the work of familial postmemory"

Cultural expectations placed on daughters are distinctive

Rememory and Postmemory:

Two modes of remembering dependent on varying degrees of working through, coming to terms with, and gaining distance from the past

Rememory is communicated through bodily symptoms and becomes a form of repetition and reenactment

Postmemory works through multiple mediation

In mother-daughter relationship postmemory risks sliding into rememory and its traumatic reenactment

Rememory belongs to someone else

Rememory takes you to the world of dead

Rememory is a noun and verb: a thing and an action

Intergenerational transmission can be dangerous

Dire consequences of one person's empathic over-identification and adoption of another's memories

Rememory suggests certainty of repetition: "It will happen again"

Memory can be transmitted to be repeated and reenacted rather than be worked through

Envy of mother's suffering; taking mother's suffering by daughter

Children that live with 'burden of a double reality'

Repeating the trauma of the past; rememories engage both mother and daughter

Rememory=transposition, postmemory=identification

Rememory is retraumatization

Thought Both rememory/transposition and postmemory/identification relate to my story

Postmemory: self and the other are closely connected through familial and group relations, through a common understanding of what it means to be Jewish or Polish or Kwinto

"For postmemorial artists, the challenge is to define an aesthetic based on a form of identification and projection that can include the transmission of the bodily memory of trauma without leading to the self-wounding and retraumatization that is rememory. The desire for this type of nonappropriative identification and empathy, and, of course, its often painful and disastrous flaws and failures, have formed the core of feminist theory and practice in the last thirty years."

"The challenge for the postmemorial artist is precisely to allow the spectator to enter the image, to imagine the disaster 'in one's own body', yet to evade the transposition that erases distance, creating too available, too direct an access to this particular past."

(p98)

Mothers' and daughters' bodily connection and closeness are reinforced by cultural expectations and therefore are in danger of over-identification and rememory

Until recently our access to postmemory was largely shaped by works by men and about men

Hirsch thinks "the position of the daughter as historical agent is not the same as that of the son"

"Yet in thinking about postmemory as a feminst, I have found it fruitful not only to search for female witnesses of the fist and second generation, but also to think about a feminist mode of knowing this past."

(p98)

................

Questions posed by Hirsch:

How memory is constructed and what stories are told or withheld, to whom and by whom?

How family stories are structured and told, how they are repressed, suppressed, or silenced and how a feminist analysis can expose those structures?

.................

Pain of Others: Surviving Images

First-time viewing of photographs portraying the horrors of war or other traumatic events by children: a sense of 'rapture', the world will never be the same

WWII: Very few images were taken by victims

Repetition of few images from WWII and the Holocaust in texts and films

Does the repetition of the images has the power to retraumatize?

Repetition connects the second generation to the first, in its capacity to produce the effect of trauma

Postgeneration's reliance on images, stories, and documents passed down to them

To consider: My family archives and stories I relay on to work through the inherited trauma

Pictures that materialise memory

What can we see as we look at an image? Does it conceal as much as it reveals?

Impossibility to stop time.

We say photos freeze time but in the case of the Holocaust we cannot stop time and avert death

Connection between photography and bodily memory leads to a connection between first and second generation

Some photographs become fixed points in collective memory

Repeated images that no longer represent Nazi genocide but provoke the traumatic effect history had on those who grew up under its shadow

Retrospective witnessing that takes form of appropriating and re-contextualising archival images in postmemorial work

"Every time we look at this image, we repeat the encounter between memory and forgetting, between shock and self-protection"

(p119)

To consider: forgetting to protect ourselves and remembering to face it and to hope for healing; exposing and foreclosing trauma; pre-war family photos versus photos of destruction; I grew up with repeated images of collective trauma in the shadow of WWII

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"The bloodlands were where most of Europe's Jews lived, where Hitler and Stalin's imperial plans overlapped, where the Wehrmacht and the Red Army fought, and where the Soviet NKVD and the German SS concentrated their forces. Most killing sites were in the bloodlands: in the political geography of the 1930's and early 1940's, this meant Poland, the Baltic States, Soviet Belarus, Soviet Ukraine, and the western fringe of Soviet Russia."

Timothy Snyder

Snyder, T. (2015) Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. London: Vintage Books.

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"Our past is literally a foreign country we can never hope to visit"

Marianne Hirsch in Family Frames

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"This condition of exile from the space of identity, this diasporic experience, is a characteristic aspect of postmemory. It brings with it its own narrative genres and aesthetic shapes and thus it permits us to return, from a somewhat different angle, to the photographic aesthetics of postmemory -- the photograph's capacity to signal absence and loss and, at the same time, to make present, rebuild, reconnect, bring back to life."

Marianne Hirsch

(p243)

Hirsch, M. (2002) Family Frames: Photography Narrative and Postmemory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.