“Untitled (Perfect Lovers) 1991

“Untitled (Ross in LA) 1991

In 1979, a couple of days after the Vietnamese army entered Phnom Penh, two photojournalists who had accompanied the invasion were drawn toward a particular compound by the smell of decomposing bodies. The site was surrounded by a corrugated tin fence topped with coils of barbed wire and looked like an abandoned school building. Over the gate was a red placard inscribed in yellow with a Khmer slogan: “Fortify the spirit of the revolution! Be on your guard against the strategy and tactics of the enemy so as to defend the country, the people and the Party.” The place carried no other identification. In rooms on the ground floor of the southernmost building, the two Vietnamese came across the corpses of several recently murdered men. Some of the bodies were chained to iron beds. The prisoners’ throats had been cut. The blood on the floors was still wet. Altogether the bodies of fourteen people were discovered in the compound, apparently killed only a couple of days before. In the days that followed, the Vietnamese army found more then 50 bodies, all kinds of torture devices and an immense archive. This is how the secret prison of Khmer Rouge, called S-21 in which more then 15 thousand people were killed, saw the light of day. Only three months after its discovery, the Vietnamese government turned it into the Museum of Genocidal Crimes, Tuol Sleng (name of the hill on which it stands, meaning sleng tree, which is known to bear poisonous fruits) and opened it to the public. The compound besides being cleaned, was left intact. 

“Post-memory is a powerful form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through projection, investment, and creation. It describes the relationship of the second generation to the first – their curiosity and desire, as well as their ambivalence about wanting to own this knowledge.” (M. Hirsch and L. Spitzer, War Stories: Witnessing in Retrospect, in: Image and Remembrance. Representation and the Holocaust, ed. S. Hornstein and F. Jacobowitz, Indiana University Press 2003, p. 139.)

Comparable to an earthquake or tornado attack. The human element is taken out, therefore the possibility to hold others responsible for these acts is put into question. Moreover transmission of information about historical events such as Holocaust or other genocides doesn’t lead to conscious remembrance or healing of wounds, but secondary trauma, which is the result of representing the Holocaust, wars and other massive violations of human rights in modes that are themselves traumatizing. Ernst van Alphen, writes:

“Modes of representation capable of causing secondary trauma are those which seek to overwhelm the viewer with naked imagery: docudramas, the journalistic image and reports that attempt to expose the ‘bare truth’ or ‘naked facts’ – in short, those realistic modes that strive to convey historical truth. [...] It’s a paradoxical and ultimately hopeless endeavor to counter traumatic effects by using traumatic modes of representation, because a foreground effect has to be apprehended intellectually to be acted upon. In this case, the viewer is too overwhelmed to arrive at such a response.” (E. van Alphen, Caught by History. Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art. Literature and Theory, Stanford University Press 1997, p. 165-66.)

http://www.culture.pl/en/culture/artykuly/es_obecnosc_zaglady

Concerned with questions of memory, place, and identity, Shimon Attie gives visual form to both personal and collective memories by introducing histories of marginalized and forgotten communities into the physical landscape of the present. The Writing on the Wall project (1991-1993) took place in Berlin’s former Jewish quarter, the Scheunenviertel neighborhood. There Attie projected slides made from pre-Holocaust photographs of the neighborhood’s Jewish residents and shops in the same (or sometimes nearby) locations where the original images were taken. He then photographed the resulting scene. A woman from the past looks out the window of a building now scrawled with graffiti. A pigeon shop with cages stacked on the sidewalk is restored to an otherwise empty street. The life and industry suggested in the projections of the past strike an unexpected counterpoint to the crumbling facades and apparently abandoned places of the present. (from: Museum of Contemporary Photography web page at: <a class=”aligncenter”

href=”http://www.mocp.org/collections/permanent/attie_shimon.php”>http://www.mocp.org/collections/permanent/attie_shimon.php

References: 

http://mocp.org/exhibitions/2004/05/shimon_attie_th.php

Attie, Shimon. Sites Unseen: Shimon Attie European Projects: Installations and Photographs. Burlington, VT: Verve, 1998.

Attie, Shimon, and Christopher Beaver. Between Dreams and History: The Making of Shimon Attie’s Public Art Projects(videorecording). Ben Lomond, CA: distributed by The Video Project, 2000 .

Attie, Shimon, Natasha Egan, and Alexander Stille. The History of Another. Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms, 2004.

Attie, Shimon, et al. The Writing on the Wall: Projections in Berlin’s Jewish Quarter. Heidelberg: Edition Braus, 1994.

“In 1944-45 an American war correspondent, Meyer Levin embarked on a journey through Europe. His assignment was to seek out the remnants of Jewish communities, to cover the “Jewish story”. Sharing a Jeep with him was French photographer Eric Schwab. Schwab was photographing the war. He was also on a personal mission, searching for his mother who had been deported in 1943. In his autobiography, In Search, Meyer Levin describes that journey from Paris to Prague, through the Battle of the Bulge, the liberation of the concentration camps, and the first stirrings of the Cold War. In the fall of 1995 Mikael Levin retraced his father’s journey. He photographed the concentration camps and the Europe of today, contrasting his journey to his father’s experiences of fifty years ago. Mikael Levin has assembled those photographs together with his father’s writings and with a selection of Eric Schwab’s photographs from 1945, creating a narrative of images and text that span fifty years and two generations.” (from artist’s web page, online at: <a class=”aligncenter”

www.mikaellevin.com