ZSUZSI FLOHR
Woven Memory
Wounded dialogue and woven narratives
‘Woven Memory–Wounded dialogue and woven narratives’ is the process of aligning and weaving together all fragments of visual art, and conflicting narratives in the familial or social context points to the past, present, and future from both a decolonial and a third-generation Holocaust perspective.
Weaving memories aims to introduce my concept of ‘woven memory’ transitioning to ‘interwoven memory,’ which resulted from my own experience as an emigrant in Vienna and the parallel exposure this experience brought with it: exposure to new experiences, concepts, and work in the field of memory studies.
The subject of Woven Memory addresses the process of weaving memories primarily by reconstructing the weaving process through discussions and conflicts. The project’s point of departure is the examination of art works and texts using different concepts of memory work, while being attuned to and integrating the discourses from the interrelated fields of the studies and literature of genocides, slavery, marginalization, othered-ness or emigration.
In Hungary and Austria, two countries in which I have been working, discourses about the third-generation olocaust perspective are still underrepresented. Therefore my goal is not only to contribute to this field but to underline the relevance of remembrance for the Third Generation in the Central
European context and it’s connectedness to other genocides and slavery from a decolonial perspective.
In recent years, I was confronted with the limitations of connectedness and the question of how much interweaving memory can take, when woven memory becomes an illusion. With my thesis I want to demonstrate that new approaches create new questions and possibilities for connecting various constructions of unique histories.
Zsuzsi Flohr is a visual artist living and working in Budapest and Vienna. Her artistic practice includes videos and photos and text based works, too. Her works mostly debate the question of everyday reality, ontology, personality and identity. The represented text fragments show human presence through self-documentation. Born into an East European jewish family in Budapest, Flohr has chosen to examine the contradictions and historical dislocations of her generation in Europe through the use of ‘psycho-portraits’ and ‘photo-diaries’ which confront the collective history with the personal and the individual. Zsuzsi Flohr’s videos and photographs are text-based narrative works that center around the issues of the ‘third generation after the Holocaust’ in terms of consciousness and collective identity, with a focus on her native country, Hungary. Questions of belonging, self-knowledge, memory policy, memory culture and the returning generation are the central questions she brings forward from a personal, gender-sensitive perspective .
