Illustrating the Holocaust

 

THIS IS A HUMAN BEING

 

 

This practice-led illustration research project investigates methods of conveying the history of Litzmannstadt ghetto (now Bałuty in the Polish city of Łódź) during the Second World War, and the destiny of the ghetto children. Our only knowledge of the majority of them is through archival material, such as deportation lists. How can illustration approach such complex matters, and what kind of images could be applied? Reception theory has inspired the first part treating illustration as a tool of engaging the viewer through object tactility and drawing.

Based in the connotation to stones in Jewish memory tradition, this text treats how workshops may function as a gradual and compassionate unveiling of information involving the participation and the contribute to the reflection of the bystander. In workshops participants receive a stone wrapped in paper. Each stone commemorates a child from Łódź who was deported and murdered. The stones are kept during a workshop where the participants produce a drawing of the stone. In return they receive information about the name, gender, address, and age of the child. 

DEVELOPING A PROJECT THROUGH PARTICIPATION


The methodology has been developed through the sharing of ideas by generous colleagues and by voulunteers in a series of workshops. Using surveys after the workshops, the procedures have been refined over time. Even if the statistic material is limited, the use of anonymous response  provided valuable  insight in and the influence on and response by  the participants.

 

The project is described in an article in the journal Formakademisk in 2019. While the main text is in Norwegian, a summary in English is  found on page 1.

https://www.academia.edu/91978330/FormAkademisk_Tema_Tegning

 

Drawing is used as a vehicle of civic awareness to intensify the awareness of forces – political and ideological – in areas of the historical past that are traumatic to the degree of being relegated to the unknown.  In participatory workshops, stones were wrapped in sheets of paper with archival information on identified Holocaust victims, using rawing as an act of memory. The stones wrapped into the archival sheets are chance elements in the sense of being stones of a particular shape, material structure and touch. At the same time, they are symbols of remembrance of departed people in Jewish culture. The act of drawing here features as a zone of entanglement between two disparate events: the stone and the departed person. It provides a setting in which other archival materials – such as photos and maps – become part of the proj- ect’s life-world. Through drawing, each participant departs from their current comfort zones to delve into the contact zone of remembrance – not as realm of the past but as realm of the contemporary (Agamben, 2009). In this sense, the project This is a Human is not bent on the aspects of drawing that are involved in making, moving the manufacture of objects that populate the feld, but in moving the feld. As a professor of illustration, the author is working directly on the Zeitgeist.

The article takes the reader step-by-step through the project conveying a sense of the vitality in the project through the intermedium of the written format. The links developed through this process clearly move beyond the zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, previous arti- cle). Her work rather resonates with contemporary developments in quantum theory – featuring, for example, Laruelle (philosopher) and Barad (physicist): the knowable is entangled with the experimental apparatus. This means that the archival approach of monitoring the exceptional events of the holo- caust, and the live events connecting to the holocaust as a state of urgency, are alternate cuts into the fabric of historical memory that cannot be merged but can be parsed in a step- by-step fashion, of which the article gives a rich narrative account. The lessons learned here come neither from visual aesthetics nor from professional practice but from enfolding contact though drawing.

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Project history

 

Part II Work in progress

 Paper at the international conference in Riga 

“ART AND THE HOLOCAUST”, RIGA, JULY 2-3, 2019

https://www.sefer.ru/eng/adds/10493/

 

PART I

The Art Book Museum, Łódź October 2018

http://www.book.art.pl/index.php/en/

Research question: How may the material made in the workshops be used furher; what kind of book or archive may bring the idea further on?


ESSAY Når tilskueren tegner Formakademisk https://journals.hioa.no/index.php/formakademisk/article/view/2741

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7577/formakademisk.2741

Published 2018-10-09

 

TALK AT HUMBOLT UNIVERSITY  Communicating sensitive topics 10th of September 2018 

Seminar hosted by Humboldt Universität zu Berlin.

 

WORKSHOP as part of education at Faculty of FIne Art, Music and Design in Bergen 8th of March 2018.


NRK Ytring: De norske jødene som ikke kom hjem


Published  2018-01-27

Co-authors: 

Aurora Jacobsen Evenshaug, formidler ved Jødisk museum Trondheim


WORKSHOP FALSTADSENTERET  

27th of January marks the date the prisoners of Auschwitz were liberated in 1945.

A ceremony of commemoraton took place at the Falsted Centre, in Ekne in Trøndelag on this date in 2018. It was a cooperation between The Falstad Centre, The Jewish Museum in Trondheim and this artistic research project.

 

WORKSHOP Łódź 

As part of the workshop cooperation, students in the multi-disciplinary group participated in the third workshop in the mid of October.

 

WORKSHOP Łódź, 29th and 30th of August 2017.

This workshop took place in Bałuty, the district in Łódź, Poland that was turned into a ghetto during WWII. Here, the workshop ended in a guided tour in the former ghetto, visiting places such as the Maria church where the main bridge in the ghetto was situated. Also the home addresses of children in the project was visited.

 

TALK Dramatikkens hus, 24th of August 2017

Hvilket refleksjonsrom tilbyr vi barn og unge i kunsten i dag, og hvordan skaper vi dramatikk som åpner opp for barns erfaring og tolkning? Hvordan kan vi skrive scenetekster for barn som er relevante, utfordrende og speiler den virkeligheten barna lever i? Dramatikkens hus  inviterte dramatiker Jens Raschke, illustratør Hilde Kramer, dramaturg Stefan Åkesson, Erik Uddenberg og Suzanne Osten til å prate om sin tilnærming til kunst for barn og unge.

 

TALK Norsk barnebokinstitutt

#HumanBeingDeported was a part of a seminar on 30th of March at Norsk barnebokinstitutt discussing how children literature convey the Holocaust in present and previous time.

http://barnebokinstituttet.no/aktuelt/seminar-holocaust-som-kunst-for-barn/

 

IN THE NEWS

Author Bjørn Sortland participated in the first workshop, and later published an article in the newspaper Vårt Land 28th of March 2017 based on his experience. 

Link http://www.vl.no/kultur/ein-liten-stein-som-gneg-i-lomma-1.944644?paywall=true (paywall).

 

PROJECT STARTUP: Workshop at Rom 8 with seminar following up 

https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/327618/327619

 

 

This artistic research relates to a cross-disciplinary cooperation:

Centrum Dialogu Marka Edelmana, Łódź, Poland

Falstadsenteret, Trondheim Norway

Freie Universität Berlin, Germany

Hochschule Ostwestfalen-Lippe, Germany

Høgskulen i Volda, Norway

The Polín Museum, Warszaw, Poland

The Strzeminski Academy of Fine Art in Łódź, Poland

 

Paper at Cumulus Conference in Paris 2018  by Kjetil Vaage Øie and Thomas Lewe

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330141811_Creative_communication_design_-Communicating_Holocaust_to_younger_generations

In a time where the last survivors of the Holocaust are soon gone, and the role of witness-oriented mediation of the history is discussed, this project investigates the potetial of drawing in a post-memory perspective. Archival practice and artistic practice are merged in the next step of the project where the drawings and stones become an archive of its own.

A scrolli-telling story was made by the Lemgo students after the workshop in 2017: Please visit http://prepalog-lodz.de

Left: Radio podcast made by students during the first workshop in 2016.

Click on image to play  film