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.
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.
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:
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.