March 3, 2011
My new artist’s book, SCHWARZER TOD AND THE USELESS EATERS, has been published in hardcover by Catalysis Projects and is now available on Amazon.com…soon to be followed by a selection of independent booksellers, and the Catalysis Projects website.
It’s 40 pages of a prose poem suite and companion photographs from outside Strasbourg. The text is in English, with a German translation by Dorothea Herreiner.
Click HERE to purchase on Amazon.
In luminous photographs and startlingly beautiful prose poetry, acclaimed artist and poet Quintan Ana Wikswo offers an incandescent, haunting fairytale of innocence in the midst of genocide. The text (in English and German) is generously illustrated with 21 full-color photographs made at pogrom sites in western Germany using antique battlefield cameras and altered vintage films.
Amidst elderberries and larks’ nests, birch trees and wild carrots, a group of children disregard their elders’ warnings: never go near water. To the children, the danger is an imaginary troll crouched beneath the river bridge. To the elders, the threat is far more real. It is the summer of 1351 and the Black Death has come to Germany. Over 200 Jewish communities have been destroyed, yet these people are not killed by the bubonic plague but by mobs of neighbors who accuse them of poisoning Christian water sources. By the 15th century, only three substantial Jewish communities remain in all of Germany.
Quintan Ana Wikswo offers a fierce and unsettling glimpse into a band of Jewish children who attempt to escape atrocity through fable and imagination. Her reference to Hitler’s term for Jewish children – “Useless Eaters” – suggests a subtle warning for contemporary audiences that forgotten lessons of the 14th century continue to resound into the 21st.