June 30, 2013
It’s a strange anniversary for SONDERBAUTEN, and a bit of a phenomenal experience of the psyche. Three years later – nearly to the day – as my first visit to the site of the former rape brothel at Dachau. My first fieldwork at the Dachau Sonderbau/Rape Brothel site was 24 June, 2010. This time, I’m with the Fieldshift Further team of Arthur Kell (composer) and Alexx Shilling (choreographer) working at the site. We’re creating a new performance and film installation iteration for this new stage of development.
With visits in between, I find myself back at the site nearly three years to the day – so much has changed, and so much hasn’t.
Three years ago, I embarked on this project alone, with the hope that the experience of these women at the rape brothel could be excavated, and some way integrated into a Holocaust narrative that has excluded much of women’s sexual experience, and experience of sexual violence. But back then, with no clear idea of its future, I spent a long, desolate summer creating a series of photographs and poems and films using whatever fragments I found amidst the ruins. It was working within occlusion.
Three years later, I am humbled, honored, grateful and astonished to share the SONDERBAUTEN project with a core team of well over thirty collaborators that currently includes the Jewish Museum Berlin, the Jewish Museum Munich, the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust and Yeshiva University Museum (presenters/exhibitors), Creative Capital, the Center for Cultural Innovation, ARC/Durfee and the Puffin Foundation (funders), Millay Colony, Dragon’s Egg, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Oberpfalzer Kunstlerhaus and Ebenböckhaus (Artist Residencies), Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek, Cilly Kugelmann and Zachary Levine (curators), Keller Verlag (publishers), Deborah Poe and Noah Saterstrom (editors), Alexx Shilling (choreographer), Arthur Kell (composer, upright bass), Isaac Schankler (composer), Andrew Tholl (violin), Anna Lisa Blöth (voice), Dorothea Herreiner (translator), Shayna Keller, Mimi Yin, Chey Chankethya, Sarah Young, and Sarah Jacobs (dancers), Eric Grush (post-production), and Ute Herreiner, William Gross, and Joanne Jacobson (angels).
Behind and throughout this team are everyone’s conversations and evolutions with myriad people whose influence has continued to shape and expand and resound across this particularly challenging and uncomfortable project.
Once again this spring, the flowers returned to the site. Once again, the moles have dug their holes along the walls and not found a way through it. Once again, there is a geometric outline at the site, filled in with purple flowers. It is in the shape of a structure that is no longer there – we think perhaps the latrine, as the flowers love nitrogen in the soil.
And over these many trips, the most difficult part is in the leaving. In the spring or in the snow, the site does not suggest staying, but it prevents leaving. The phenomenon is perverse – a contemporary visit with this kind of place is so painful, that all one wants is for it to be over, to get out, to be away. And yet there is a thicket of relationship here that makes leaving feel truly impossible. These women, and the men, and the site, and the absence of the site, and the path we have all travelled together, and the path I could not follow, and the path that leads ahead, and stretches out behind…all of it wraps and wraps and wraps into a skein that cannot be untangled. I’ve spent countless hours in a space on planet earth about ten meters by ten meters. I sit in it, I’ve laid down it in, I’ve nearly fainted in it, and cried in it, and created in it. Now, going back to my spot… It’s difficult to stand up and to walk away, which is also walking into, and through…
