February 21, 2013

Here is the catalogue essay for the exhibition and the project SONDERBAUTEN.

 

Quintan Ana Wikswo
Project Notes + Artist Statement
From the exhibition ALLES HAT SEINE ZEIT: RITUALE GEGEN DAS VERGESSEN/ A TIME FOR EVERYTHING: RITUALS AGAINST FORGETTING. February 27-October 1st. Judisches Museums Munchen/Jewish Museum Munich.

SONDERBAUTEN: THE SPECIAL BLOCK

To disappear is to pass into an enigmatic state which is neither life nor death.  – Jean Baudrillard[i]

We don’t know, either universally or individually, exactly what our relationship to the dead is. Individually, it constitutes part of our work, our work of love; not of hate or destruction; we must think through each relationship. We can be the killers of the dead, that’s the worst of all, because when we kill a dead person, we kill ourselves. But we can also, on the contrary, be the guardian, the friend, the regenerator of the dead. Surviving is not what we think it is.” – Hélène Cixous[ii]

I grew up in the deep countryside OF THE AMERICAN SOUTH: Virginia, Tennessee and Texas. I lived within arm’s reach of disintegrating wooden slave cabins, a well-tended Civil War Confederate cemetery, and an elegant, carefully preserved old white plantation mansion, still marked by battlefield bullets. As children, we would put our fingers into the holes in the heavy white boards, and feel the cold metal bullet with our fingernails. It was hidden in there, invisible and yet present. Forgotten, and yet remembered. I wondered why – more than a century after the trauma – nobody had tended to the wound.

When I was older, I grew increasingly aware of the wounds left in the United States by the crime of slavery, by the plantation system, and by centuries of daily atrocities against Americans of African descent. And I thought again and again of this bullet. I returned to the plantation house nearly 30 years later, and it was still there, still deep in the well-painted, carefully-preserved white wood. Strangely, now the edges were dark and greasy, as generations of Americans had reached their dirty fingers inside to touch. I was startled, surprised.

This bullet was intentionally left in the wood to serve as an active and intentional ritual of remembrance, telling everyone something important happened here.

Nearby, the slave quarters had been torn down. The slave cemetery shoulder-deep in weeds, neglected, and the tombstones removed or rotten away. This told everyone: Nothing important happened here.

THE RITUAL OF REMEMBERING IS A RITUAL AGAINST DISAPPEARANCE. But who decides what is deserving of a ritual? How do we determine what to remember? And who? Why are some memories forced to disappear? How are specific stories remembered, but others intentionally erased? And who ensures that certain histories are forbidden remembrance – the sexual ones, the women’s ones, the ones that are particularly uncomfortable? Why are some truths forced into silence, and disappeared? And how can we correct the injustices against those we leave out of the family portrait?

The phenomenon of genocide has occurred throughout human existence and experience. The Holocaust is the most well-documented, the most discussed, and quite possibly the most memorialized. There are extensive rituals around its remembrance. Tremendous effort has been made by many people to ensure that it is not forgotten. And yet even within the Holocaust, the sexualized, gender-based atrocities remain hidden, undiscussed, obscured, and erased.

As an adult, I have worked with war crimes refugees and survivors of human rights trauma. I myself have been at different times a survivor, a witness, an aid worker. As the years passed, I found that again and again a second, hidden story emerged amidst the women. A story of disappearance and erasure. The female survivors were afraid to tell, prevented from telling, and surrounded by a society who actively discouraged them from speaking about gender crimes. Anything too uncomfortable did not fit the uplifting “American Immigrant” story, and anything sexual was too inappropriate for the archetypical “Holocaust survivor” story. And thus, their stories – their lives, their truths, the injustices – were silenced.

In many way, Judaism is a religion of exodus and immigration, and the United States is a nation of refugees and immigrants – the only people native to the continent were eradicated through genocide. Thus, every American family has a well-worn narrative: oppression, humiliation, and injustice, followed by escape and immigration to eventual equality, opportunity, and success. These stories are repeated over and over again, simplified and refined, smoothed out into a lesson of triumph and strength over oppression so that the next generation remembers the context of their lives, the trajectory, the goals towards which they must travel. For every generation, it can be exhausting, irritating, and even painful. Yet Americans know we must do this, or else the visions of the ancestors would be forgotten. And nonetheless, the endemic crimes against women – individually and collectively – vanish day by day.

Today, I read an essay by Shuddhabrata Sengupta about the December 2012 protests in Delhi following a gang rape. He writes: “Rape is not about sex, it is about humiliation, its intention is precisely to make the raped person think that now that they have been subjected to sexual violence, their life will no longer be worth living. The rapist and Sushma Swaraj are in perfect agreement about the worth of the life of a rape victim.The reason why some men rape women or others who are in their power is because they believe that some lives are more important, worth more, than others. That is the key to patriarchy.”[iii]

I MET “LOLA” late on a sun-drenched winter afternoon, up in the high desert mountains of New Mexico. I had just recorded her Holocaust survivor testimony for the permanent archives of a prominent institution. Her story was powerful, and she had notes in her lap – she said she had delivered the same speech to thousands of schoolchildren, museum visitors, church groups, and people like me. When the camera crew packed up its lights and video cameras and drove away in their van, she put away her notes and poured me a cup of coffee.

She told me that her 90th birthday was very soon, and she was afraid to die without telling her actual story to someone who could do something about it. Speaking off the record and asking for anonymity, she spoke with me about the repeated rape, sexual violence, and undocumented, undiscussed gender-based crimes that pervaded hers and other women’s wartime experience. She shared searing insights, observations and personal and collective history of Nazi rape brothels, the rape of civilian women by soldiers, forced prostitution within families – desperate to survive – for whom their daughters’ bodies became the only available form of currency.

At the end of her story, she expressed frustration surrounding the silence – she said people didn’t want to hear about such things, and as a post-War refugee and survivor, she was told to keep quiet about them or else she would be unable to start a new life in a new country…unable to marry, unable to raise good children, to have a job, to find security: unable to start a respectable life. Later, she was told that it would be an embarrassment to survivors, to Jews. That it would be misunderstood. That it was inappropriate. That it would cause unnecessary pain and discomfort within a community that already suffered too much. That sexual trauma was not a subject for public discussion, and certainly did not belong within the ritual of remembrance – it was better forgotten.

Yet from within 75 years of enduring a myriad of reasons for why she should not, could not, and would not speak of these hidden traumas, she urged me to find some way to bring attention to the female experience of human rights atrocities, institutionalized sexual violence, and gender-based war crimes. She asked me to find a way to remember the women after they were dead, because she wanted their experience to be remembered, no matter how painful it might be.

She suggested I begin at Dachau’s Sonderbau.

Even cursory research made clear that the project was awkward and difficult – within a society that even today tolerates epidemic levels of domestic violence, sexual crimes against women, sex slavery within the trafficking system, and gender-based violence, how to talk about women’s experiences during the Holocaust and World War II? Why should I? Why should I take on this particular project? Was it the institutionalizing, the industrializing of rape? Was it the sensationalism of the Nazi genocidal sexual psychology? Was it simply the compulsory ritual for every Jewish artist to create a major artwork surrounding the Holocaust? These questions were preoccupying.

And then I MADE MY FIRST TRIP TO DACHAU. It was LATE MAY, AND THERE WAS A MASSIVE THUNDERSTORM. I was soaking wet, and in my backpack I carried a copy of an old RAF British Aerial surveillance map where the square of the Sonderbau was marked. Researchers in Michigan had given me obscure promotional propaganda photographs showing the SS angora rabbit hutches at Dachau, constructed along the back wall of the Sonderbau and tended by the women imprisoned there, the rabbit fur used to line the flight jackets of the Luftwaffe. I had evidence, and I had a direction, and I thought it would be simple to locate the rape brothel, and to take some photographs of the ruin.

Instead, I walked in the rain for an hour, unable to find a mark on the visitor map, a delineated pile of stones, a small numbered marker, anything. Confused and surprised, I went to the main museum building and asked several attendants – they became deeply embarrassed, and lowered their voices, and said that it was not a matter to be discussed. Dachau was full of flowers and trees, birds, and everything else: ash heaps, blood ditches, crematorium, torture chambers. And yet, there was no marking, no mention, no memorialization for the crimes of life and death in the Sonderbau. Through the Royal Air Force photograph, I went to where the building once stood. It was a field of stones, grass, wild violets and dandelions. I discovered that the building – and the women’s experience – had been removed and obscured. There were no markings at the site itself.

The complexity of gender, sexuality, and gender violence within the larger genocide, I was told, were too difficult, too uncomfortable, and thus a decision had been made not to make those histories available to the public. As Susan Sontag writes, “policies about what is to be seen and not seen by the public are still being worked out. Television news producers and newspaper and magazine photo editors make decisions every day which firm up the wavering consensus about the boundaries of public knowledge. Often their decisions are cast as judgments about ‘good taste’ – always a repressive standard when invoked by institutions.”[iv]

This, then, would be the project.

AS A THIRD GENERATION WOMAN, I decided to create for us a suite of disobedient works, undermining the control and policing of the story by others through creating my own independent markers: multi-panel photographs, film installations, original text, poetry, movement, music, dance, and live performance – all of them questioning how gender-based crimes against humanity are erased, obscured, and remain untold. I wanted to shift the legacy of forced forgetting. I wanted to gather together – and to create – a myriad of fragments from my elders and my ancestors and my self…half-told anecdotes, whispers, hints and allusions, secrets, marginalized bits and pieces – each offering a multiplicity of perspectives, and representing different voices and visions of memory, history, and atrocity. Located within the Holocaust, but resonating and connecting to global crimes against women that transcend boundaries of decade and nation.

Someone in Munich told me an anecdote: that a transport of women from Ravensbruek were brought to Dachau. Some of the women were selected for the rape brothel. The remaining women were sent to the Afga subcamp of Dachau to manufacture film cameras. I resolved to recover the cameras manufactured by these women, and to bring those cameras back to the site itself and work with them to create a loop of witness and memory. To photograph the absence and erasure of the Sonderbau at Dachau, to reappropriate these cameras and find a way to re-introduce these women to the world in a way that honored and recognized their double oppression: the war crimes themselves, and the near-century of enforced silence that has followed.

I needed to question how and why – in the most documented, most remembered genocide in human history – the crimes against women remain in the shadows. I needed to do what I could to correct this. Like a collection of ritual items, this work would be a suite of tangible objects that would surround the gender-based crimes experienced by women. In the absence of a marker at the site itself, I would create a marker that could not be controlled, and that would transcend the limitations of time and space.

I had very clear ideas of what I did and did not want to create: I did not wish to create a didactic, hegemonic work with a tidy message and a moral. I did not want to condemn or judge or exalt. I did not want to continue the ominous black and grey angular stone and metal memorial iconography of my parents’ generation. I did not want to turn these women into objects, or martyrs, or victims. I did not want to attempt to speak for them, or for a time that I did not witness. Instead, I wanted to create a third generation documentation of the situation that has haunted me since childhood: why are some lives erased, and some remembered? Why are the physical ruins of some lives preserved, and others are destroyed? Why can we speak openly about the lives of some people, and not of others? How are the lives of certain people considered important enough to remember, whereas others are so unimportant that they are erased? And is there a larger question of power, authority and control underlying why and how the lives of women are destroyed?

Over several months, I tracked down several of the Agfa cameras manufactured by these women in forced-labor at the factory. Now nearly worthless to photographers who place value only upon perfect lenses, perfect bodies, and perfect images, they are useless, worthless, unimportant cameras that can be found as decor items, in garbage piles, and in rummage sales and flea markets. Unimportant cameras made by unimportant women. The Second World War was the first war to be exhaustively filmed, photographed, and documented. The very cameras these women were manufacturing testify to this fact: simple 120 and 35mm cameras, with only one or two settings, could be used by anyone, even amateurs, to create a compelling visual image. Thirty-six photographs could be taken in the midst of battle, without the camera being re-loaded. The tools were lightweight, sturdy, portable, and small. Film was easily transported, exposed, developed, and distributed. Photographs could appear almost instantly around the globe, reproduced millions of times in magazines and newspapers and movie theaters.

Using the Agfa cameras and salvaged Nazi military typewriters, I began to create an extensive series of photographs, 35mm films, poems, video projections, stories and texts in German and English, field recordings, oral histories – a prism of perspectives that I hoped would form, over time, a meditation on the individual and collective experience of gender-based war crimes, and their obfuscation.

In this series, I do not offer the bodies of women to be looked at or examined. Instead, I offer the absence of our bodies, the erasure of our stories, the image-less suppression of our traumas.

I intentionally work with a vocabulary of abstraction and fragmentation that echoes the cognitive process of traumatic memory. Yet I also work with the irritating beauty and an unwieldy romanticization, an emotional engagement that operates in contrast to the traditionally detached compositional aesthetics of observer-based documentary photography. I work against the conventional objectifying portraiture of nude women whose available bodies are offered up to the gaze. Against the images of graphic violence and spectacles of sadism that have become endemic to our visual culture, and make us both immune and afraid. Instead of creating atrocity photographs that one must force oneself to contemplate, or pornographic photographs that lure the eye, or voyeuristic documents of women’s degradation, humiliation, and pain, I wanted to create images that invite participants to access a different, more internal place of reflection and meditation. If possible, a place of conscience, and identification.

I wanted the shock of color in a place of greyness. Against the cult of the perfect camera, the ideal optics, the exquisite lens, the high definition pixel, the sharper-than-life focus, I bring the presence of imperfection, refraction, damage. The blur, the bleed, the grain. I offer damage and imperfection. These cameras themselves were built by women who were starving to death, who were being raped, who were forced to work through bombings, hypothermia. They were being forced to create the cameras that would document their own destruction. These photographs could not be made with thousand dollar Hasselblads and Leicas.

The damaged optics of these reclaimed cameras are apparent in the aberrations within the resulting images – light leaks, dirt and soil from Dachau, rust, cracks, dents and scratches all become part of the perspectives… To achieve the purple and yellow tones I placed the Dachau violets and dandelions between the lens and the film, so that all light filtered through these colored flowers growing at the site of the women of the Sonderbau. Cameras are often called phallic, yet they also contain a cervix in the aperture, which opens and closes to determine the light that enters. These were my thoughts and intentions surrounding all the work – to connect the visual perspective and vocabulary of photography to the female, and to the prisoners of the Sonderbauten – in meaningful, physical, tangible ways recognize their experience, rather than the detached, objectifying black and white gaze of authority that we have come to associate with the 1940s Holocaust photography made with the same cameras.

In all other aspects of the war and the Holocaust, there are thousands of archival images to review. Yet surrounding gender violence, there are none. Susan Sontag again writes, “Photographs of atrocity illustrate as well as corroborate. And of course, atrocities that are not secured in our minds by well-known photographic images or of which we simply had very few images […] seem more remote. These are memories that few have cared to claim.”[v]

I RETURNED TO THE UNITED STATES TO PREPARE FOR THE FIRST EXHIBITION OF THE WORK at the Yeshiva University Museum in New York City. My father, visiting from Tennessee, wanted to attend the rehearsals for the performances of SONDERBAUTEN. We took the Manhattan Bridge over to the studio in Brooklyn. As the train went over the bridge, my father ran to the window with his camera and began photographing – New Yorkers, accustomed to the vista, were surprised. They wondered what special event he might be seeing out the window. Perhaps there was a new catastrophe. Everyone rushed over to look. He had a camera. They decided that because he had a camera, he must have been photographing something important. Is something important happening here?

On the days that I photographed the absence of the rape brothel at Dachau, I discovered that visitors would come over to see what was important. I was lying on my back, photographing the sky. I was crouched down, photographing the dandelions and violets growing against the wall. I was photographing the rust particles on the barbed wire. I was photographing patches of bare grass, and lost stones. They were confused. Where was the important thing? What were they missing? They would look at me, and then look at their maps. Unable to correlate the importance of the camera to the insignificance of the empty grass, they were perplexed. She is photographing ghosts, said one child to his parents, and their faces wavered, and they hurried him along the signs pointing to the crematorium.

Like every ritual, this work is never completed. A ritual is created through its repetition, through its reproduction, through its perpetuation. And thus, the work of Sonderbauten remains uncompleted. Every country has its tragic past, its victims and survivors, its public and hidden traumas – Germany, Jews, and the Holocaust are a map of memory and resistance that may possibly prevent future atrocity. Yet even this task remains incomplete, and vulnerable to ossification and cultural hegemony.

The pathological erasure of crimes against women extend across all nations and all eras. We are part of the cloth, and yet our thread has been pulled out and hidden away. The thread must be rewoven into each cloth. And in the process, we must learn to speak of it. Rape is about the assertion of power. And that assertion, that power exists long after the rape, long after it has been hidden away. It is a power repeated, exercised, and maintained.

Hannah Arendt writes, “Power corresponds to the human ability not just to act, but to act in concert. Power is never the property of an individual; it belongs to a group…Authority is unquestioning recognition by those who are asked to obey; neither coercion nor persuasion is needed.”[vi] Many of our most enduring rituals are powerful because authoritative humans are acting in unison. This power and authority is used in the ritual of remembering, but also in the less easily observed ritual of forced forgetting. For the powerful authorities, it is a privilege to determine what can and cannot be discussed or remembered. For the survivors and victims, it is one more additional crime committed with a velvet glove. It is committed through the power of institutions and communities to say, this is not important. Or, we do not speak of this. Or even, you shall not speak of this.

Sonderbauten is a ritual: a creation of time and space for something to be honored, and remembered, and discussed. A ritual of claiming power. A ritual of resistance. It is a ritual that says, this is special. These lives are important. This is important. Pay attention. Stop what you are doing and make time and space for this.And this is the time and the place to speak. Something important is happening here.

 

28 December 2012
New York City

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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[vi] Arendt, Hannah. On Violence. New York: Harcourt, 1970. 44.