{"id":2755,"date":"2019-12-04T06:57:03","date_gmt":"2019-12-04T06:57:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/?p=2755"},"modified":"2019-12-08T06:09:33","modified_gmt":"2019-12-08T06:09:33","slug":"unlost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/newecologies\/unlost\/","title":{"rendered":"Unlost in Lost in J\u00fcdischer Friedhof Wei\u00dfensee"},"content":{"rendered":"

Following a recent reading given at the University of Washington in Seattle by the writer Katja Petrowskaja from her book Maybe Esther<\/em>, an audience member posed a particularly difficult question. Perhaps provoked by the land acknowledgment that I had given during my introduction, which recognized that the reading was taking place on historical and contemporary lands of the Coast Salish peoples, the audience member wondered aloud whether Petrowskaja\u2019s reading of stories about the displacement and genocide of European Jews was itself not also part of the ongoing displacement of Indigenous peoples in this settler colonial state. The question was not so much directed at Kyiv-born and Berlin-based Petrowskaja as it was at all of settlers in the room (including this questioner himself) who in telling and retelling and publicly platforming their traumatic family histories abroad participate in the marginalization and erasure of those past and ongoing histories of settler colonial violence in which we, as settlers, are profoundly implicated. Occurring after an extremely moving reading that imaginatively reconstructed the history of the murder of Petrowskaja\u2019s grandmother by Nazis in Kyiv during the Babi Yar genocide, the audience member\u2019s question, in no way accusatory, was both compelling and unsettling.<\/p>\n

I began to consider this question yet again while recently visiting Robert Sniderman\u2019s exhibition, Lost in J\u00fcdischer Friedhof Wei\u00dfensee<\/em><\/a>, currently on view through December 7 at the Western Gallery on the campus of Western Washington University. One of Europe\u2019s largest intact Jewish cemeteries occupies the gallery walls in the form of photographic images, video, and inscribed names. In the cavernous space between the walls all manner of objects have been assembled in a kind of vortex of Jewish memory, a patch of debris whose provenance stretches from Berlin to Bellingham: a rusted-off, Shofar-shaped exhaust pipe, Joanna Rajkowska\u2019s book Where the Beast is Buried<\/em>, a pair of boots, a modified U-boat cart bearing various reading materials including multilingual survey responses and a battered copy of Walter Benjamin: A Critical Biography<\/em>, a jar of deep crimson liquid that upon closer inspection is identified as beet kvass, a small hoard of hair and toenails, pairs of wooden chairs facing each other in close proximity, a tapestry of compost on which the Hebrew word \u05dc\u05a5\u05d5\u05bc\u05d6 (\u201cLuz\u201d) is visible, a soiled shirt with \u201cGaza\u201d painted on the back in the Latin, Hebraic, and Arabic alphabets. Collectively these objects activate a force field of Holocaust memory. Everything is permeated by it. But the word Gaza also testifies to memory\u2019s permeability, and this is where the exhibition opens lines of inquiry that might begin to engage with the question of memory\u2019s forms of implication and its ability to mobilize seemingly disparate decolonial movements.<\/p>\n

\"Exhibition<\/a>

Exhibition photo by Payton Dickerson.<\/p><\/div>\n

\"A<\/a>

A book given to Sniderman by the Berlin-based Kurdish poet, Abdulkadir Musa, who fled Rojava in the 90s. Photo by Payton Dickerson.<\/p><\/div>\n

The acts of remembrance documented and performed in Lost in J\u00fcdischer Friedhof Wei\u00dfensee<\/em> are anything but monolithic. The disorientation of Sniderman in the cemetery\u2014and the disorientation of the viewer in this fragmented surrogate of that space\u2014provokes a disorientation of memory and its dislocation into something multidirectional, transcultural, and cross-pollinating. An interpretive panel informs the viewer that many of the documents and objects in the exhibit are derived from a series of three long walks (\u201cCounter-Ruins I-III\u201d) undertaken by Sniderman between the Jewish cemetery in Wei\u00dfensee, an Arabic-Palestinian commercial district, the US Embassy, the Israeli Embassy, and ruins of Nazi deportation sites. The trajectories of the walks, and the trajectories of the exhibition, owe their genesis to the intersection of multiple events, as one (all upper case, punctuation-less) wall text in the exhibit gives notice:<\/p>\n

On May 14th I was returning to Berlin from Warsaw Poland the city of my great-grandmother\u2019s birth when more than sixty nonviolent demonstrators were massacred marching against their exile and mass incarceration in Gaza On the train I started to envision a public intervention I would eventually call \u201cCounter-Ruin\u201d sourced from an image I had co-manifested with\/in the cemetery tens of people picking up stones around the ruins of Anhalter Bahnhof a former Nazi deportation site then carrying them in each hand en mass to place on the graves of the thousand of suicides buried in J\u00fcdischer Friedhof Wei\u00dfensee during the 1942 deportations The concurrent Great March of Return and retributed massacres purged and relocated the image In so far as I could be read or read myself as Jewish in Berlin Gaza was written on my back I wished to make this anxiety public to ritualize and provoke its intensity within the larger project\u2019s embrace and thereby insert my body physically and symbolically into the racist transnational discourse that vilifies my position or justifies it and pits traumatized communities against each other in the name of it I meant to communicate geographically and socially in real time the terror of lineal entanglement in the fact of my body moving in relation to other bodies in Berlin I meant to be ambivalent I moved without stopping my reference\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The course of the walks links up these two histories of dispossession. Sniderman\u2019s experience of disorientation in the Jewish Cemetery in Wei\u00dfensee develops, through the exhibit, into a decentering of Jewish suffering, or rather, to speak with Judith Butler, a centering of ethical relationality that both interrupts and constitutes Jewish identity; out of this interruption facilitated by the exhibit emerges a subject who is both impacted by the Shoah and who is implicated in the ongoing injustice in Gaza.<\/p>\n

\"Snyder-13\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Multidirectional memory, the implicated subject: these are also keywords in the scholarship of Michael Rothberg, whose lines of inquiry run parallel to, and sometimes intersect with, Sniderman\u2019s. In his work Rothberg pieces together, in his words<\/a>, \u201ca countertradition in which remembrance of the Holocaust intersects with the legacies of colonialism and slavery and ongoing processes of decolonization\u201d: W.E.B. Du Bois reflecting on relations between Black and Jewish histories following his visit to the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto in 1949; Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire writing on the atrocities of the European \u201coccupation\u201d of Africa and Asia anticipating and preparing the atrocities of the Nazi occupation of Europe; Marguerite Duras juxtaposing, in the wake of the Paris massacre of pro-FLN Algerians in 1961, immiserated Algerians in France with Jewish inmates in Nazi ghettos. (This multidirectional line of inquiry is also featured in Marissa Brostoff\u2019s recent essay<\/a> in Jewish Currents<\/em> that links together Benjamin\u2019s messianic mediations, Holocaust memory, Lakota prophecy, and the current climate emergency.)<\/p>\n

Sniderman\u2019s “Counter-Ruin” participates in this countertradition at a deeper level than a passing reference to Gaza. For one, the genre of the performance walk has long been mobilized by artists to reflect on their affinities and affiliations with migrant communities. Though encompassing much more than a single walk, Joanna Rajkowska\u2019s Born in Berlin<\/a><\/em> and the burial of her daughter\u2019s placenta in front of the Reichstag might be considered part of this tradition, as is the work of Yael Bartana, both of whom Sniderman has cited as inspiration. I\u2019m also thinking here of Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum\u2019s iconic performance walk, \u201cRoadworks<\/a>,\u201d which she undertook in 1985 in the then-predominantly Afro-Caribbean London neighborhood of Brixton, walking barefoot through the market and arcades with a pair of Doc Martens, tied to her ankles by their laces, trailing behind her. (If Hatoum\u2019s walk is nowhere explicitly cited in this exhibit, the former nevertheless resonates in the latter, particularly in the display of Sniderman\u2019s walking boots.)<\/p>\n

\"Photo<\/a>

Photo by Payton Dickerson.<\/p><\/div>\n

Second, while Sniderman undertakes “Counter-Ruin” as a solitary walk\u2014a planned collective walk was cancelled\u2014he is rarely, if ever, alone. Not only are many of the spaces that he traverses crowded with diverse passerbys who visibly engage with him in the film; moreover, as Sniderman puts it, \u201cthe walking body collaborates with the site\u201d and that site is never unpopulated. In this regard the solitary “Counter-Ruin” might then be regarded as a mode of \u201cwalking-with,\u201d the practice perhaps first elaborated in the Zapatista\u2019s 2005 Sixth Declaration of the Selva Lacandona where they invite others to walk with them as a form of \u201c\u2018reciprocal respect for the autonomy and independence of organizations\u201d involved in the struggle for Indigenous rights and sovereignty (cited in Juanita Sundberg\u2019s \u201cDecolonizing Posthumanist Geographies<\/a>\u201d). And as Stephanie Springgay & Sarah E. Truman of Walkinglab point out in their recent book, Walking Methodologies in a More-than-human World<\/a>, \u201cYou could walk-with alone.\u201d While not directly addressing Indigenous struggles in the Americas, “Counter-Ruin” overtly acknowledges and, in its own oblique way, participates in a common struggle against settler colonialism, even if it does not reflect on its own implication in the ongoing occupations on this continent.<\/p>\n

If Lost in J\u00fcdischer Friedhof Wei\u00dfensee<\/em> performs a politically consequential form of walking-with, it also performs the minor Jewish genre of getting-lost-with. As a Jew, one is never lost alone in Berlin today; a forerunner is always present. For example, Walter Benjamin, whose critical biography Sniderman schlepped around in Berlin and which can be found in the exhibit\u2019s study, begins A Berlin Childhood around 1900<\/em> with the memorable passage: \u201cNot to find one’s way about in a city is of little interest. But to lose one’s way in a city, as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires practice.\u201d This school of getting lost in Berlin is also documented in the exhibition in the heavily-thumbed copy of Rajkowska\u2019s Where the Beast is Buried<\/em>. (Further reading in this genre includes Gideon Lewis-Kraus\u2019s 2012 novel, A Sense of Direction: Pilgrimage for the Restless and the Hopeful<\/em>, as well as Tomer Gardi\u2019s 2016 novel, Broken German<\/em>, whose protagonist Abschalom Raucherzone breaks into, and then proceeds to get lost in, Berlin\u2019s Jewish Museum.)<\/p>\n

But rather than dwelling solely on and in a condition of disorientation, “Lost in J\u00fcdischer Friedhof Wei\u00dfensee” seems equally invested in, to speak with Walter Benamin, redeeming<\/em> what is unlost, what is unverloren<\/em>. Here the reference the citation from Benjamin\u2019s “On the Concept of History” in the exhibit\u2019s explanatory text\u2014a passage about \u201cthe chronicler, who recounts events without distinguishing between the great and the small [and] thereby accounts for the truth, that nothing which has ever happened is to be given as lost to history\u201d\u2014provides the most fitting account for the significance of the objects salvaged in this exhibit. This mode of chronicling might also account for the exhibit\u2019s anachronistic aesthetics, in which histories of oppression and dispossession are never confined to the past but are always irrupting in the present and always making openings for new, if provisional, acts of solidarity and walking-with.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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