Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe

In Berlin this past weekend I visited the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe. A few weeks prior we had discussed it in class through the essay Memory and Monument after 9/11 by James E. Young in the book The Future of Memory (Crownshaw and Rowland, 2010).  I want to revisit this text now in light of having experienced the monument in person. 

James E. Young writes of Peter Eisenman's design as:

...a waving field of stelae. Where the 'monumental' had traditionally used its size to humiliate or cow viewers into submission, this memorial in its humanly proportioned forms should put people on an evenfootmg with memory. Visitors and the roles they play as they wade knee-, or chest-, or shoulder-deep into this waving field of stones will not be diminished by the monumental but will be made integral parts of the memorial itself, now invited into a memorial dialogue of equals. Visitors will not be defeated by their memorial obligation here, nor dwarfed by the memory-forms themselves, but rather enjoined by them to come face to face with memory. Able to see over and around these pillars, visitors will have to find their way through this field of stones, even though they are never actually lost in or overcome by the memorial act. In effect, they will make and choose their own individual spaces for memory, even as they do so collectively. The implied sense of motion in the gently undulating field also formalizes a kind of memory that is neither frozen in time, nor static in space. The sense of such instability will help visitors resist an impulse towards closure in the memorial act and heighten one's own role in anchoring memory in oneself.

 My experience of the memorial on a crisp and cold January day echoes Young's words. I was not overcome or humbled by the physical size of the monument. Indeed I do not feel like this monument is designed to burden the visitor with the weight of Holocaust memory in its entirety but instead advocates a steady and personal working-through. As it stretched out before me I had an understanding that I could never gain a full personal experience of the entire monument at once, beyond the superficial. As my friends and I walked into the monument we instinctively chose different paths, reflecting our individual journeys through the memory, while as Young notes, also experiencing it collectively. As the path led through the undulations the city and other people would come and go around me, expressing memory as a dynamic and evolving process that constantly changes in relation to our understanding of the past and experiences in the present.

Below are some of the photos I took, though they do little to express the experience of being in that space of memory. The second to last picture in the series, which shows ice expanding out of a crack in the monument, has stuck in my head. It shows nature's slow erosion of the monument and occurs to me to be an apt (if admittedly cliche) illustration of the process of memory, both individual and cultural, itself. I am left wondering how (and if) our cultural memory of the holocaust will be eroded and changed by temporal distance and what the effects of this could be.

All photographs taken by Ruth Annett.

Practicing Ireland

This weekend I will visit Berlin for the first time and I can't wait! But I am also incredibly nervous as it marks the beginning of a project that I have been thinking about for a few months now, but am only just getting off the ground.

The project is called 'Practicing Ireland' and will be made up of filmed interviews with cultural producers either from Ireland and practicing abroad, non-Irish and practicing in Ireland or Irish practicing in Ireland. All must be actively engaging with Ireland or Irishness, though not necessarily in name, but through critical engagement with contemporary issues.

The first interview will be with the artist Mark Curran who works and lives between Dublin and Berlin. I hope to ask him what it is like practicing between the centre and the periphery, and how he understands his place as an artist in contemporary society.

The point of departure for this project is the desire to create a snapshot of the current moment through the voices of the people to whom we look to tell us about ourselves in this moment of crisis, the people responsible for re-mythologising post-crisis Ireland. I want to ask them what it is like to bear the expectations of a society that at the same time as it is cutting support for the arts. I want to know how they experience Ireland and Irishness in this post-national, transcultural, globalised world. I want to create a conversation that shows Ireland, not as a unique place of artistic genius, but a site of complex, global cultural entanglements, potential and hope.

Belfast's Flags Protests

I am in the midst of essay writing and therefore am going to keep it short this week. The essay I am writing discusses the flag protests that continue to rumble on in Belfast and whether they can be understood as cultural performance.

While researching the protests, mostly via on line articles I am struck by the images, in a way that I have not been before. Beyond a masking of identity the protesters have, through wearing the flags, turned themselves into living symbols, erasing their own individual identities. 

via BreakingNews.ie

Image via Belfast Telegraph

Protest outside the Alliance Party office in East Belfast belonging to Naomi Long, following the decision by Belfast City Council to stop flying the union flag every day. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Tuesday December 4, 2012. See PA story ULSTER Flag. Photo credit should read: Paul Faith/PA Wire via Belfast Telegraph

Loyalists demonstrators clash with police during rioting in Belfast during a protest about flag flying restrictions via Daily Mail 

Cathal McNaughton/Reuters via The Christian Science Monitor

The other thing which has really caught my eye is the images of life-as-usual against the images of violence. They really capture how 'normalised' disturbances form the backdrop to everyday lives. Simon Hoggart wrote in the Guardian:

I was fascinated to see that in Belfast some parents are taking their children, a few still in prams, to watch the riots over flying the union flag. It's as if the events are part of the great tapestry of their history. In the same way, people took their infants, now in their 60s, to see the last coronation, so they could in turn tell their grandchildren that they were there.

 It all underlines for me that protest is as much an expression of cultural identity in Northern Ireland as anything else and should be understood as such. While I would never expect politicians to condone such violence, I worry that very few of them have stopped to really ask why it is happening.

Union flag protests have been staged since December. Photograph: EPA via The Guardian

Violence sparks: A family walks past a burning hijacked car during rioting in east Belfast via The Daily Mail 

via the Baltic News Network

Willie Doherty

Willie Doherty, The Only Good One is a Dead One, 1993 (installation view)  Courtesy of Matt's Gallery

Willie Doherty, The Only Good One is a Dead One, 1993 (installation view) As above.

We have been talking about the distinction between collective and collected memory in class recently and the latter has been making me think about Willie Doherty, whose work I have been revisiting since his talk at the RCA last week.

James E. Young wrote:

...in an increasingly democratic age, in which the stories of nations are being told in the multiple voices of its everyday historians - i.e., its individual citizens - monolithic meaning and national narratives are as difficult to pin down as they may be nostalgically longed for. The result has been a shift away from the notion of national 'collective memory'. Here we recognize that we never really shared each others actual memory of past or recent events, but that in sharing common spaces in which we collect our disparate and competing memories, we find common (perhaps even a national) understanding of widely disparate experiences and our very reasons for recalling them. (From Memory and Monuments after 9/11, pp80-81 in Crownshaw, Kilby and Rowland (2010) The Future of Memory Oxford: Berghahn Books pp77-92)

Young advocates for the creation of spaces that understand memory as inherently disparate, instead of Halbwachs model which despite its allowance for individuals to belong to multiple groups insists on a unified memory within that group. Essentially collected memory makes allowances for conflicting memories thereby acknowledging that it is an inherent part of memory.

This brings me back to Doherty and his work The Only Good One is a Dead One, described on the Matt's Gallery website thus:

The Only Good One is a Dead One is a double screen video projection installation. On one screen the artist uses a handheld video camera to record a night time car journey, while the second screen shows the view from inside a car which is stationary on the street. The accompanying soundtrack is constructed from the interior monologue of a man who is vacillating back and forth between the fear of being the victim and the fantasy of being an assassin... The Only Good One is a Dead One forces the viewer to speculate about what might happen and to choose between innocence and guilt, Catholic or Protestant. It undermines any certainties about the truth and exists in parallel with mainstream mediated images of Ireland.This co-existence creates a gap where the unspeakable and unspeaking face of violence is given a voice, where the victim and killer confront each other and the identities of murderer and volunteer are questioned.To do otherwise is to accept the status of ‘legitimate target’.

The viewer of this work is brought into a space of directed conflict between cultural memory in Northern Ireland, with the Northern Irish viewer especially forced to recognise the violent and ugly truth of their own assumptions. In so doing the piece creates a space of collected memory, foregrounding the conflict and demanding acknowledgement of it.