My embodied study of the largest, in-tact and active Jewish cemetery in Europe, the project, Lost in Jüdische Friedhof Weißensee, led me to perform durational solidarity walks with Palestinian rights during the massacre of non-violent protestors in Gaza. I ventured between the cemetery, Europe's largest Palestinian neighborhood, and the ruins of train stations from which the Jews of Berlin were deported en mass. Wearing a rusted pipe and a shirt with “Gaza” written across the back in Latin, Hebrew and Arabic letters, I carried piles of stones to and from these locations, placing them where each walk ended. Placing a stone, I interpreted from rabbinic sources, signifies one's effort to assure the dead of their earned rest apart from the world's tumult. Such an act then must coincide with participation in the collective repair of our times. This work foregrounded my dissertation-in-process at Simon Fraser University's School for the Contemporary Arts (Vancouver, CA), under the Art Historian, Dr. Claudette Lauzon, "Walking in Ethnocidal Places; Durational Aesthetics and Jewish Ruin" dually performs and theorizes walking as a methodology of contemporary art and embodied study in sites haunted by racial subjugation. I take the walking body here to be the organizing and accumulative action of a public practice I call "durational contemplation," the extended physical-intellectual devotion to a site of excessive meaning. Concentrated on the intense intersections of social contact, historical internality, and spatial proximity, the walking body collaborates with a site over time, and might produce a coterminous archive of writing, works on paper, ready-mades, and installation that continue to perform the walking body's investment. However, it is the "spontaneous particulars" (Howe 2014) of duration that serve as such a work's performative medium, while its boundaries remain relational and practical, rather than plastic or time-based (Boon and Levine 2018). In the dissertation, I am enacting three site-specific performance-installations where my Ashkenazic identity construction and ancestral traces intersect with a) a former Jim Crow military college in the US American South, b) a devastated forest in Łomża, Poland, and c) a small cemetery of Jewish settlers in the shadow of the US-Mexico separation wall. The lineal terrors of racial subjugation arrange the tensions by which each site comes to be encountered, in that a site, inseparable from its being haunted, "expands the realm of the visible to include the visibility of the invisible" (Hochberg 2015). These three works co-manifest invisible visibilities, radicalized aesthetically by the mechanics of what Performance Studies theorist, Fred Moten, after the historian Saidiya Hartman, refers to as "the diffusion of terror" (2017).
Citations
Boon, Marcus and Gabriel Levine, ed.. Practice. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2018.
Hochberg, Gil Z.. Visual Occupations: Violence and Visibility in a Conflict Zone. Durham: Duke UP, 2015.
Howe, Susan. Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives. New York: New Directions Publishing, 2014.
Moten, Fred. Black and Blur (consent not to be a single being). Durham: Duke UP, 2017.
