Spaces and Moments – solo exhibition at Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix, Whitechapel, London

Abstract

How does the trauma of loss, passed from one generation to another translate to the structure, the architecture and absent buildings within a city?
I listened to recordings in the Oral History British Library Sound Archive of first-hand accounts of Polish Jewish women’s lives, informed by field visits collecting audio visual material in the city of Łódź, supported by an exploration of Łódź State Archives to examine street plans, maps and architectural drawings relating to the Jewish community from the late 19th/early 20th century.
Ernest van Alphen states that part of post memory is not remembering and the guilt of this lack. How to hear the subtlety of the influences of languages no longer spoken or convey the impact of architectural details and graphics which have lost their original function; the only evidence of once vibrant communities, key contributors to the economy and culture. Marianne Hirsch examining the concept of post memory, describes the trauma of loss passed from one generation to the next, I investigate how this translates to the structure, the architecture and absent buildings within a city.

I uniquely demonstrate that a void can be filled visually and aurally by a stranger’s ‘aimless wandering’ reactivating lost rituals and ceremonies. My hand printed images re-present rooms where rituals of parting and death once took place. My images of a cemetery accompanied by birdsong and traffic noise, illustrate how an important layer of the cultural fabric was torn from the landscape, never to be replaced or mended. Plans and drawings of houses and synagogues hang, floor to ceiling. Moving images projected on them show that in their place I found empty space; this layering of the city’s unresolved present upon its past, reminds us of the willful destruction of a vibrant community at the heart of an industrial city.