Writer Tom Hastings and translator Rey Conquer complete the line up for Holocaust Centre North’s Memorial Gestures artistic residencies for 2024. Along with Corridor8 writer Alice Bradshaw and the Centre’s Head of Creative Development Andrew Key, they met to talk about having joined this year’s cohort.
Alice Bradshaw: Andrew, would you like to introduce the residency programme?
Andrew Key: Memorial Gestures is now in its second year and is in some ways an answer for the Centre to the question of how we sustain Holocaust commemoration and memory at a time when first generation survivors of the Holocaust are no longer around to tell their stories. Holocaust commemoration has relied on survivors telling their stories to audiences and there’s a shift now to thinking about second or third generation, but there’s also an absence we’re facing.
Holocaust Centre North has this wonderful living, growing archive of collections from families relocating to the North of England and surviving the Holocaust. We felt that this was an untapped resource, yet archives are not always accessible or easy to understand, especially if you’re not a scholar or specialist. The thinking behind Memorial Gestures was to invite visual artists to come and spend time with the archive and to produce new work based on what they found. We wanted to crack open the monolith of Holocaust studies and think about how people could bring their own experiences to the work.
We’ve welcomed seven visual artists so far. When I joined the centre I felt that there was a gap between visual artists creating work in a very compelling, sensitive and careful way and the fact that the archives contain so many languages and that Holocaust history is a world phenomenon. There was already an idea of a writer in residence that many museums do, but I felt like there was also an opportunity to do something interesting and different: to have a translator come in and explore things through a different lens, who might take a more experimental approach to the materials that wasn’t just a straight forward retelling. Also, survivors had to translate themselves into new contexts, so it was really important for us to find a translator that understood translation as an everyday, cultural practice not a rarefied literary practice. I also wanted to keep the open call as non-prescriptive as possible.
AB: What attracted you to Rey and Tom’s proposals? What stood out for you?
AK: Rey’s proposal really understood that this wasn’t a straightforward translation project; it was a more expansive reflection on what translation is and what it can do and how translation functions. It was a very complex, deep and careful application and sensitively attuned to the ways we were thinking at the Centre, so it was very exciting to read it.
With Tom’s application, with his focus on gesture, we felt it was an opportunity to really understand what gesture is and to find the groundwork for how gesture is transmitted. We’re really interested in not just the things that exist within the archives but things that we can’t have because they were stolen, destroyed or lost. Tom’s approach to gesture is as something that is handed down and transmitted through generations and also as something that is ephemeral. His work is interested in interrogating what that means and what gesture actually is. How gesture can take on social and political valence that might not be obvious at first glance just felt completely in tune with the whole premise of the residency.
It felt that they’d mesh really well together and that they’d work really well with the other artists in residence to build a cohort or network of people thinking.
AB: That’s a lovely introduction, thank you. How have you each approached the residency so far Rey and Tom?
Rey Conquer: In relation to what Andrew was just saying about translation and openness, I went into the archive with a particular set of concerns but I wanted to be open to what I might find. One of the things that I was surprised by in the two collections I looked at was that I was expecting to find that the home or first language – or rather languages, because these were often people already speaking several languages before they were in the UK – would have a personal resonance, and that English would be a problem. What I actually found was something like the opposite, in that all of the personal correspondence was in English, in part for bureaucratic reasons because the letters were being censored, and it was the official documents that were in German, Czech, Slovak.
I found that very interesting in thinking about what my task was as a translator: if I were to translate these documents it would just be another bureaucratic process in some sense. I really got a sense that the Holocaust was multilingual not just because the victims spoke lots of different languages but also on the side of the perpetrators: there was this cross-linguistic coordinated bureaucratic programme and that came out quite strongly and challenged me in how I feel about these other languages. I did go in with an idea of translation as a humane practice, where you’re allowing people access to these personal documents, but in fact the act of translation is not always an innocent one.
So I’m open to surprises and things that make me question what it is I actually do in the rest of my life.
Tom Hastings: It’s fascinating to hear, Rey, about the work you’ve done so far in the archives, and I echo your point about how you don’t know what the project will become until you’ve spent time with the materials. I’ve not yet spent any time in the archives, but I have been meeting with Rey and Andrew for bi-weekly reading groups, reading through literature including Victor Klemperer’s Language of The Third Reich, and I’ve been steeping myself in Holocaust memoir and literature.
What I’ve noticed is many instances of gesture, of detail and body movement. These points in the writing feel significant or central, especially for those writers casting their minds back over decades to their childhood spent during the Holocaust or in occupied Europe. You sense that these fleeting moments seem like anchorages. You can imagine that these are the things that are remembered and everything else is reconstructed around these moments.
A book I picked up from Holocaust Centre North was Fractured Memories, a memoir by Hana Greenfield who was a Yugoslavian Jew transported to Theresienstadt Ghetto before being deported to Bergen-Belsen Camp. At the Ghetto she recalled stealing some potatoes to deliver to her grandfather who was unwell and very grateful. He took out a penknife to skin these potatoes. She returned the next day and the other men living in the room with him told her that he was no more, and it transpired he had used the same penknife to kill himself. What I’ve noticed is the immediacy and recognition that these kinds of gestures elicit and also the doubling of gestures I’ve come across.
Of course, Jewishness across the Holocaust was intensely scrutinised and racialised by the Nazis and their race ideology, but it was also safeguarded by Jews through rituals such as the Shabbat. An example of a gesture is in a memoir by Marcel Liebman’s Born Jewish: A Childhood in Occupied Europe. He recalls walking through countryside in rural Belgium with his brothers and they hear a Nazi approaching on a motorcycle so they all instinctively cover their noses with their hands, clearly to obscure this feature of Jewishness. This gesture feels like a response to the process of racialisation and anti-Semitism, but also evokes a sense of fraternal intimacy. One of the brothers was deported and killed. There was collective intimacy in this fleeting moment.
I’m very interested in the recollection of gestures and how they enter a narrative. Something Andrew said earlier about the way the Holocaust can sometimes be mythologised. When you start entering into the materials you encounter complexities, difficulties and complicities, and gestures might be a way of navigating the collisions that ricochet through this period.
I’m interested in the archive in relation to the past as well as the living. Gesture suggests a different relation to the archive that’s not just a repository but replete with moments of recognition. I’m very interested in the formation of this archive as well, with the Holocaust Survivor Friendship Association, the relationships as part of the pre-history of this archive and the testimonies which seem to be ongoing. There seems to be lots of exciting opportunities, so I’m excited to dig in!
AB: In terms of writing and translating as transformative acts, could you talk about how you view the transformation of artefact and archive into your own work, writing and translation as practice and the power of transformation?
TH: Firstly, it’s a matter of ethics when you’re dealing with the stories of families. It’s a living archive, so one thing to consider is the care with which these materials are responded to. Something Hari Jonkers, the archivist, has spoken about is how part of this work is negotiating how to use these materials and what can be used as well. That negotiation seems to be a part – and will be a part – of the writing process.
In terms of form, I think it will emerge in response to the collections and what I find. What I’m interested in is working against a narrative coherence. I’m very interested in certain narrative forms. For example, there’s a film by Yvonne Rainer called Journeys from Berlin/1971 (1980), where she has different tracks of material that are non-synchronous and discontinuous yet still correspond to each other in some way to deal with the history around terrorism in Berlin.
Also Charlotte Salomon’s book Life? Or Theatre?. Charlotte Salomon, who was murdered in Auschwitz, produced a big opus of gouache watercolours and writing about her family. So I think part of this journey will be about responding to different, quite experimental, formal approaches to the archives, in particular in relation to the Holocaust.
RC: Translation is always transformation, so that’s the starting point – but that obviously doesn’t mean, as Tom was saying, that you have free rein. There are careful, ethical decisions to be made. Again, I think I’d like to work against coherence, and I think translation can do that.
I echo Andrew’s point about the archives, that the material is there but not everybody will feel confident going and looking at it. You have to offer a ‘user’s manual’ so that people know what to do with it. One way could be to publish the material in facsimile, to reproduce a sense of what these documents look and feel like. But I felt I needed to push against that as well.
It’s easy to be tempted to think about authenticity as the be-all and end-all. The historian Mary Fulbrook has talked about the way survivors are presented as authentic living proof, a bit like how peasants might have tried to touch the hem of the King’s garment in the Middle Ages. But there are other ways of showing that the Holocaust happened. Living survivors are not our only bulwark against Holocaust denial.
I’m really drawn to the authenticity of these documents and I want people to see them as they are, as objects with an undeniable thingness, but at the same time I’m really interested in the absences. As Hari has said, there’s loads of things that we don’t have. Their absence doesn’t mean there’s no truth there, but we have to fill in the gaps another way.
My interest is not really in the transformation of the material but in the people looking at the material, the transformation of the viewer. What I’m thinking about is how I present this material – which will necessarily be a kind of transformation, but not in terms of a distortion – in a way that will allow for a transformation in the viewer: in what they think the Holocaust is and in how they live their life in the North of England, or England, knowing that this is a history that belongs to them and not just a foreign history.
AB: Have either of you, Tom and Rey, met any of the other artists in residence yet? Have they affected your individual journeys?
RC: Ariane Schick’s work has really spoken to me. She talks about coming across a pressed four-leaf clover and about these objects you find, these moments that create or even force a connection to a particular story or aspect of the archive. Her work is really hands-on with an intensive engagement with the archive and its complexities and richness. I have watched that and thought it looked like hard work, but I felt closer to her way of working than perhaps people who are able to look at the archive and then go away and make something. I was reassured by someone else who wanted to stick quite closely to the archive and spend a lot of time with it.
Again, this a bit like what you’re saying Tom: perhaps the most faithful – and also formally innovative – way of dealing with this material is by not transforming it. I don’t know where that will take me, and Ariane has a connection to this material through her family history, which is a very different angle to the one I’m coming from, but it was good to watch her work. And it’s really good to come together and talk about what this material means to each person’s practice. It’s important – for the work but also for the project as a whole – to understand that this is always going to be a collaborative project, even if people are going away and making their own work.
TH: Similar to Rey, I attended a talk by Karen Russo and that was really interesting, looking at the esoterica of national socialism today. I also met Ariane at the induction event and found the story of her research similarly fascinating: looking through letters of her grandparents who sent each other these four leaf clovers, as Rey said. My mother’s side is Jewish and my grandmother is from Berlin. There are boxes full of stuff which I haven’t looked through properly but I think I will at some point during the residency.
The clover is a really fascinating way to forge a connection between Ariane’s own family history and collective history and that’s something I’ve been thinking about. Whilst I’m interested in focusing on my own family history, I am cautious about centring a personal narrative, especially in the face of collective tragedy. One thing Ariane mentioned was working with one family’s file – the Culman family. She’s reproducing the material as a whole and that sounds really interesting. What does that mean to reproduce without necessarily transforming? The viewer is then essentially working through the same material.
AB: Do you think it links back to the earlier point about authenticity?
TH: Yeah, and I think it raises more questions about how you respond to a family archive. Reproduction is one strategy among others, and I think it does respond to that point.
AB: I am really interested in how viewing the archives through a contemporary lens might have impacted your engagement with the archives and work so far.
RC: I think part of the problem is you can’t not view it through a contemporary lens. When I’m in the archive I’m really present with these moments in the past. And then to come out of it and chat with people about what they’re doing on their lunch break or about politics is quite weird. The news keeps happening even if I don’t want to look at my phone when I’m in the archive because I want to be present with the material.
It’s not a case of viewing things through a contemporary lens but about knowing that whatever you do is going to come out into the present. And we can’t control what present the work will come out into. Whatever work I’m doing now will be made public after the general election, for example, so in some sense I don’t even know what a contemporary lens will look like by the end of the residency.
Some of the questions in the elections around immigration seem very relevant to the kind of work we’re doing in the archive, but to direct the work towards those questions wouldn’t be necessary because it’s going to come out and speak to those questions anyway. The contemporary relevance is inevitable, it’s about how one does justice to this material. It’s about allowing it in its fullness to change the present.
TH: The question about the contemporary lens, you cannot help but think about what’s happening in Gaza and the public debate in Britain at the moment responding to what is happening. It’s something I’ve navigated in my own life in terms of family, as I think many Jews have. You cannot ignore what is happening when doing this work, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it enters the work. That’s something that remains to be seen as I don’t know at this point.
We had that event at the Oscars where Jonathan Glazer, the Director of the film Zone of Interest, spoke about the way the Holocaust was weaponised by the occupation and Israel. That was an important statement which caused a huge struggle within the Jewish community. In relation to the archive and the work we’re doing in the residency, we are really thinking about the questions of the politics of memory. Negotiating stories with care, as Andrew said.
Perhaps what I’m hoping for by working carefully through the archives is maybe finding the ongoing nature of human struggle. Maybe that’s universalist, but perhaps there’s resources in the memory work around the Holocaust which means getting under the way things are mythologised and the way the Holocaust gets deployed as a signifier in political discourse that may allow us to contend with the present.
AK: It really feels like – the phrase that gets rolled out all the time – it’s more important than ever. I feel like there’s a sharpness to Holocaust memory at the moment and it’s a difficult moment to do this work, which makes it feels more pressing.
The purpose of Memorial Gestures is in many ways to create a space for reflection and question, away from the pressures of the news cycle and responding to the events that happen day by day and hour by hour. There isn’t pressure to respond immediately, but to think about these very knotty, complicated questions of how we remember atrocity and how the memory of atrocity is used and to what ends.
It’s important for us as an institution to create a space for nuance, careful consideration and real thought as opposed to reaction or position taking. What does this actually mean and what are we actually doing to remember?
So it’s very encouraging to hear how, in this very early phase in the residencies, both Rey and Tom have such careful, sophisticated and considerate approaches to these questions – which I expected when I recruited them, but it’s just wonderful to hear how articulate they can be about it!
Alice Bradshaw is an artist, curator and writer interested in discarded, everyday materials and words.
Rey Conquer is a writer, essayist and translator. They teach translation from German into English at university level as well as teaching German literature and film at Queen Mary University of London.
Tom Hastings is a writer based in Glasgow and is also a lecturer in contemporary dance at London Dance School. He has been investigating gesture in recent years and is working on a book project on gesture and decolonisation.
Andrew Key is Head of Creative Development at Holocaust Centre North. His role covers fundraising, leadership and strategic thinking around creative programming and the artistic residencies Memorial Gestures. Andrew is also a writer.
Memorial Gestures at Holocaust Centre North supports both writer and translator in residence for six months and is funded by the Ernest Hecht Charitable Foundation and Arts Council England.
This discussion was supported by Holocaust Centre North.
Published 19.07.2024 by Benjamin Barra in Interviews
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