FALL
2016
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IML501:Final Project
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INTRODUCTION:
The ‘spatial turn’ of the late 20th century has encouraged scholars in the humanities and social sciences to regard space as a dense entity that is actively produced.[1] Spatial dimensions of colonialism, nationalism, and imperialism have invited studies of space as a set of social and power practices. More recently, the rise of digital media and globalization has shifted scholars’ attention towards virtual and technologized spaces[2]. Considerations of the ways in which space informs culture (and its texts), politics, and our reading of history can be summarized in one broad question: how does space function heuristically and what do we learn about ourselves based on our relationship to different spaces and places? Here, I outline different ways in which I have been conceptualizing spaces of memory.
[1] Some of the examples include: Michel Foucault, “Of Other Places,” Diacritics 16.1 (1986); Andres Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2003); Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Wiley, 1992); Doreen Massey, “A Global Sense of Place,” Marxism Today (June 1991); Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso Press, 1989).
[2] Some of the examples include: Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (University of Michigan Press, 1994); Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2009); Alexander Galloway, The Interface Effect (John Wiley & Sons, 2013); Joanne Garde-Hansen, Media and Memory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011).
Dissertation Inspiration
I began to think about spaces of memory in January 2010 when I went to Auschwitz-Birkenau to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the camp and the International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
In that particular place, on that particular day, different conceptual axes of memory and space collided.
I.
First, there was an axis of collective and individual memory. I self-identified as a Polish great-granddaughter of a man murdered in Auschwitz and as an employee of an organization (The Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation) whose sole purpose is to keep the collective memory of the Holocaust alive. While in Auschwitz, I spoke to some of the survivors and became aware of the direct link between their autobiographical memories, the concrete place where they were created, and the cultural memory of that place I have had long before I arrived at the “Arbeit Macht Frei” gate.
II.
Second, I conceptualized of a centrifugal axis of literal and commemorative spaces between which I have been moving. I drew a line between Warsaw (the center; the capital; the place where national memory is written; the source of cinematic and cultural subsidies; and the place of undeniable historical importance and symbolic value to the Polish WWII history) and the peripheral, uncivilized, anti-Semitic, mysterious, silent, permissive, “contaminated landscapes” (Kontaminierte Landschaften; I am using the expression coined by Martin Pollack.) where the extermination and concentration camps were built. (And that is exactly where I position my remix video ‘33km’: within the context of this consideration of the landscape and memory.) One factor that appears to have a tremendous influence on Polish thinking (or lack thereof) about the Holocaust is the material connection between the Polish landscapes and the traumatic past. Within this axis of proximity and distance, I also began to theorize the notion of pre-war Polish and Jewish neighbors. How is contemporary Poland negotiating this geography and history of indifference, apathy, and – often – anger directed at their Jewish neighbors?
iii.
Third, I began to think about the relationship between different sites of institutionalized memory and their relationship to a broader, more abstract space of Holocaust remembrance. Is it important to visit the actual place where hundreds of thousands of were gassed and burnt in crematoria or pyres or is it enough to visit its proxy in Washington D.C. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum) or Berlin (Jewish Museum) or Jerusalem (Yad-Vashem) or Warsaw (POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews)? How is preservation of the ruins of the former concentration camp different from the perpetuation of Holocaust memory via technological means (Something that institutions like the USC Shoah Foundation or the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale focus on)?
IV.
Finally, I began to think about how mediation of Holocaust memory has unfolded across various types of media (cinema, TV, photography, holograms, digital technologies, etc.,) and different categories of representation (documentary, fictionalized historical narratives, testimonies, social media posts etc.) and how these different ways of curating and remembering shape the space of Holocaust discourse.
What's next...
WHILE MOST OF THESE AXES SEEM RIGIDLY BINARY IN THEIR APPROACH...
...to the problem of space and place, I use them as mere starting points for further excavation of the landscape of memory. Therefore, I defined Auschwitz-Birkenau as a starting place of my investigation and a fixed literal and metaphorical center of all Holocaust memory productions that my research analyzes. It is the anchor point for my study of visual, physical, and digital spaces of memory.