Zimzum Issue 1

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1 One of the primary sources of inspiration for my initial photographic projects was Rainer Kubatzki’s book: Standorte und Topographie in Berlin und im brandenburgischen Umland 1939 bis 1945 (2001). Subsequent to my reading the book, I collected documentations made in locations that were transformed into organic/ normalised parts of the urban landscape in Berlin. Along the process, I was examining other historical events that occurred during WWII. This examination allowed me to broaden the senses of crime scene, and to regard the concept of normalisation from different situations and events as massacres, executions, etc. The photograph seeks to unravel the scene, to untie the structure. IN KREMS, I COLLABORATED WITH DR ROBERT STREIBEL. MOST OF THE FINDINGS WERE BASED ON HIS PAST STUDIES. Transforming shows how memory is formative and is one of the primary practices for preserving normalisation. Memory teaches the subject in accordance with models of thinking and creating, and also with regard to what its visual reflection will look like: Positive, visible, monumental, victimising, free, decadent, etc. The memory connects the past and the future in a “systematic” way. It is a form of commemorating the past and designing the future. In a groundbreaking essay on the nature and power of memory from 1989, Pierre Nora discusses the transience of memories, explaining how Memory is constantly on our lips because it no longer exists. reverberates in Michel Foucault’s influential theories of ironic “countermemory” and “effective” history with its moments of intensity, its lapses, its extended periods of feverish agitation, its fainting spells. Nora supports Foucault’s “counter memory” that becomes a milestone in modern western academies. Considering the brutality that Nora speaks about going through deconstruction, I am trying to evaluate what elements are necessary to produce normality. This debate was and is relevant in every culture, since it is a crucial means to rewrite history. Moreover, it may even work as a tool to substitute written history into another narrative that is more befitting the current political atmosphere. Nevertheless, Foucault’s approach introduces practices of remembering and forgetting in the context of power relations, focusing not only on what is remembered and forgotten, but also how it happens, by whom, and to what effect. THE THESIS DEVELOPED FROM A COMBINATION OF ARTISTIC AND HISTORIOGRAPHICAL RESEARCH CONDUCTED BETWEEN 2013 AND 2017 I plan to continue this research and create an archive of collective portraits. An archive in terms of visible forms of knowledge: a collection of images that intends to illustrate a plethora of things in a systematic or problematic way. The initial project began as photographic research, focused on the aesthetics of contemporary images of places used as forced labour camps during WWII. I have investigated campsites in Poland (as part of a CK ZAMEK residency in Poznan), Greece (ArtAmari residency in Crete) and, recently, with AIR Kunsthalle Krems, Austria. As an artist-in-residence, I was able to research and photograph drawing on local knowledge. This involved collaboration with historians, archivists, and local people and city planners. Usually, projects divide into three phases: a Research b Photography c Introducing the project to the public through exhibitions and artist talks In Crete, the situation was different, and the project was presented in the form of research and information in an academic context, as well as in the central archives and the local population. The overriding feeling was that there is neither sufficient curiosity, nor any concrete knowledge about any of the events that took place during WWII. Most of my knowledge was gained through meeting people in their natural environment and by listening to their own subjective experiences. THE ARCHIVE CONTAINS 1.000 IMAGES FROM FOUR DIFFERENT COUNTRIES Stela, testimony of Gerakari massacre, Crete, Greece. Photo: Hadas Tapouchi, 2016 The research will provide a theoretical frame for the work that I have carried out to this date. It will present a theory that aims to shed light on a normalisation process in which images are deconstructed and reconstructed over many years. The focus of this project has gradually broadened from an interest in a specific historical dimension to a preoccupation with the subject of archiving and storing - how we “write” and accumulate our histories and memories, both as individuals and as a culture. Additionally, one is inevitably confronted with obsessions, particularly in Continental Europe, with a dialectic mechanism of memory and of loss. The archive contains 1000 images from four different countries, while each one exposes many layers of the city or landscape that were mostly hidden or unknown to its inhabitants, and the revelation itself attracted significant public interest. It reveals as well the many competing narratives that emerge after a conflict. However, it also specifically contextualises these new experiences in a colossal historically unique system in which all “others” were victims. Screen shot: Mapping Krems AS PART OF AN ARTIST-IN- RESIDENCE PROGRAMME IN THE WINTER OF 2016, I WAS ABLE TO EXTEND MY WORK TO THE CITY OF POZNAN, POLAND (FORMERLY POSEN). The image was taken in Poznan, Poland during the CK ZAMEK artist residency in Poznan. The exhibition stretched over dozens of public spaces around the city, for example, in bus stations, trams and on billboards. Screen shot from a video documentation: Hadas Tapouchi, Poznan 2016 Phenomenon memory The phenomenon of complicity branched all over Europe, as it took place in several locations and was an enormous exchange network of humans and goods - normalisation happened everywhere. Significantly, this is why a “transforming project” could be used in any post-conflict situation. As I demonstrated in the case studies above, memory is a global concept and the research represents the official narrative clash, as it encourages facing new narratives and new memories. Through understanding the power of narrative visibility, I am creating an aesthetic theory. The challenge of visualising “disciplinary power” in art Throughout this research, I demonstrate the tense intertwining of disciplinary power and everyday life, and how it is perceived as an obvious situation. Power strives to be understood as something unreachable; by means of its very banality, it assumes a double character of being overexposed and invisible/ hidden at the same time; it operates according to its own unfathomable but unquestioned (by entire societies) rules. The research deals with the problem of two major issues: Firstly, the city (and landscape) as the manifestation of normalisation. Secondly, the city’s generally hidden and unspoken codes that regulate the order imposed on, and derived from, the city. Michel Foucault’s publication Discipline and Punish (1975) deals with control and normalisation as a combination of strategies to practice maximum social control with minimum use of force, including the way in which normalisation constructs idealised human behavior. This is analogous to the process of change as discussed by Foucault: The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself The equilibrium between the present and past is disturbed because the discontinuity creates very different narratives. Memory has couple of ways of being treated: personal or collective; and it is activated freely through nostalgia, similarity, and metaphor. Memory for Nora is a paradigm suffused into contemporary culture. The establishment of worship as cultural initiation, memorial buildings, flags, anthems and memoir writings are a single phenomenon. The discussion concerns historic preservation as a phenomenon of a strong sense and cultural identity. Pierre Nora writes: Memory takes root in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images, and objects: history binds itself strictly to temporal continuities, to progressions and to relations between things. The linguist James E. Young has looked at the modern concretisation and aestheticisation of memory and national narratives in relation to Germany in his publication The Texture of Memory. In the work, he touches upon the consequences of these first prototypes that emerged as dozens of “counter memorial” projects became the standard for subsequent Holocaust memorial competitions in Germany. Young discusses the work by German artist Horst Hoheisel, who constructed a huge fountain to commemorate a similar fountain donated to the city of Kassel by a local Jewish entrepreneur, Sigmund Aschrott, in 1908. The Nazis destroyed this fountain, and Hoheisel buried his version of the fountain beneath the ground. And as in the case of the fountain, Pierre Nora warned in his book Between Memory and History: The less memory is experienced from the inside, the more it exists through its exterior scaffolding and outward signs In his work, Hoheisel solved the problem by streaming the water flow towards the ground. Hoheisel had already been known for his negativeform monument in Kassel, a simple but provocative anti-solution memorial proposed in the contest: an antimemory sculpture, which illustrates that to not have a memory, or to not remember, is to shatter the object. Hoheisel’s submission for the Holocaust memorial competition in Berlin was even more radical. He suggested demolishing the Brandenburg Gate, burying and dissolving all the remains over its former site, and finally covering the entire memorial area with granite plates. The memory’s history critique Methodological photography The photographs are typological, warm, inviting, and even discreet. Thus, they stand in contrast to the shocking and ghoulish images known from that period, and which are being used to this day to describe history in a one dimensional narrative, an untouched narrative. Everyday life is underlined through the use of colour photography and the occasional inclusion of pedestrians, who sometimes may even look at the camera. History stands at the centre of the research, not as an abstract goal in itself, but rather as an instrument to understand contemporary reality. The photographic medium I am using in order to visualise historical data is the medium format colour film. It enables me to gain hyperrealistic images. The idea behind it is to empower and emphasise my topic: normalisation. The use of hyperrealistic images is intended to stress the reason for speaking necessarily about the present, then the past. The past is inherent in the image/reality, and there is no need to highlight it more than it already is. Normalisation and memory are types of power that are free from any law. They constitute power in the sense that people do not need any authority to control them. This power is no longer imposed from above through outright coercion, but by disciplining people to serve power themselves. Not only prisons, also urban and landscape aesthetics such as nature, hospitals, schools, and museums are the only physical and visible evidence that demonstrate a link to any architectural form. Public meets Art The objective of photographing and thus documenting is to encourage observers to integrate their own historical knowledge into an everydayorientated perspective and sensitise them to the process of normalisation, where experiences of violence are hidden or ignored and eventually re-absorbed. In my research, I use images as site-specific installations, reflective of the historical occurrence, culture and memory. I want to bring this to light through various modes of representation, neutralised in everyday life. The site-specific works installed in the public sphere - bus stations, billboards, newspapers - do not interrupt, or draw attention to, the relevance of daily life. Much of my knowledge was acquired within residencies, conferences and artist talks that I held, and situations in which I had the opportunity to interview people from different fields, as well as reading and listening to memoirs. How art meets the public: how can the artistic, theoretical materials enter the public, make it visual and, by doing so, make it real, substantial. The public performance is to ask the community to observe the obvious, to re-think and re-ask what part they play in the public sphere, what their role is in the representation of collective memory. Hadas Tapouchi is a visual artist, founder and editor of <strong>Zimzum</strong> newspaper. She is based in Berlin.
3 AIR KREMS AUSTRIA Last July/August, I was invited to be an artist-inresidence at Krems. During these months, I examined my practice along the Danube and in the lush vineyards, photographing the sites based on data I achived during my stay. The purpose of the newpaper is to expand the concept of normalisation; to examine how it functions in different areas. I asked twelve colleagues I got to know during the previous and current study to write about what normalisation is for them and how it functions in their field. Stalag XVII B Krems - Gneixendorf. The biggest camp for POW in Austria where 70,000 prisoners were held. Photo: Hadas Tapouchi, Krems 2017 IG gallery T he images in the exhibition are a continuation of my memory practice. My works are being shown in vitrine tables, in an attempt to present the images within the language of the world of findings and discoveries. In the video work Landschaft (Landscape), I made in Krems, my aim is to examine the landscape as a site of amnesia and erasure. It is a strategic site for burying the past and masking history through natural beauty. Adorno writs: Print screen from the video Landschaft. Video: Hadas Tapouchi, Krems 2017 Beauty in nature is the history that stands still and refuses to be revealed In this context, I used the creation as an extention of the concept of erasure-recreation. It is an abstraction of space and an illustration of space, reductionism to what appears from a distant perspective, a vantage point that controls, frames and focuses the landscape in terms of such well known epithets as pre-poetic, picturesque, lofty, pastoral, etc. During the process, I referred to the text by Professor William John Thomas Mitchell, an iconologist: What do pictures want (2005)? He quotes the term "totemism" from Claude Lévi-Strauss, “defining relations of ideological status between two series, one natural and the other cultural.” Is that not the definition of landscape? The title was the result of my researching the etymology of the suffix “-schaft”, which can be traced to the Indo-Germanic root * skapi / * skapja / * skafti, derived from the verb "scapjan", which means “create”. THE LANDSCAPE WAS MEANT TO BE LOOKED AT, NOT TOUCHED. The totem, like the landscape, is an ideological instrument by which cultures give themselves the status of nature, planting themselves in the earth, or a symbolic space in which communities have a common destiny. Artothek Niederösterreich. In a company named Gustloff- Werke POW´s re-filled cartridges (firearms) after 1940. Photo: Hadas Tapouchi, Krems 2017 A R T I S T T A L K S Artist talk #1 City Hall, Stein Rathausplatz 2, Stein Monday, October 2nd 2017 at 6pm Panel with Dr. Robert Streibel and Hadas Tapouchi. Moderator: Andreas Hoffer Artist talk #2 IG gallery Gumpendorfer Str. 10-12, Vienna Wednesday, October 4th 2017 at 7pm Panel with artists: Iris Andraschek, Hubert Lobnig and Hadas Tapouchi. Moderator: Ruth weismann
Page 1: issue n o . i Founder and Editor in
Page 5 and 6: 5 THIS IS EBENSEE, LOOKING NORTH TO
Page 7 and 8: 7 NORMALISATION FROM THE PERSPECTIV
Page 9 and 10: 9 T he plastic skin of the mask is
Page 11 and 12: 11 D er Turnertempel stand Ecke Tur

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