Lecture by Artemis Alcalay at the event “Synagogue Blockade: Soul Searching | Images & Testimonies”, organized by the Workshop for the Study of Jews in Greece in cooperation with the Jewish Community of Athens, 31.3.2019.

Synagogue Blockade 1944

Grandfather: a word we almost never uttered; an important relationship of love we didn’t get to experience.Alongside my grandfather, all the objects in the house were gone, annihilating every trace of his presence that would remind us of his passing through this world, save for a few photographs our godmother was able to rescue.

 

For the past 20 years, I have been committed to the Holocaust as a visual artist in an attempt to heal the trauma of my grandfather’s loss, along with a moral obligation towards personal and collective memory.

Initially, I struggled to represent this unspeakable experience, this extreme, traumatic event, drawing on the innocent perspective of children’s art.

 

For those who lived together, for those who died together

When it comes to puppets, an invisible hand pulls the strings of human fate, with family members or even the entire community joined in life or death.
Underneath the happy newlyweds, the naked, dead puppets are piled on top of each other, an amorphous mass alluding to the bleak photos of Nazi concentration camps.

 

Home (to Ilias Alcalay)

Home: In peacetime, a place of safety and protection, a source of love and joy, containing and preserving family memory and creating a happy childhood.
On the contrary, in this burning house, outwardly locked, with the palms of appeal or supplication addressed to the outside world, we witness calamity and death ruling supreme.
No hope of escape. Thick black smoke comes out of the chimney.

 

The departure – the whiteness of absence, the whiteness of silence

Fragments of the human body are already on their way to their final destination. In their transition from matter to spirit they offer themselves up to a symbolic farewell gesture.
The source of inspiration is, on the one hand, ancient Greek gravestones, and, on the other hand, the rituals of Jewish burials, in which, instead of flowers, a stone is laid at the grave – the distant descendant of the memory of a nomadic people that once crossed the desert.

 

My great love for fabric, a central element in my work, also pays homage to my father’s and grandfather’s professional work in the upholstery fabric business.
Through this work, I made a symbolic grave for my grandfather, given that these dead people were deprived of even that, and we were overcome with a difficult grief, at times evident, at times latent.

 

Survivors of the Nazi concentration camps

I have been photographing Greek Jews who survived the Holocaust since 2012. That is when the strength and determination to immortalize their faces in photographs matured inside me. I wanted to preserve their figure.

 

I have travelled all over Greece and to many other countries to meet them in person, speak with them and their families, photograph them and record their testimonies. I visited them in familiar surroundings: their homes, synagogues, care homes, hotels and workplaces. Though they shared the same traumatic experiences, each personal story was a source of great emotion, vast knowledge and sacred heritage.

 

(I have already photographed 67 survivors, 47 from Auschwitz and 20 from Bergen-Belsen. This project is not yet complete as long as there are is still a number of living Greek Jew survivors, few as they may be.)

For me, this journey has been a unique process, one of introspection and catharsis. I had the opportunity to delve deeper into this period in history, to endeavour, perhaps in vain, to understand it and attempt to transform it into a visual language. Above all, however, I was fortunate to have met these incredible people, to have made contact with these last surviving witnesses of a bygone era that still feels so close. Their inner strength and attitude towards life has been an invaluable life lesson.

 

I am forever grateful to them.
I never met my grandfather, nor have I told you anything about him.
I only attempted to create an intangible meeting place connecting all those who are forever gone and us.
A place of love and healing.

 

 

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