6. Trying to Bring Back by Magic (2025) – Maud Haya-Baviera 

2025. Super 8 film transferred to 4K video file, 2 min 36 sec

Maud Haya-Baviera’s Trying to Bring Back by Magic unfolds in quiet
loops of 16mm film: split-screen footage in which the artist handles
replicas of photographs from Holocaust Centre North Archive with a ritualistic, almost spell-like attention. In her hands, black-and-white faces and scenes are conjured, held, and gently made to vanish—appearing like ghosts, disappearing like memories. Set
against yellow and violet tablecloths, the images glow faintly, as if
lit from within, fragile and luminous against time.

The silent footage is accompanied by a melancholic lullaby—a series
of syllables stitched together into song. Beneath the melody, other
voices rise and fall, layering the sound like breath, like memory
passed from one person to another. It is a chorus—a reminder that
remembrance is a connective experience.

With tenderness and wry grace, Haya-Baviera takes on a task
that is, in truth, impossible—but deeply, desperately wished to be
possible: to conjure the presence of those who are no longer here,
to reach across time toward lives that ended too soon and too
brutally. There is no illusion of bringing them back. But in the flicker
of film, in the hush of an image appearing and disappearing beneath
her hands, something stirs. She invites us to feel fragile, flickering
and real traces, and in that invitation, something returns. Not as it
was, but as it lingers in memory: glowing, weightless, and briefly
held. Not through magic, but through care.

With thanks to the Kubie family, whose collection features in this
work. Courtesy of Holocaust Centre North Archive. Audio produced
as part of public workshops held at Manchester Jewish Museum in
response to letters from Holocaust Centre North Archive, courtesy
of Rachel Mendel. Many thanks to the MJM songwriting group.