Blog – Martyna Puciato

Threshold

“No matter how artful the photographer, no matter how carefully posed his subject, the beholder feels an irresistible urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the here and now, with which reality has (so to speak) seared the subject, to find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the future nests so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it.” Walter Benjamin 

I am Martyna, a multidisciplinary artist whose work blends multimedia, theatre and installation to create playful and politically engaged work about migration, identity and belonging. I’m joining the Memorial Gestures 4 as a Cultural Translator in Residence – this is a new role for Holocaust Centre North – but in some ways it’s a position I’ve been occupying for the last 18 years.  

In 2008, I migrated from Poland to the UK with my family. We moved to Burnley, a post-industrial town in the North of England. While I am now fluent in English, and have completed higher education and worked within art institutions, I am familiar with the various forms of social, cultural, and political (in)visibility and marginalisation common to many forms of migrant experience. But rather than seeing this liminality as a deficit, I treat it as a site of creative possibility and critical insight – inhabiting overlapping worlds enables me to navigate multiple perspectives, and to take a consciously polyphonic approach to storytelling and cultural translation. 

DOUBLE EXPOSURE 

Some of my favourite objects to work with are family memorabilia – photographs, ornaments, jewellery, textiles, toys. I approach these objects as mediators between past and present, memory and imagination. My interest in archives stems from an understanding of them not as static repositories but as dynamic fields of traces: lives interrupted and remade and memories carried across borders. I understand translation as a lived, ongoing process of interpreting objects and events, an act of interpretation which is not only shaped by language but also by negotiations of memory and belonging.

As a Cultural Translator, I will first identify materials that I feel have a contemporary relevance. I will then design a series of workshops with community groups (whose first language is not English), to facilitate encounters with the archival materials from Holocaust Centre North and create frameworks for collaborative translation. Translations resulting from the workshops will then be gathered in a printed publication with reflections on the process.  

As an artist/researcher the main question I want to explore during this residency is – how do migrants understand their relationship to home/nation after building a new life in the North of England? I approached my first visit to the archives at the Holocaust Centre North with this question in mind, and on that visit, I was instantly drawn to double exposure photographs I found in the Kubie’s Family archive.  

In photography, double exposure happens when two or more images are captured on a single frame. By taking a picture without advancing the film, the original frame is exposed more than once, allowing two images to merge into one. Although artists and photographers often intentionally produce this effect with cameras now, in the past images like this often came about through technical mistakes and would often not be printed. The visual effect of double exposures is that images become enmeshed, layered on top of each other, creating unique pictures containing overlapping stories, two realities existing in a shared moment.  

My dad always said that when having a picture taken with your extended family, you should always stand on the side. That way, if relationships turn sour and you become estranged from your family, it is better to be cut out of the image, than to be in the middle and have needles poked through your eyes (I thought holes in your eyes weren’t that bad… at least you were still in the picture!). After moving to the UK, I often felt like a cut out part of a photograph, lost somewhere in a keepsake box, not making sense without the rest of the photograph. The double exposures feel like a perfect visual metaphor for the cultural estrangement that can accompany migration: the feeling of being cut off from one’s “natural” environment and pasted into a new one, having to constantly translate yourself to fit into the new environment, without being able to fully present the other side of your identity. The double exposures – merging two out of focus images – perfectly capture the feeling of cultural (in)visibility common to migrant experience.  

PHOTOMONTAGE 

“ We take photographs of people… in every situation of their life… we capture the microcosm and the light, the stone, the space, past cultures, war, moon dust, formulas, atomic fission. This is the foundation on which photomontage, and parallel to it, collage  had  to emerge.’ – Hannah Höch on the medium of collage, March 1971.  

Inspired by Hannah Höch’s Life Portrait – a collaged autobiography of a German Dada artist at the height of their career before WWII, I wanted to experiment with photomontage and the possibilities that it offers to connect, expand, redact or remove, to capture this cultural duality.  

The power of Höch’s collaged images stems from its potential to alienate the viewer, in a similar way in which Bertolt Brecht, a German theatre director and playwright, tried to achieve through his estrangement technique in the theatre. Brecht developed the concept of Verfremdungseffekt – also known as distancing or estrangement effect – a technique he first mentioned in 1936. Created in response to the rise of fascism in Germany, the technique was supposed to prevent the audience from losing themselves in the emotions of the story, and instead to feel a sense of alienation, provoking them into using the intellect to critically engage with the narrative unfolding on stage. In her use of photomontage, we can see that Höch is also trying to apply this effect by merging news clippings, pictures of objects, and popular figures to criticise corruption, gender roles, and the mechanised chaos of Weimar Germany.  

I wanted to build on the possibilities afforded by both alienation and estrangement, and of holding more than one world within a single image presented by the double exposure. I did this by physically manipulating the copies of photographs, both personal and from the archive. In the process, I prepared different tools – scissors, stapler, holepunch, lace, ribbon, glue, tape – and when connecting, expanding, redacting and removing the images I remained attentive to which tools I was using and how each tool interacted differently with the materials. 

The results of my experiments were visually quite interesting, as the Frankensteined images embodied the feelings of displacement, longing and lost identity I was trying to achieve. However, during the process, I started to feel that manipulating the images through photomontage might appear too closely related to some forms of Holocaust distortion; another form of manipulation. For in my role as an artist working with these archives, I must remain vigilant to the ethical implications of working with the memories and representation of survivors, and the potentially uncomfortable interpretations that a chosen process might raise. The act of physically altering, obscuring and removing elements from these photographs raised challenging questions for me about where artistic manipulation ends and the distortion of memory begins.

Although I was still interested in Hannah Höch’s work and photomantage’s ability to draw parallels, juxtapose or amplify certain ideas through repetition or scale, I wanted to return to the archives and explore new ways of achieving a similar effect without physically manipulating the images.  

BEING IN NEGATIVE 

On my last visit, I was given a large collection of photographs belonging to the Kubie’s, together with three chunky envelopes filled with film negatives. These negatives provided an interesting counterpart to the photographs, for as a migrant, you are often defined by what you are not, producing a constant awareness of what is lacking. Flicking through the collection, I began to think that these negatives might offer an interesting alternative to photomontage, as the inversion of colours also further captures this sense of cultural estrangement. Moving forward I want to explore what it means to remain in the negative space, exploring marginalization and otherness, not as a deficit, but as a potential site of empowerment and transformation, a shifting of the centre. Drawing on the relationship between the film negatives and double exposures, I am interested in how what is absent, out of focus, or outside the frame can become visible.

During the workshop phase, the participants and translators will explore film negatives, double exposures, and the archive at the Holocaust Centre North, whilst reflecting on cultural translation, belonging, and how we might relate aspects of our own stories besides those of the Holocaust Survivors in the archives. As Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme suggest, being “in the negative” can become a form of invisible excess from which new ways of seeing and belonging can emerge. By creating images that hold multiple perspectives within a single frame, in these workshops I hope to create such a space of estrangement and possibility.