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. 

Conrad Leser’s (Lay-ser) melodeon, or button accordion, is one of the first objects you see as you come into the Holocaust Centre North’s permanent exhibition. The melodeon was one of the few objects Conrad chose to bring with him when he fled from Nazi oppression, from where he was studying in Zürich to the UK, to become an economics student, then an enemy alien, then in time the first Professor of Econometrics at the University of Leeds.

When I start to touch Conrad’s melodeon I am struck by the strangeness of this interaction – the negotiation of movement, sound, and care. I have it resting on an archive pillow that will support it and minimize the pressure of playing. Handling Conrad’s melodeon is hard. The leather straps are fragile and deteriorating. At first, it didn’t seem like we were going to be able to perform the push and pull motions that are essential for making sound. But the Collections team inspected the folds of the billows, the paper concertinaed within – and have given the all-clear. Though I can only make small, slow movements with it, rocking it back and forth, it’s louder than I expected. Some notes come easier than others, needing a bit more breath in the lungs to be heard. At first the incidental archive sounds annoy me, distracting from my main object of listening. The sound of the tiny balls inside the archive pillow shifting as we move, the creaking of the table and wooden panels and straps, the sound of the room (we test it – not the AC or the lights but some other elusive hum that we can’t locate). My back hurts from the odd and unnatural movements I’m having to perform to keep the melodeon safe, like some strange contemporary dance. When I sit down to rest and listen back to the recordings, I begin to appreciate the incidental composition of the melodeon, the room, its conditions of life now, and all the sounds which evidence our care.

Though I count myself as a multidisciplinary artist, I can’t help but gravitate to sound. Its here-but-not-here-ness. The ephemeral and the corporeal, inseparable. My practice often attempts the intangible, through performance, film, text and installation – and in recent projects, I have worked with sound as a way of holding presence and absence simultaneously: with voice, field recordings, and layered composition to explore what it means to listen to something that is only partially accessible. This is really what drew me to the Memorial Gestures residency. The act of engaging with the archive is not only interpretive but also requires a sensitivity to what cannot, and should not, be fully known or translated. 

I first saw the melodeon as a lung, and I still see it as one. A lung must breathe; an instrument must be played. When I first contacted the Collections team at Holocaust Centre North, I wasn’t hopeful that I would be allowed to touch, let alone make sound with the melodeon. It is a Hohner Club Model I, which was produced commonly in the 1930s but is rare to find in good condition. When I received the reply that the team had inspected and tested the instrument, and that it could be very gently handled – not played in full how it would’ve been – but that I could make some sounds that preservation would allow, this seemed even more interesting. If the melodeon is a lung, then it is also a voice, and has a testimony to tell. During our research stage of the Memorial Gestures residency, we discussed living memory and objects as witnesses.

What is an archive? What is its purpose? What and why are we choosing to preserve (and why is sound so rarely included in that)? I can’t help but reflect that as time progresses, we are not interacting with the artefacts we choose to preserve in the way that is intended – the way that offers us an idea of their whole. As a result, we risk losing the memory – or the full understanding of human experience/history – that an object can give us. Our learning of the past stays at arm’s length. In preservation, or traditional approaches to archive work, we prioritise the visual and the object. But really it’s a multisensory and experiential approach to the past that has the ability to greaten our understanding of atrocity. Or else might it fade to the recesses of time, only understood by facts, figures, diagrams and dates copied into a schoolbook? Sectioned off as ‘back then’ and ‘over there’.  

Rather than eliciting: 

This sound gave me joy 

I remember that tune 

It’s stuck in my head 

Is that the sound that reminded him of home  

Or his mother? 

Conrad Leser’s melodeon has not been played since the 1990s. What might we learn from its sound? How might it, within the archive, breathe again? 

In my first full day in the Holocaust Centre North Archive, I felt I got to know Conrad. He was a man who campaigned for human rights causes throughout his life, loved logic and probability, but was also involved in the theatre and music, and would play the melodeon for his friends at social gatherings. I was particularly on the lookout for letters with return addresses on them, that would give me a clue as to exactly where he and the melodeon travelled and lived in Germany, Switzerland and the UK. It was while looking for this that I found his address in Cambridge, which was where he studied Economics and from which he was taken to the Isle of Wight then Canada and imprisoned as an enemy alien. When he was released and returned to Cambridge, on the same day (24th January 1941) he wrote two letters. One to his tutor at university and one to his cousin Margarete, with whom he was very close. To his tutor, he apologised for the gap in his studies and said he looked forward to telling him about his “adventures”. But to Margarete he described the ordeal in these words “I really feel as if I had been buried alive for 8 months and (am) now beginning to live again”. I wonder how well he played the melodeon – how his tunes changed?

In August I was at home recounting these details to my partner. Conrad, his life, his instrument. My housemate Carol, half listening, cooking dinner, coming in and out of the room, suddenly turned to me and said ‘Conrad? I think I know him! Long hair, plays in that band – I didn’t know he was a mutual friend.’ I was confused at first and then realised what had happened. It’s lovely to think that, for a second, Conrad and my excitement about his melodeon helped him become alive again. But perhaps what happened was less dramatic than that. Conrad was never really absent: his handwriting, letters, photographs and melodeon have all carried him forward. And so, I think Conrad’s melodeon is alive too. Not because it can return us to his life, what he heard, felt or remembered, but because it can still enter into relation with us. Even in the small rocking movements that make a sound – in the creaks, breaths and limitations of the encounter – it seems to resist being entirely still, and we can listen to what remains.