|
|
Cristina's History |
 |
|
A Jewish Itinirary from Poland to Africa I met Cristina DaSilva - Szwarc in 2003, in Bissau, the capital of Guinea Bissau, a small country on the western coast of Africa. I am related to her on the Szwarc side. Four generations back our common ancestor, Isuchaar Szwarc, a renowned Jewish scholar, lived in Zgierz, a town near Lodz in the very center of Poland. Cristina`s history passes through Portugal. Isuchaar`s eldest son (Cristina`s great grandfather) left Poland as a young man and settled in Portugal during the First World War. He became a successful mining engineer, and also came to be known for discovering the secretive Marrono communities, Jews who had lived in hiding since the Inquisition. Cristina`s grandmother, born in Lisbon. moved to Portuguese Guinea in 1947. There she and her husband played a prominent role in the anti-colonial movement. Cristina`s father was born in the Portuguese colony. An agronomist, he has devoted his life to the agricultural development of this impovrished nation. Cristina was born in 1973, a year before Guinea Bissau`s independence. I had always vaguely heard of this accomplished branch of my family. It occurred to me that their lives were an embodiment of modernity`s positivist belief in mobility and progress. Jewish families are often characterized by patterns of dispersal and migration, patterns that have of late come to characterize the general world population. In reconstituting my family history, I am interested in this more general phenomena. Photography, for me, is a tool for describing and evoking. While my images are specific and local, the intent is for the work to go beyond the narrow identifications of any specific community or nation. This project is not about the return to one`s roots. But in evoking modernity`s collective experience of displacement and migration, I am also staking a claim for the continuing validity of the Diaspora as a vital part of Jewish identity. The condition of multiplicity, wandering, and exile, as shown in this one particular story of one line of one family, suggests some principles for an alternative foundation of cultural identification, based on tolerance and shared experience. The richness of Diaspora experience should not be usurped by the nationalist confines of Zionism. I see this tension between the global and the local as the nexus of documentary art. I traveled to Bissau, to Lisbon, and to Zgierz. The resultant project is a series of photographs from these three places, presented together with a text relating Cristina`s family history. Cristina`s History will be presented as an installation consisting of three digital projections (Zgierz, Lisbon, Guinea-Bissau). In each of three rooms two projectors are mounted back to back on a central pivot. The images rotate around the room (like the beams of a light house), stretching and bending on the walls as they are distorted by the shape of the room. A voice-over narrates the story. Each room`s cycle lasts approximately 15 minutes and consists of about 45 images. This is how one pictures the Angle of History. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angle would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angle can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. (Walter Benjamin, Illuminations) |