Project description:

“Before Shabbat fell on a summer day in 2016, I got lost in the largest intact and active Jewish cemetery in postwar Europe. Jüdischer Friedhof Weißensee lies in eastern Berlin on Herbert-Baum-Straße, a street named for the young anti-fascist electrician whose martyred body the community buried in 1942 amidst mass deportations. Running between the forested fields of some 116,000 people buried since 1880, searching for the gate I assumed had closed, I experienced radical awe turn to a synesthetic terror. Hyper aware of the severe security measures protecting Jewish institutions in the city, I was doubly afraid of being mistaken for a vandal and decided if I were caught climbing out over the mausoleum-lined walls I would tell the police my grandfather Fredrich S is buried inside and that I became lost searching for him To prompt immunity and form a claim where there was violent abstraction. After two years, I returned to Berlin to practice the repercussion.

Beginning with the innate choice of walking to and from or not walking to and from the cemetery, my performance work mediates the separation between experience inside and outside the cemetery walls over a sustained six months; a practice conjoined with rabbinic laws that place a boundary of ritual and ways of thinking between everyday life and burial space. I formed my own laws from nervousness lethargy fear and intense concentration: The Weight of My Body Inside Jüdischer Friedhof Weißensee; The Unstable Perpetuation of Daily Law; Empty Heat; and Spleen. I rapidly envisioned dramatically committed to and then forgot ritual actions and corollary constraints. I collected hundreds and hundreds of stones in the streets of Berlin while singing and hauled them in great numbers to the cemetery to place on individual graves or entire fields of graves. I sent people I met into the cemetery or accompanied them and afterward presented them with a series of questions to answer in writing in their mothertongue. I tracked a recurring pain in my spine and searched for its representation in recurring gravestone images. I found a rusted off car exhaust pipe while walking to the cemetery and archived and lived with it I collected trash in the cemetery and recorded the names of the person buried nearest each piece and archived and lived with it. I kept the hair that fell from my face and head into books I was reading and archived it. I wrote inside the cemetery upon specific paper sheets, using the words and names from graves to induce statements, lists, poems, public actions.

On May 14th, I was returning to Berlin from Warsaw, Poland, the city of my great-grandmother’s birth, when more than sixty nonviolent demonstrators were massacred marching against their exile and mass incarceration in Gaza. On the train, I started to envision a public intervention I would eventually call “Counter-Ruin”, sourced from an image I had co-manifested with/in the cemetery: tens of people picking up stones around the ruins of Anhalter Bahnhof, a former Nazi deportation site, then carrying them in each hand en-mass to place on the graves of the thousand suicides buried in Jüdischer Friedhof Weißensee during the 1942 deportations. The concurrent Great March of Return and retributed massacres purged and relocated the image. In so far as I could be read or read myself as Jewish in Berlin, Gaza was written on my back. I wished to make this anxiety public, to ritualize and provoke its intensity within the larger project’s embrace, and thereby insert my body physically and symbolically into the racist transnational discourse that vilifies my position or justifies it, and pits traumatized communities against each other in the name of it. I meant to communicate geographically and socially in real time the terror of lineal entanglement, in the fact of my body moving in relation to other bodies in Berlin. I meant to be ambivalent. I moved without stopping my reference.”

—from installation