Project description:

Wierzba Estery / Esther’s Willow is a long-distance collaboration with artists Katarzyna and Marta Sala in Chrzanów (PL), a pre-dominantly Jewish city until the Nazi genocide and postwar processes that continued a long century of ethnic cleansing. Katarzyna, Marta, and Sniderman are organizing a local collective to re-plant a white willow sapling in the former Esther’s Square, the location of the Great Synagogue of Chrzanów until its demolition by the Polish state in the 1970s. The Sala family has rented an apartment on the now unnamed square for three generations. In 2018, Marta vicariously witnessed the cutting down of a white willow tree that had towered over the synagogue’s concealed foundations for as long as she could remember. After this, Marta began to think of the willow as having mourned the city’s Jewish eradication in its own living, nonhuman terms; a powerful counter-monument both to the grave-like plaque marking the site of the synagogue and a nearby oak tree, planted the same year the willow was cut, marking 100 years of Polish independence. The sisters’ collaboration with Sniderman, whose ancestors fled Jaroslaw and Warsaw, is bound to Marta’s idea, born from and meant to contribute to the full complexity of everyday life in Chrzanów.

In experimental video correspondence between Chrzanów (PL) Berlin (GE) and Whatcom County (US)/Lummi and Nooksack territory, public meetings, walks, and workshops, the construction of the living memorial and a corollary happening to plant it, the artists are working with/in the everyday conditions of memory in the city, archival relations between their distance and difference, and the traditional cultural-medicinal uses and cosmological significance of the white willow across time, space, and peoples as social-aesthetic guide. The project’s approach then gestures into the city’s traumatic Jewish past to reach an old and intimate space of transcultural ancestral experience and horizontal implication, where Jewish and Slavic communities in Poland mutually, collaboratively, and differently depended on willows to treat viruses, diseases, infertility, and bodily pain, exchanging knowledge, treatments, practitioners, and patients at a site of nonhuman mourning that continues, even nominally (“weeping willow”), to mediate between the living and the dead.

Curated and produced by CentrALT, a centre for contemporary Jewish art and ideas, and its annual FestivALT in Kraków, as well as Chrzanów’s Irena and Mieczysław Mazaraki Museum and Municipal Center of Culture and Sports (MOSKiR), the artists are working with a broad coalition of city residents and regional institutions to organize through horizontal artistic tactics the culminating happening. The artists are mobilizing, through a year-long series of workshops and other situations, a collective walk from the Chrzanów train station (where the Jewish population of the city was deported to Oświęcim/Auschwitz), through the market square (where the population was divided into two groups: one to be deported and the other to return to Esther’s Square in the ghetto), ending in the former Esther’s Square. Able-bodied participants will carry the sapling and chairs. All participants will carry vessels, ranging in size, of “silent water” (which will be harvested in an installation at the Kraków exhibition or a preceding workshop in Chrzanów)—a traditional Ashkenazi and Slavic medicinal substance made simply by harvesting water in silence, usually at night. Once at the square, the collective will plant the willow with the silent water. Others who are tired from the walk can gather in the chairs over the foundations of the synagogue, eventually joined by everyone else to converse and in this way activate the kind of relations the synagogue itself nourished for centuries. Advocated by a Chrzanów resident, “Silent Water” (minus the planting) intends to recur annually, and so this happening represents the beginning of a civic ritual in the city of Chrzanów.