PASSAGES
2023 - 2024
archival pigment prints; single-channel film
2023 - 2024
archival pigment prints; single-channel film
Duality dwells below the surface. The sun is setting as a storm approaches; starboard, a rainbow, hovering just above the horizon, as the light fades away and the black water churns. As the cargo ship heaves forward on the tumultuous North Sea, I watch the vast horizon through the narrow frame of my camera, retracing the exact same route that Edith Goldberg took at only 11 years of age as a Holocaust refugee on the kindertransport.
For every account of a traumatic event, there is a speculative history that cannot be told, whatever the cause of the inability of the survivor to record their experience; in his writings, Primo Levi posits that these unspoken testimonies are the ones we most need to hear. While retracing Edith's journey, I thought of the water as conduit: a repository of memory, containing not only transcribed experiences, but those like Edith's sister Irmgard's, hovering silently alongside, her presence trembling just beneath the surface.
For every account of a traumatic event, there is a speculative history that cannot be told, whatever the cause of the inability of the survivor to record their experience; in his writings, Primo Levi posits that these unspoken testimonies are the ones we most need to hear. While retracing Edith's journey, I thought of the water as conduit: a repository of memory, containing not only transcribed experiences, but those like Edith's sister Irmgard's, hovering silently alongside, her presence trembling just beneath the surface.
