SILENCED MEMORIES
AND NATIONAL NARRATIVES
Text by Camille Relet
A dialogue with artist Martina Zaninelli
Eighty-three years ago WW2 began. It was not until five long years later that it ended, forever changing those who experienced it. The aftermath resulted in years of reconstruction and rebuilding of a collective narrative, in hope that we would never allow such events to happen again. The transmission of stories and collective memory was established through the years and manifested mainly through education and commemorative events. Alongside this, the creation of what Jacques Le Goff called “memory-institutions” such as archives and museums dedicated to the study and conservation of the events, supported the creation of our collective memory. This collective memory created a space for our generation and future ones to remember and discuss the events of the war. However, those who fought in and survived the war often remained silent and refused to share their personal experience of the conflict. Their silence, often caused by trauma, shame, or guilt, left the next generations in their family unaware of their thoughts and experiences.
Martina Zaninelli, an Italian photographer currently based in Berlin, faced this issue with her own grandfather. She used part of her family photographic archive alongside her own photographs in her project “Are there trees back in Berlin?”, to create a visual dialogue which never took place between herself and her grandfather. This is an attempt to give a voice to the family’s photo album and to breach the gaps in the incomplete memory left behind by her grandfather after his passing. This project, driven by her desire to understand her family history, allowed her to explore the complex transmission of post-war memory after the Second World War in a familial context. This first project departing from her personal enquiry within her family photographs, organically led her to explore subjects that relate to a wider societal experience of national narratives.
Her recent project ”Brotherland” developed in collaboration with Thomas Jacobs, visually explores the notions of nationalism in the former East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany. The recent geopolitical changes brought hope of reconstruction to the country and the rest of Eastern Europe. However, it also created a situation favourable to a rise in racist and nationalist behaviours whilst creating a lot of resentment towards foreign contractual workers who were brought into East Germany (GDR) from countries such as Poland, Hungary, Algeria, and Mozambique which were considered as “Brotherlands”. In this work, they use photographs alongside archival materials and interviews, to inquire after Germany’s collective memory of those events. The collected oral testimonies are combined with new images as a way of articulating the different temporalities and contribute to breaking the silences around these taboos and controversial events.
In her artistic practice she appropriates archival images aiming to confront individual and national discourses and explores the notion of transgenerational memory and how it transforms collective consciousness. Driven by her interest in images and what they can reveal, she uses institutional and personal archives alongside her own photographs to create new narratives that challenge our collective memory. The archive is approached as a site where silent memories can be explored and investigated, through which the present is seen in a different light.
ON THE ARCHIVE...
To create my stories, I combine archival material with the photographs I produce. I respect archives and materials from the past, which makes it sometimes hard to appropriate and give them a new context and meaning. I often question if my pictures are even necessary. For this reason, I try to let the archive speak by cropping images to strengthen some points or to direct the gaze of the viewer. It is like a puzzle, where new and old pieces interact, and from this interaction a new story is told. I use archive materials to support the work of storytelling and integrate past stories in the present. For every story I want to tell, I take a look at the past in order to understand it. I would say that my background as a historian plays a great influence on how I approach photography.
© Martina Zaninelli, Are there trees back in Berlin, 2016-2018.
© Martina Zaninelli, Are there trees back in Berlin, 2016-2018.
ON THE LAST 10 YEARS...
I shifted from a personal and introspective use of photography and archival materials in the project “Are there trees back in Berlin?”, to a more analytic and storytelling practice. I am constantly asking myself why I am doing a project, who could be interested in it, and how to bring it to a larger public. It is a try-and-error game, which I am exploring within my latest project “Brotherland”. I'm exhibiting the project in foto festivals, but when we got invited to exhibit in cities of former GDR (German Democratic Republic known as East Germany), where neonazis attacks happened in the 1990’s, Thomas and I refused to exhibit the work in closed spaces. Instead, we decided to print posters and paste them on walls to face the ones that continue to ignore this part of Germany’s history.
© Martina Zaninelli and Thomas Jacobs, Brotheland, 2021-ongoing.
© Martina Zaninelli and Thomas Jacobs, Brotheland, 2021-ongoing. Courtesy of Detlev Kennerth.
ON ARCHIVE FEVER...
Although I have Derrida’s book, I never really read more than 5 pages as I find it difficult to understand so I’m not sure if I suffer from ‘archive fever’ or not. I consider myself a materialist.
ON DISCOVERIES IN THE ARCHIVE...
During a workshop I visited an archive in Kuldiga, a small village one hour away from Riga. I found a folder named “communists in the underground”. There was a picture of a man taking out a gun and an encrypted alphabet from a door frame. It was nothing special, but I was struck by it. The picture was taken in the 60’s, but the gun was hidden in the 20's. What happened in these 40 years? I wanted to discover more about the people hiding the gun, this small village with communists in the underground, the largest waterfall of Europe, and the 'flying fishes' (aka salmons). And for the first time, I wanted to bring multiple stories altogether and narrate these different aspects of a place. This is just because I found this one picture and my previous idea suddenly seemed boring. I began to look at photography differently, maybe I discovered the real potential to speak through images. I don't exactly know what happened, but this one picture changed almost everything for me and my practice.
© Martina Zaninelli, Critique of Political Economy, 2019.
