The archive follows no clear stream of historicity, but rather presents itself as a study of behavioural repetition across varying socio-political climates that share one thing in common: the pursuit of endless acceleration, at the cost of ecologically balanced cycles of growth and decay. The archive currently spans geographically across Ukraine, Romania, Belgium, Germany, Moldova and Sicily.
2022 – A Bear Trap in No Man's Land
Monuments, documents, and records of collective trauma exist to stand for and contain that which has happened. But in an attempt to lighten the burden of atrocity and barbarism, these mementos simultaneously distance us from the context that birthed them. Through the act of burying and depositing history in monuments and artefacts and by grouping victims into categories and statistics, we are letting a passive silence do the work an active memory should engage. The moment a violence of the past resurfaces, we detach in disbelief and in repetition.
The publication intertwines two archives that bear witness to the violence of the twentieth century: photographic records (witnesses) and literary reflections (the work of mourning). With facts eschewed to an index in the back, the visual and literary representations affect the reader as they echo the histories that contain them. The project proposes a reflection on trauma and the administration of a regime of tragedy that ensued within as well as characterised the twentieth century.
Within the installation the publication is accompanied by a collection of photographs which display sites of former concentration and transit camps across Eastern Europe. Eighty years later, as testament to the negligence towards our collective memories, these forlorn sites have become fragmented representations of an inexpressible absence. It is through monuments that a language of heroism rewrites senseless death as martyrdom, thereby annulling the necessity of a work of memory.
2024 – Not to bear Witness, but to bear Presence
In collaboration with Tudor Bratu
"In the desert of history every step forward seems a lurch towards a past that divulges itself as an unbound trace. This trace scatters as it attempts to form a path, while it simultaneously crosses the organ that propels it onwards. The resulting dichotomy becomes indicative of a linearity that is both leading, and disorienting – a dance that elegantly, yet covertly, omits the collision with a collective memory that is often presumed to be final. Remembrance seems hardly possible without this misleading dance, for the act of remembering carries within itself an act of betrayal – both a forgetting, and an absence. There is hardly a history without a submission to this movement, and therefore, hardly a history without an admittance to a perpetuation of betrayal, or to forgetting, or to absence.
The blind admittance to this linearity suggests a missing language – a dialogue that cannot be held until words are formed and spoken, and then, with the greatest hesitation, left unbound. To chisel words into a stone not to form them, but to suggest the movement and the force that makes the cut. To trace a footprint not in order take the same path, but to deepen the imprints left behind. The gaze leads itself to the picture not to bear witness, but to bear presence." (Julia Waraksa, 2024)
2019 – The Poetry of Protest
Where protests are part of a systematic, nonviolent campaign to achieve a particular objective, involving the use of pressure and persuasion, they go beyond mere protest as a definition and may better be described as cases of civil resistance – or situations of absolute chaos. The Poetry of Protest takes a look at the character of protest, decomposing its underlying destructive nature through a poem in three verses: the chants, the chaos and the aftermath. Selected spreads.
