Marika Bertoni Photography
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Shoah - a term that cannot simply be relegated to history, a word you cannot refer as to a thing of the past, placing it on the same level of all those historical events that determined human evolution (or, might I say, regression).You cannot comprehend it only through dates or numbers, (what does "6.000.000 victims" mean?? Numbers among other numbers when it comes to estimates regarding world genocides) through considerations, through facts (the distruction of entire ethnic groups, not only Jews, but also Romani, Poles, Soviet civilians, prisoners of war, people with disabilities and mentally ill, homosexuals, Jehovah's witnesses...)In "Blindness", the common element is not the gesture, the number, the tale, the memory but the Indifference. The human indifference. The dramatic nature of the ability to become "blind" even when facing a horror of this magnitude.For the human soul: the opportunity of a civilized survival in front of such a monstruosity.Eyes that are able to close themselves, so as not to see, in order to survive in a world ruled by men able of such homicidal orderliness.Nevertheless the will to survive continues.The will not to feel, not to hear.
The tragedy of the Shoah expands its roots to the dark depths of the human soul, whose consciousness cannot but sentence every possible chance of redemption to death.
Through these considerations, (extended through all the Holocaust sites, from Poland to Germany) through testimonies (that the world still has the fortune to hear) some pictures are born, images that aim to bring about the "immemorial" character of an event that is, more than anything else, a condition that regards us all.Infact, there isn't and there cannot be, separation between past and present, between what was and what is. From here, the necessity to mix past with present, images from the historical archives of the Shoah with current images, those of the places that still bear the memory.
I am walking through those wonderful Polish forests, I am getting lost in the scent of pines that are hiding places where bodies had been thrown, after being burnt alive.I don't smell anything. Only the silence.Only the memory of something that I dont know, that nobody really knows.I can figure it out, I can rebuild it, but deep down... I know nothing about it. It was dark when the gas was released.There was music when the people were becoming conscious of their end, and were screaming. The aesthetics of horror. The need to rebuild it through a series of atemporal pictures, because saying Shoah means much more.In the production of this project I was immediately faced with the ethical problem that arises with the depiction of pain. How can you justify the easthetical search when you are in front of such a dramatic content? Starting from myself, at what point am I starting to get lost in the shape losing sight of the essence?? Most important, what weight do these thoughts have now, more than 60 years since the liberation of the concentration camps?How current and still immemorial, with no past, is the Shoah?