Stolpersteine in Copenhagen Tromsø Helsinki (IMAGES: Ruth Mandel)
Spectral Antisemitism, Stolpersteine and the Nordic Gaze
The septrional space is the analytic canvas for our ongoing ethnographic research about past and present heterotopic threats to the imaginary of Nordic monotopias/utopias. We interrogate recent interventions in both known and unknown landscapes. Specifically, we address the confluence of memory, narrative, and forgetting in these post-WWII settings. We do this by examining counter-memorials, a genre of art and memory activism. Europe’s largest decentralised counter-memorial is artist Gunter Demnig’s project, Stolpersteine – ‘stumbling stones’— small brass plaques installed in the pavement in front of the former homes of victims of Nazi persecution. The plaques are controversial; they have been celebrated, imitated, banned, and vandalised. To date, more than 80,000 Stolpersteine have been embedded in pavements across 26 European countries. Each stone, in the local language, reads ‘Here lived...’ followed by the name, date of birth, death, and place of death. Having travelled with the artist conducting participant- observation ethnographic research, we have been to hundreds of installations in eight countries over the past few years, including Norway, Finland, Denmark and Sweden.
Each Nordic country has its own term for Stolperstein: Swedish: snubbelsten; Norwegian: snublestein; Finnish: kompastuskivi; Danish: snublesten. Equally, each has its own narratives and counter-narratives surrounding them. Our paper highlights the significant inflection points in their cultures of memorialization, wartime trajectories, and approaches to the past in the present, demonstrated through Stolpersteine.
Each Nordic country has its own term for Stolperstein: Swedish: snubbelsten; Norwegian: snublestein; Finnish: kompastuskivi; Danish: snublesten. Equally, each has its own narratives and counter-narratives surrounding them. Our paper highlights the significant inflection points in their cultures of memorialization, wartime trajectories, and approaches to the past in the present, demonstrated through Stolpersteine.
Stolperstein in Stockholm
We ask whether Stolpersteine provoke, or respond to, changing social narratives. With each country’s markedly different WWII history, the compelling factors that drive the installation of Stolpersteine diverge. To wit: Jewish Norwegian citizens were deported to Auschwitz, while most Jewish Danish citizens were ferried to Malmö and its environs. But in Sweden and Finland, stateless European Jewish refugees were surrendered to the Nazis.
We investigate the recollections, representations and imagined identities of Jews in Nordic countries before, during and post-WWII. Questions about intersubjective identity and belonging have come to the fore through observations and interviews at Stolperstein installations.
Furthermore, issues of temporality, the social fringe and cross-border migration arise as we examine the position of Jews and other refugees during WWII alongside contemporary concerns. We ask a number of questions: How to interpret the intersection of rising xenophobia, nationalisms and racism with the positionality of new Nordic citizens from the global south? To what extent are challenges to imaginary Nordic mono/[u]topias conveniently collapsed as non-threatening generic ‘multiculturalism’? Returning to the past in the present, what are the risks to Nordic subjectivities in recognizing the specificities of victims of WWII atrocities? Do today’s others reverberate with identifiable structural patterns?
The paper interrogates how largely unknown landscapes in Norway, littered with hundreds of WWII concentration camps are largely ignored for the sake of a whitewashed historical narrative that lauds statuary of resistance fighters, and memorials to Norwegian war dead. What are the social and cultural consequences of these hiccups and blots on the landscape being paved over with forgetting? The small, modest brass Stolperstein opens the conceptual space for confronting these and other questions.
Ruth Mandel University College London, UK & Rachel Lehr University of Colorado Boulder, USA
Beyond Conceivable Landscapes (Stills) - IMAGES by artterror.
ERRITORY: (Evolution of Depicting Landscape in Digital Cinema)
From religious to nationalistic and from progressive to postcolonial, cinema has been, throughout its history, inscribing ideology to image of a landscape. 1969 Masao Adachi, Japanese film director articulated this idea creating fûkeiron genre:
“We would make a film about how Japan and its landscapes oppressed people. We realised how the landscape reflects the image of society’s power. The landscapes were enough.”
French horticulturalist and landscape architect Gilles Clément refers to the left-over spaces outside of cultivation and human use as “Third Landscapes.” Clément describes the third landscape as “an undetermined fragment of the Planetary Garden [that] designates the sum of space left over by man to evolution—to nature alone. Included in this category are left behind (délaissé) urban or rural sites, transitional spaces, neglected land (friches), swamps, moors, peat bogs, but also roadsides, shores, railroad embankments, etc.
“We would make a film about how Japan and its landscapes oppressed people. We realised how the landscape reflects the image of society’s power. The landscapes were enough.”
French horticulturalist and landscape architect Gilles Clément refers to the left-over spaces outside of cultivation and human use as “Third Landscapes.” Clément describes the third landscape as “an undetermined fragment of the Planetary Garden [that] designates the sum of space left over by man to evolution—to nature alone. Included in this category are left behind (délaissé) urban or rural sites, transitional spaces, neglected land (friches), swamps, moors, peat bogs, but also roadsides, shores, railroad embankments, etc.
In international politics, a territory is usually either the total area from which a state may extract power resources or any non-sovereign geographic area which has come under the authority of another government. Concept of territorial integrity is one of the rights inherent in sovereignty and independence.
Any deviation of concept of territory, terms like overseas territories, Indian territories, extraterritorial status of some entities, free territory (which described territories liberated by Yugoslav partisans in occupied Yugoslavia during WWII) problematize its own definition – and constitute what we can name historical erritories. There is no esthetical difference between landscape within free and occupied territory, but there is essential difference in context, which is much more relevant for contemporary media. If we define free territory as “piece of land free from any hegemonic state power or foreign occupation, self-governed by its inhabitants and entitled to make alliances and associations with other territories”, we can ask ourselves how can a territory be free today with satellite monitoring of every part of Earth? Only through some kind of error, either error of digital technology, or error in socio-political context.
In contemporary cinema, landscape is not only determined by psychological and sociological aspects, but also by formal logic of appropriation of territory as ritual: films about immigrants depict appropriation of landscapes of their new homeland; films about passing the borders problematize political and natural differentiation... video with its accessibility create evolution of perception of landscape, allowing independent filmmakers and video artists to create different aspects of political and subversive narratives which deconstruct dominant practices of depicting territory. This results in images of erritories, rather than territories, which deconstruct dominant geographical and political concept behind a landscape.
This paper focuses on various films, documentary and experimental, produced worldwide that depict various erritories, thematising problematic of contemporary landscape, also including analysis of actual artistic practice of the artterror duo.
Vladimir Šojat & Milica Lapčević artterror Belgrade, Serbia