‘Doing’ memory: performativity and cultural memory in Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s Alter Bahnhof Video Walk

Abstract

Remembrance of the Holocaust is fraught with difficulty and as survivors pass away, our understanding moves from communicative to cultural memory. In exploring ways to successfully engage audiences, artists take up the notion of the monument and extend its boundaries. An example is Cardiff and Bures Miller's Alter Bahnhof video walk (2012), which invites its participants to critically consider the notion of monumentalisation, the nature of photographic media and the interplay between performativity and performance. This essay discusses the relationship between photographic media, memory and art, illustrating this through an analysis of the video walk.No matter how fractured by media, by geography, and by subject position representations of the Holocaust are, ultimately it all comes down to this core: unimaginable, unspeakable, and unrepresentable horror. Post-Holocaust generations can only approach that core by mimetic approximation, a mnemonic strategy which recognizes the event in its otherness and beyond identification or therapeutic empathy, but which physically innervates some of the horror and the pain in a slow and persistent labor of remembrance.Andreas Huyssen, Twilight memories, p. 259.

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