Khlebosolny/Bread and Salt : A time-travelling journey to Eastern Europe (and back)

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal

卷:4

Katy, Beinart¹ 

[1] Universität Graz;

关键词: family history;    memory;    postmemory;    migration;    diaspora;    roots journey;    contested heritage;    ritual;    performance art;    photography;    indexical;    salt;    bread;   

DOI  :  10.25364/08.4:2018.1.2

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

In this article, I describe a journey my sister Rebecca and I made in 2012 to Eastern Europe, partdiasporic return/roots journey and part artistic residency, during which we developed artworks inthe form of ritual, performative practices with bread and salt. Our diasporic Jewish family had littleknowledge of their place of origin, a village in Lithuania. The artworks that we made on the tripexplore connections between bread, salt and memory, through the haptic qualities of touch and taste.Documenting these artworks and re-enacting family photographs calls into question the veracity of“roots” and the role of memory in the present. Through reflecting on our journey and art practices,I ask how individual subjectivities are identified and how dialogue between self and other is revealedand concealed, where those others may be in the past, and have left little trace in the present. I also askhow pasts and presents are negotiated in the making and unmaking of subjectivities, and how thesecontested relationships between past and present may be traced, acknowledged and surfaced. And Iconnect our personal history with wider heritages, ones that are currently contested and politicallycharged. We used bread and salt in a threshold ritual, Khlebosolny (2012) in which the materialityof bread and salt became tools to fill absences, and to embody different kinds of meaning. Throughephemeral memorials using salt, we left residual traces in particular places. The work we made inVilnius and the Lithuanian villages is remembrance as an act made present, and I suggested that thisongoing process of mediation in the present can be seen as attaching specific meaning to memoryby enacting it. Therefore, a choice is continually being made about how this memory and heritage isreproduced, in the present day.

【 授权许可】

Unknown