Reproduction of family part 4: Mother’s history – a library of language
In the multimedia installation, Mother’s History, a Library of Language, Sara Blokland explores her mother’s Amsterdam-Jewish family history. Sara Blokland interviews her mother about her (Jewish) identity, idealism, and memories of her post-war childhood. She brings this into dialogue with the pre-war philosophical ideas of Gerrit Mannoury, her mother’s grandfather. Mannoury, a mathematician, philosopher, and communist, focused his studies on how language shapes human perception of the world, developing a Dutch variant of linguistic philosophy called “Significa.” One of his key concepts involves how to imagine a images by words. He does that by describing an specfic visual moment —a dark background with white dots—that should be universally envisioned in the same way based solely on textual description. This inspired to an artistic research of the impossibility of visualizing trauma.
The installation comprises 11 photographs and 1 video. The photo series features family photographs that have been re-photographed and resized, capturing traces of lamplight or sunlight reflected on the photographic surface through which the passage of time becomes visible. These photographs were taken during my interview with Roos. Some images include visually added text resembling a watermark, consisting of answers by Roos during the interview as she looks back at her time in Israel in the eighties while visiting family there for the first time and thinks back on the stories told about our family members who were murdered during the Shoah.
Mother’s History centers around the memory of pre-war ideals and a second generation postwar trauma, by abstraction of the narrative trough the photographic image and language.
video. Time:17 min
11 photographs size between 160×130 and 25×30 cm
( in collection of Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam)
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