Artist’s statement
“After Gaza” does not mean that the Gaza genocide is over—not only because the genocide is ongoing, but because Gaza, like the Shoah and the Nakba, will never be over. “Never again” feels like “the hope” that Benjamin said was for those who have none.
Theodor Adorno said that poetry “after Auschwitz” is barbaric, but you only live “after Auschwitz” if you realize that you do. It becomes a way of seeing things. My mother was a Jewish refugee who left Romania for Switzerland in 1941. For me, now 78, much of my life has been lived after Auschwitz began to shape my sense of the world. But what has “after Auschwitz” become “after Gaza”? After the realization that Gaza will never be over, and that now, in the light of the Gaza genocide, Auschwitz will also appear in its light.
I live in a safe, protected space, but the desolations of Gaza (even from a distance) can transform the look (and the life) of things. Using a camera phone, I start with photographs of things I live with—trees, chairs, wall-shadows, burnt matches, cannabis ashes. As I work with the limited editing technology that the camera phone provides, I find icons in the photographs that seem to witness ongoing catastrophes—Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan . . . to witness and to be witnessed. I find what I can see but have hardly been prepared to know how to see.
