Tacheles

First time I arrived in Berlin I went to visit the famous art-house Tacheles. I was especially taken with an exhibition titled “Global Warning”, but it’s not the exhibition itself I want to talk about here, but rather, the way it was portrayed in Tacheles; the massive drawings, which could have easily decorated the walls of a museum, were scattered on the floor or “sat” on chairs leaning against the walls; the place was not tidy nor clean and the guy standing at the entrance, who looked like a homeless person, was actually the artist. I spent a long hour talking with him about his works, his masterpieces, actually.

I find in Tacheles a good metaphor for my research method in Berlin. Before I clarify this comparison, I ought to say a few words about the research itself: I was granted a DAAD Kunststipendium to conduct research at the Visual History Archives (VHA) of the Freie Universität, hosting the Steven Spielberg Holocaust Foundation Institute.
Inspired by his experience making Schindler’s List, Mr. Spielberg established the Survivors of the Shoah (Holocaust) Visual History Foundation which, within several years, held some 52,000 video testimonies in 32 languages representing 56 countries; it is the largest archive of its kind in the world.

My interest in the archives has to do with a script I’m writing. What I’m looking for there is the evasive thing called: human subjectivity. I can only presume that some of the survivors give inaccurate information in their testimonies. After all, they are asked to recall events which happened over 60 years ago; in some cases when they themselves were quite young or too young to remember; and especially so when dealing with a traumatic ordeal, which has its own ways to play with your mind.
But the way the memory is told – even if no place could be found for it within the pages of a history book – is exactly what defines those who tell it. It’s what makes it subjective.

Back to my comparison: a museum is like a history book; there they would treat the memory with silk gloves, hang it on the wall in a room with a humid-meter and beside it you would find a few selected words about the artist himself. It would be forbidden to take any pictures of the memory, let alone to touch it. There would be no one doubting its authenticity there. And that’s a good thing; so it should be.

But we should also be allowed to visit other “exhibitions” of memory; ones like in Tacheles, where you could meet it in “eye-level”, where you could touch it, have a cigarette with it, confront it with difficult questions. A museum and an art-house (like Tacheles) together give a more complete picture of art, if such a thing as a complete picture of art actually exists; history books and personal testimonies together give a more complete picture of history – a truly complete one probably doesn’t exist.

I will give some examples of my research method during the following weeks in the form of short stories which are inspired by the testimonies I view; I will also try and explain a little about the original testimonies vs. my adaptation of it.
I often try to identify common narratives within several testimonies and then combine them into a single story of a single protagonist. I try to write them plain, honest, straightforward – Tacheles.