Without images, there is no memory, and without memory, there is no history. When we talk about images, we are also talking about language, memory, and knowledge. Starting from this premise, we can assert that the tragedy of the Shoah must be possible to imagine. Far away from Adorno's thoughts, which denied the possibility of poetry after this disaster, the circumstance posed the sublimity of Auschwitz, making horror inconceivable and unspeakable, concepts that, in the future, bear the weight of forgetfulness. Can we then continue to argue, nowadays, that there is no way to represent the Shoah?
Elizabeth Dychter takes a defined stance of resistance and proposes an image for such atrocity; the sculptural ceramics is the chosen means through which she translates her father's experiences in Auschwitz. Those torsos with bowed heads that reveal their drama in the cracking of the glaze, figures of those marching towards the trains, without distinguishing features, anonymous, their identities lost.
The artist presents us with a history of horror but with a renewed interpretation, since she did not live through such circumstances. Undoubtedly, addressing historical trauma from an aesthetic perspective presents disagreements and ambiguities, but the truth is that every memory could be laden with these concerns because there is no singular and all-encompassing collective memory.
This shows us that the resistance of the images represented in this sculptural corpus entails that history does not close and paves the way for these events not to fall into oblivion.
Luciana Acuña
Arte Mediante
Curatorial Team