January 1, 2013
photography memory history philosophy

Se Souvenir

by Markus Oberndorfer

German, French, German, French, … The languages alternate poster by poster on the bunker walls Henri Lavrillat was forced to build in 1941 during compulsory work service, the walls I have studied and captured in my photographs over the last few years. By doing so, I have created a temporary photographic installation in the recreation area of Cap Ferret, which combines two of my projects, “Autrement on devient fou…” and “Foukauld – La Disparition”. These projects, which both describe the processes of remembering and imagining, but from completely different perspectives, are contextually and performatively united, even if only for a short time, in the very place where it all happened.

On 19 and 20 September 2013, I glued approximately 160 posters – each with a complete transcript of the interview in the two languages, and in justified alignment without borders, see fig. xx, p. xx – to the bunker walls. Standing in front of the bunkers, the observers who read start with the language they most closely identify with. However, they have to stop reading when they get to the next poster. The vertical ‘divide’ between the individual posters glued one next to the other (where German and French billboards intersect) is a reference to the division of France during WW2 as well as a reminder that language does not only create identity, it also reveals differences in identity.
While I was touching the rough bunker walls formed by both man and nature, smoothing the countless posters with my palms, I realized that I was bruising myself. This eye-opening insight, and the conversations I had with passers-by, made me understand what it really meant to unite the two projects (for the duration of the “Se Souvenir” intervention), also in terms of completing my work on the disappearance of the German fortifications at Cap Ferret. I am not talking about understanding the concept, but about the moment in which I, as a visual artist who mainly uses photography and usually looks at things from a distance, became directly involved in the process of change. In this moment, I stopped being an observer and became someone who was being photographed, who was being confronted with the past, who was being questioned and observed. This role change enabled me to actively interact with what I call the pre-existing, which I usually just interpret and capture. To me, the pre-existing is essentially everything a place presents to me, everything that has an attractive force so strong as to pull me out of my ordinary life and thoughts or even makes me feel concerned. (This is what Hermann Schmitz calls “the onset of the sudden in a moment of primitive present”.)

During my “Se Souvenir” intervention – at least while I was putting up the posters and until the last posters have disappeared from the walls – I was actively involved in the on-site process of change, which I formerly used to just ‘capture’. One aim of the project was to explore the potential of a setting through alienation or practice-led spatial design” and both show and scrutinise the spatial innovation potential resulting from the discrepancy between designated purpose and practical function.1
During my extensive analysis of the content and practical implementation of Henri Lavrillat’s interview, I came to think about how individual statements could be interpreted against a metaphorical, i.e. not purely fact-based, background. When one (ON*) leaves Henri Lavrillat’s (JE*) directional space of remembered subjective facts, one puts history in a different context and observes and interprets it from the perspective of a third person (IL*).

*“One has seen the movies” – Someone who was not present is only remotely (if at all) able to imagine what someone else experienced based on what one has seen, e.g. in documentary films. see fig. above.

*“When I see them like that …” – Here, Henri Lavrillat is speaking of himself. However, if one interprets “I” not only as referring to Henri Lavrillat, but to “oneself”, the statement is true for everybody who imagines what happens “when he (or she) sees them like that”. see fig. xx, p. xx.

*“He imagines” – He (or she) is the person who poses questions and interprets the pre-existing. It could be, for example, the man (or woman) who is standing right over there. see fig. xx, p. xx.

The quotes on the bunker walls, which you can see in the figures, play with the spectators who read and their direct personal experience of that place. They attract them, they try to get them involved, and they aim to raise questions about what happens outside this seemingly objective perspective that we build (as a constellation) from the enumeration and connection of individual facts, programmes and problems. The aim is to lead the spectators to their own experience of the subjective facts (i.e. everything someone can recount in his/her own name at best).2 Subjective facts are what happens to the spectators, when they openly experience the site.
Since we (as human beings) have the ability to think and put facts in relation to each other, we are prejudiced when we pose questions about the past. In spite (or paradoxically because) of that, the questions we ask ourselves about the reception of history and the media lead to answers to related questions about the multiperspectivity of perception, memory, authenticity, performance in everyday life and the way future generations will deal with cultural heritage.

The more we know, the more remains unknown. In other words: The faster the information flow, the more we realize, how fragmented and incomplete it is.3

Whatever questions may arise – from the quotes on the bunker walls, the interview, the intervention or the reading spectators’ own reflections on what they have read and seen, and whatever answers we may find – against the background of a collective memory, the interview (as a narrated memory)4 is no more than one of an infinite number of parts in the puzzle of experiences and perspectives. Nevertheless, for a listener, the privilege to hear a story first hand is equivalent to experiencing this (hi)story. Only if we keep an open mind when we dive into a story – similar to a child listening to a story teller, like in Jeff Wall’s “A Ventriloquist at a Birthday Party in October 1947” – will history (as established by the authority of the narrator) become somehow concrete and alive, because it will affect us directly. The life of human beings (and of animals) is characterised by their exploitation of situations. These situations cannot be fully exploited as they have a pre-existing significance which does not need to be given to them. Individual facts, programmes and problems, and, as a result even individual things, can be explicitly extracted from this diffuse but holistic significance and transformed into sentences of speech (translation; cf. Hermann Schmitz: Situationen und Konstellationen, Verlag Karl Alber 2005, p.9).

What is true for explicit sentences of speech (e.g. Henri Lavrillat’s narration), must therefore also be true for a protocol of such speech – for example a transcript – and for photographs and documentary films. All these are details of the environment we experience. By explicating this lived environment, we leave markers that help us re-enter it again if we would like to do so.5

An event is created (for ourselves and all those who were not there) by a text (or by a photograph). An event has happened, but it will take shape only after having been embedded in a network of ratings, classifications and texts. Obviously, an event requires someone to be present; its tense is the present tense, its spatial dimension is someone’s presence. However, the physical presence of several persons does not guarantee that they speak of the same thing. Nothing can replace the direct (and unique) experience of an event.6

I carried out the “Se Souvenir” intervention in a public space without giving advance notice to avoid biasing the direct experience of the intervention and the process of remembering. In this twilight zone of planned and unpredictable events, the performance constantly re-generates itself in the personal present of each “participant”. The shared situations I had with passers-by during the intervention – no matter if they were interested, irritated or did not even come closer (like dreamy, solitary walkers) – are the situations all those who were present can (at least in theory) remember, provided that they wish to do so.

‘I see it right before my eyes, as if I was there…’ (Henri Lavrillat)

From Henri Lavrillat’s use of an if-clause we can infer that he ‘sees’ something that is not in the same place in which he is when he utters these words. The process of ‘remembering’ always happens in the present, but in the very same moment, the person who remembers dives into the sea of memories, which are part of the past.
What becomes apparent when, for the purpose of an interview, an intelligent and experienced 91-year-old man tries to put his memories in a chronological order and compress them to a few hours, is that he is able to bring back especially those events which, when they happened, abruptly pulled him out of the steady continuity of his ordinary life.7 His memories are so vivid and detailed that he almost believes to see the actual events in the same way as in the past. Current, impressive and segmented situations8 blend in with personal situations. It is this mixture of memories and related facts we have collected over the years from which we create our reality and our past.
”In the trace, we gain possession of the thing; in the aura, it takes possession of us”.9 To put Walter Benjamin’s words in the context of this last performative part of my work: In texts, movies and photographs – as details of a more complex whole – we take possession of history (as a series of facts). When we create subjective facts based on our own feelings (like in the personal present that is performative action), history takes possession of us and we are able to experience it.

It is the ‘culture of feelings’ that turns a given place into habitable space, in a way everyone can feel, and that creates an atmosphere that makes life, which is always life-threatening, worth living.10

By the same token, my photographs of a deserted camp site in Cap Ferret (during wintertime), when put in relation to Lavrillat’s story, are a reference to the architectural similarities between the former camps of the workers during the construction of the Atlantic Wall and the bungalows that accommodate the ever increasing number of holiday makers in today’s recreational area. Both the former camps and today’s bungalows are similar in design, and both are temporary and purpose-oriented. Henri Lavrillat’s experiences in Cap Ferret interact with the images I made in ‘my photographic present’. This interaction builds a bridge between the two historical actualities of now and then, which allows us to experience cross references that would not have been possible if I had used archive material. As the concrete bunkers disappear in the sea, taking with them their historical, local and temporal connections, and as those who experienced this part of history in person will eventually be dead, the place itself approaches an emotional sphere which yet remains to be filled again.

‘When I see them crumble, it is like my bad memories of Cap Ferret crumble with them.’ (Henri Lavrillat)

As the remnants of total war, still visible as objects, vanish in the sand and the sea, the lived space related to them gradually empties. In the same manner, the possibility to be part of an event of a historical narration dies with the last survivor. The disappearance of the last survivors marks a new age in the reception of this historical episode, which – in a few years’ time – no one will have experienced in person. When contemporary history becomes history, subsequent generations face the difficult task of identifying the relevant fragments of this (hi)story, in order to either reflect on it or compare it to the world around them.
It is just as legitimate to use a bunker as a canvas for graffiti (at least for me, but by now also for Henri Lavrillat) as it is important to remember the history behind the bunker walls.

In principle, the titles of both my books (and both individual but intertwined projects) “Autrement on devient fou…” and “Foukauld” have the same aim: In reciprocal interaction, they refer to the game of disassembling and completing, a game that is also manifest in remembering and writing history. Fou… (with five full stops) and “Foukauld”11 could suggest to the attentive reader who deliberately pronounces both titles one after the other (“fou…” and “Foukauld”) that they are connected beyond the three letters they share. In order to complete, one has to disassemble, and vice versa. If we therefore look at the titles more closely, “Fou” is followed by the hard German consonant “K”, which (like the German bunkers in France) can be seen as an enclave, dividing the French name “Foucauld” in two parts – just as the Third Reich divided France.

As Henri Lavrillat put it:
One ought to be a philosopher…

This essay was written for “Autrement on devient fou…(OmdU)” and published in German & French as part of the corresponding book.

Notes:

Footnotes

  1. Saskia Hebert: Gebaute Welt, Gelebter Raum, Jovis 2012. ↩

  2. Hermann Schmitz: Situationen und Konstellationen, Der gespürte Leib, Verlag Karl Alber 2005, p. 138 et seq. ↩

  3. Paul Virilio, Ästhetik des Verschwindens, German edition, Merve Verlag 1986, p. 51 ↩

  4. Aleida & Jan Assmann: Kultur als Schrift und Gedächtnis, in: Stephan Moebius, Theorien der Gegenwart, VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften 2011, p. 550 ff. ↩

  5. Hermann Schmitz, Situationen und Konstellationen, Verlag Karl Alber 2005, p.9. ↩

  6. Saskia Hebert: Gebaute Welt/ Gelebter Raum, Jovis 2012, p. 135 ↩

  7. Dieter Mersch, Zur Struktur des ästhetischen Ereignisses, in Anna Blume (ed.), Zur Phänomenologie der ästhetischen Erfahrung, Verlag Karl Alber 2005. ↩

  8. Hermann Schmitz, Situationen und Konstellationen, Verlag Karl Alber 2005, p.71. ↩

  9. Hermann Schmitz, Was ist Neue Phänomenologie, Ingo Koch Verlag 2003, p.89-97. ↩

  10. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Werke V.1, Das Passagen-Werk,Frankfurt/Main 1982, p. 560. ↩

  11. Markus Oberndorfer (Ed.), Foukauld, Fotohof edition, 2012. ↩