Per Noi: conversations with the ancestors

(New work in Progress, Platinum/Palladium Prints)

A cemetery is thought of as a place for memorializing a loved one, a place to say goodbye, a place for reflection on one’s own mortality. More interestingly, cemeteries are a place to have a conversation with an ancestor, a place to ask for advice or work out a problem. These images invite communication, contemplation, and connection. They remind us to take guidance from the wisdom and the energy of the ages.

Responding to the inner turmoil caused by what seemed to me to be the explosion of anger and divisive hatred around the US, I began to look to the past to find reassurance that we would survive this moment, once again find balance, and come together as humans instead of adversaries.

Conversations with the Ancestors is a project that has grown out of spending the last several summers visiting Florence, Venice, Rome and Berlin. I began my journey to the past by visiting my favorite Monastery in Florence, Italy, San Miniato al Monte, and wandering the crypts. They seemed to call to me. To say, “come in, have a seat, listen to our stories”. These seemed invitations to converse with the ancestors fed directly into my desire for us to remember the events and hatred that led our world into WWII and to correct the course of our current society.

As a person of Jewish heritage my first trip to Berlin was filled with intense emotion. I visited the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the Jewish Museum Berlin, and the Stiftung Neue Synagoge. I spent time at Checkpoint Charlie, the Berlin Wall Memorial, and then wound up at the Topography of Terror exhibition which only solidified my dread and foreboding by featuring rhetoric from pre-WWII that seemed to me identical to words I was hearing from many sources such as Breitbart.

So once again I found solace at the cemeteries, but this time the Jewish ones. Whereas in Italy I found the invitation to visit, in Berlin I found the evidence of the visitor. In the Jewish tradition, when we visit a friend or family member who has passed we leave a stone behind to say we were here, we haven’t forgotten. In Berlin, the Jewish cemeteries were devastated in the war. Once completely desecrated, all the tombstones removed and destroyed, and the other the stones still there but cracked, broken or knocked down. And yet, in both places, people still come, they still visit and converse and hopefully learn and garner hope from the fact that as humans we survived and grew and healed even from the horrors of the holocaust. 

By combining the images from Italy and Germany I want to tell a story of hope that I believe we need now in this culture of division, anger and diminished respect for individual freedoms.

 For as we know,

“Those who can not remember the past are condemned to repeat it” George Santayana