January 1, 2014
memory history media-theory philosophy

To Forget

by Lydia Nsiah

For millennia on end, the ocean has blindly pursued its work of eroding and remodelling: […] the result (a landscape) really has to have something to say about the resistance and weakness of the shore, of the nature of its rocks and its soil, of its faults and fractures […].1

The sea spills over again and again onto the firm structure of a bunker. It seems to disappear from view our entirely — at least for a moment, until the forgotten and out of mind structure resurfaces again.

Archived Material (OmeU)2 filmed in 2013 uses a visual aesthetic, in order to remind the spectators of the historic context of the analog documentary film material. Accompanied by the correspondent track Archived Material,3 we hear Henri Lavrillat talking about his time in compulsory work service building Atlantic Wall bunkers on Cap Ferret in the early 1940s: ’Everyone has seen the movies showing the Allied troop landings, everyone has seen what happened.’ Contemporary documents like this one are available on Youtube en masse. The historic, analog film recordings are converted into Preview-Mode4, which is common on digital video-platforms. The analog film grain interweaves with the digital pixels of reduced video-imagery. This process merges past and present moving-image technologies is developed further in Archived Material. In his black and white video, the artist Markus Oberndorfer digitally combines his own mobile phone recordings of the contemporary disappearing bunkers with a documentary film from 1944, that has been uploaded onto YouTube. Without particularly focussing on the historic recordings of the Aliied landings in Normandy again, Oberndorfer appropriates and doubles their visual aesthetics by digitally layering them. By dissolving the different image masks, his high resolution mobile phone footage transforms into rainy, grainy celluloid that seems to be wearing a pixel-cloak. While a haze of analog film sits on the surface, the layering of the video provides pixels in the background (and vice ver- sa). Uploaded in Preview Quality, the video floats in the digital depths of the online archives of Vimeo and Youtube5 — available to share - and comment for everyone and only one click away from finding it’s way into our memory and therefore into remembering (and forgetting).6 Through title and imagery, Archived Material — in constant relation to the present — references to the past; today‘s absent. Present and past are reflected in the narrative and technical layers of the videos. In the captured scenery, the musical backdrop, the statements by contemporary witness Lavrillat, the filmic image-haze and the reduction of the video- image into today’s widely spread Preview Mode.

In the artistic approaches and appropriations of the Atlantic Wall bunkers on Cap Ferret that he has carried out since 2005, Oberndorfer addresses memory. Using photography, photofilm and performance as a medium for memory he considers the blanks and fragments, which are part of the process of disappearance7 and forgetting. Marc Augé describes forgetting with the help of a metaphor: The ocean as something renewing — swaying between the bottom of the sea and its level until it slopes over into our memory. We forget, remember, forget and remember again. For Augé remembering and forgetting bear close relation to each other as vital regulating principles of remembrance.8 Forgetting is essential to cope with our everyday lives or to free ourselves from negatively connoted events of the past and start fresh. A circumstance pointed out by numerous writers, scientists and artists.9
Forgetting and remembering are based on a storage- and archival-system, that‘s structure might resemble a palimpsest: Content stored in our memory (experiences, images, sounds, smells,…) overlap. In constant correlation, forgetting and remembering coordinate the virtualisation and actualisation of what we experience and perceive.10 According to that, the ultimate deletion of memories is impossible. At any point in time the forgotten could make its way out of one of the countless layers of our memory, back into our consciousness: and we remember.

’In effect, the initial impulse to memorialize events like the Holocaust may actually spring from an opposite and equal desire to forget them.’11

With Foukauld and Autrement on devient fou… (OmdU) Oberndorfer evokes this kind of recollection. For example by taking photos of the spray-painted Atlantic Wall bunkers.12 The young graffiti artists admittedly know about the charged history attached to them but rarely use it as an opportunity to make references in their tags: ’We don’t think too much about the origins of these buildings, as we weren’t here at that time. For us they are just cool walls to paint on. The bunkers have lost their primary function, they are just ’vestiges’ of an ancient war we haven’t known.’13 Through this kind of oblivion however, a resurgence of meanings is generated, the forgotten is remembered and the absent is present. ’The inclusion and remembrance of the processual, ephemeral and fragmentary is distinctive of an art production, that considers its own disappearance and oblivion.’14
In the performative project ’Se Souvenir’15 Oberndorfer breaks with his photographic distance and, not without reference to the graffiti artists and Henri Lavrillat, closes in on the bunkers. He covered the rough surface of the spray-painted bunkers that are sinking in the sand, with printed, bilingual transcripts of his interview with Henri Lavrillat and looks into his past. ’To be honest, seeing them crumble like this… What I say now may sound harsh, but I don‘t mind… not any more.’16
Walkers arrive on the scene, curiously posing questions, looking inward and joining the reminiscence. By using thin A2-paper, that hardly withstands the sea and the sand, Oberndorfer emphasises the creative potential of disappearance and oblivion — not only with a focus on his own artistic work, but also with respect to Lavrillat’s memories, that were put down (and literally up) on paper. Lavrillat talks about his past experiences and unintentionally also points to the fragmentary nature of his memories, to what he has forgotten: After a month he managed to leave Cap Ferret and meet his pregnant wife in Montpon. She had bought two squabs for him. ’I was watching you, you ate those two doves neck and crop. You were scoffing everything’, she said to her husband afterwards. Lavrillat speaks of a situation that he, himself, does not remember. Instead his wife does and her tale finds it’s way into Lavrillat’s memory. Every recollection and everything that has been forgotten is subjectively controlled and essentially fictional.
We can imagine how Henri sits in this restaurant scoffing the doves pinched with hunger as if it was part of our own memory — but without really coming close to the affective and visual associations of Mrs Lavrillat, who actually experienced it and remembers.

Memories can blur and change — that’s the passage of time. In this context, Theresa Georgen mentions Sophie Calle’s artistic event M’AS-TU-VUE,17 in which the artist questions passersby about their recollections in regard to GDR-emblems that were removed in the 1990s. Visible in Berlin’s urban space, they disappeared from one day to the other — and with them, the immediate past‘s references connected to them. Many, even before, have not been attracted by the emblems, and if, only in passing — without taking the time to consciously engage with them.18 That shows, that the mere presence of references, of monuments does not automatically trigger a reflexive engagement of our own history. Only through the disappearance of these monuments, the forgotten is remembered. This antithesis, defined by the term counter monument19, has been increasingly addressed by artists in the early nineties: ’In its conceptual self-deconstruction, the counter-monument refers not only to its own physical impermanence, but also to the contingency of all meaning and memory – especially that embodied in a form that insists on its eternal fixity.’20
Counter monuments can not be defined as permanently existent, as actual realisation of the forgotten, as memory and commemoration. They remember by positioning the process of forgetting, not-knowing — with the help of visualising disappearance — on the same level as remembering and show, that it is (im)possible to remember something that has never been experienced: Jochen Gerz’s and Esther Shaleve-Gerz’s ’Harburger Monument Against Fascism’ from 1986 is probably one of the most well known counter monument events.
After a short (seven year long) period of visibility it has now entirely disappeared. Their twelve meters high counter monument, built from aluminium as requested by the artists, should be inscribed, painted, spray-painted and marked by passersby. The more people chose to interact with the structure, the more it was lowered into the ground. The presence and attendance of the artwork is directly related to its absence, its disappearance. ‘In the long run, it is only we ourselves who can stand up against injustice.‘21
But the performative quality of absence can also lead to unintentional repercussions for creators: Olu Oguibe‘s Monument for Strangers and Refugees (2017) for example has been shown as an installation during documenta 14 in Kassel until it was vandalised in 2018 and eventually removed on behalf of the city of Kassel in October (of the same year) without the consent of the artist.22
When Markus Oberndorfer reminisces by writing- and pasting over the bunkers covered by graffiti he also exposes previously absent visual traces. He tells us of the Nazi regime‘s war-monuments by papering over their presence with ephemeral material and highlights them by doing so. Henri Lavrillat‘s experiences overlap with the (forgetting) artistic expression of the graffiti artists and the (remembering) artistic event of Markus Oberndorfer. With the written (and german) translation of Lavrillat’s story, Se Souvenir refers back to the memories of the contemporary witness and the today‘s absent. The concrete bunkers become a counter monument and are surrendered to nature with one last visual flash — ’a little like Frankenstein’s monster, a golem out of the maker’s control’.23They transform into a lively mirror for our own memories and their oblivion in the palimpsest of the creative process. Lavrillat’s stories will be forgotten and the bunkers will eventually disappear. They will become one of many layers in the ground; their presence however survives in their absence, in our memory.

This essay was written for “Autrement on devient fou…(OmdU)“. Published in German, English & French as part of an e-book version of the corresponding book. Lydia Nsiah: Artist, writer and researcher.

Notes:

This essay was written for “Autrement on devient fou…(OmdU)” by Lydia Nsiah.

Footnotes

  1. Marc Augé, Oblivion, Minneapolis 2004, p. 20 ff. ↩

  2. Video, BW, 16:9, 3’41”, Stereo, Cap Ferret/Wien 2014 (2022). ↩

  3. The track Markus Oberndorfer produced using samples from archived vinyl records is reminiscent of melancholic, French Hip Hop, particularly produced during the mid 90s. By giving the video the same title as the music track and by using archived audio-material, Oberndorfer makes referral to the archive as a place of remembrance and storage. ↩

  4. Cf. Rick Prelinger, The Appearance of Archives, in: Pelle Snickars, Patrick Vonderau (Hg.), The YouTube Reader, Stockholm 2009, 268–274, p. 268. ↩

  5. https://vimeo.com/91806017 (13. 9. 2014 / remastered 28.3.2022). ↩

  6. Video-platforms are archives of paradoxical nature: They pretend to archive moving images, but ultimately don’t bother about longterm conservation, let alone the contextualisation of provided content. Cf. Lydia Nsiah, Back to the Future; Mark Greif, WeTube, in: Bluescreen, Berlin 2011, p.155–167. ↩

  7. Disappearance in this case is not meant as a final process: Similar to forgetting, something that has been considered as vanished, can resurface again, whether through natural, human or technological powers. ↩

  8. Marc Augé, Oblivion; Cf. also: André Blum, Theresa Georgen, Wolfgang Knapp (Hg.), Potentiale des Vergessens, Würzburg 2012. ↩

  9. Zum Vergessen in Kunst, Film und Literatur, Cf. also: Das Werk von Audre Lorde, Octavia E. Butler, Lydia Davis, James Baldwin, Zadie Smith, Andy Warhol i.e. | Michael Glasmeier (Hg.), Vergessen, Köln 1997 | NGBK (Hg.), Der Blinde Fleck/ The Blind Spot, Ausstellungskatalog, Berlin 2008 | Walter Benjamin, Zum Bilde Prousts (1929), in: Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 11.1, Franktfurt a. M. 1977, 310–324 | Zu Studien zum Vergessen, Also: Christine Abbt, „Ich vergesse“ – Über Möglichkeiten und Grenzen des Denkens aus philosophischer Perspektive, Frankfurt/New York 2016 | Harald Weinrich, Lethe: Kunst und Kritik des Vergessens, München 1997. ↩

  10. Cf. Blum, Georgen, Knapp (Hg.), Potentiale des Vergessens. ↩

  11. James E. Young, The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today, in: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 18/No. 2, 267–296, p. 273. ↩

  12. Cf. Markus Oberndorfer (Hg.), Foukauld, 2012; Markus Oberndorfer (Hg.), Autrement on devient fou… (OmdU), 2014. ↩

  13. Cf. Markus Oberndorfer, Disappearance – The Atlantic Wall around Cap Ferret, in: Oberndorfer (Hg.), Foukauld, p. 61. ↩

  14. Theresa Georgen, Die Dynamik von Erinnern und Vergessen in der Kunst der Moderne, in: Blum, Georgen, Knapp (Hg.), Potentiale, 207–224, p. 207. ↩

  15. La Pointe du Cap Ferret (19. 9. 2013 –21. 9. 2013), Intervention, Texte auf Papier (D/F). ↩

  16. La Pointe du Cap Ferret (19. 9. 2013 –21. 9. 2013), Intervention, Texte auf Papier (D/F). ↩

  17. Cf. Sophie Calle, M’AS-TU-VUE, München/Berlin/London/New York 2003. ↩

  18. Cf. Georgen, Die Dynamik. ↩

  19. Cf. Young, The Counter-Monument. ↩

  20. Ibid., p. 295. ↩

  21. Cf. http://fhh1.hamburg.de/Behoerden/Kulturbehoerde/Raum/artists/gerz.html(20.09.2014). ↩

  22. Cf. Laurel V. McLaughlin, As Strangers and Refugees: Olu Oguibe’s performing monument, ttps://monumentlab.com/bulletin/as-strangers-and-refugees-olu- oguibes-performing-monument (28. 3. 2022) ↩

  23. Young, The Counter-Monument, p. 284. ↩