français            polski 

 

WARSAW - MALKINIA                                                                                                                 

2013. Video installation.

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The installation consists of four videos showing the train journey from Warsaw to Małkinia, the last station before Treblinka, where an extermination camp was located during the Second World War. The video was filmed on August 23, 2010, the anniversary of the deportation of Jankiel Wiernik from the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka. The reading of his testimony, published in 1944, constitutes the background sound of the installation.

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By creating the contrast between an ordinary train journey and the description of the life of a deportee, who in 1942 traveled the same path to death camp, the installation makes the history of the Shoah less abstract. Unlike cinema, which plays on identification, the installation - through its spatial arrangement, the desynchronization between sound and image and the absence of characters - creates a distance. The reflection is not overwhelmed by emotion, the reference to the past does not exclude the present. Provoking an association of ideas between train travel and deportation, it aims to perpetuate the memory of the Shoah.