Things. Places. Years.
The knowledge of Jewish Women. Absence and Presence.
Vienna and London. A documentary in process.

Outline.
'Things. Places. Years' focuses on Jewish Women and their contribution to cultural production in London and other cities of the UK. Our protagonists are Jewish Women of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd generation after the holocaust. The project aims to investigate and document the different spaces where Jewish Women's knowledge is produced, preserved, passed on and redefined. We want to look at how this knowledge is represented in libraries, books, music or film as well as in urban spaces or in every day life, where it is passed on from mouth to mouth – from grandmother to mother to daughter to grand- daughter – or remembered and reconstructed from names of streets or buildings, from public spaces and their histories. The project shall consist of a photographic research, of a series of interviews on video and of a documentary film for TV and cinema.

State of Project.
From November 2000 until February 2001 we have been in London and interviewed 11 women there. A key issue which more and more crystallised as the most important one while talking to these women was place, the notion of place. One of the questions asked in the interviews was which places were important for them in terms of their own histories as Jewish Women and their work in the cultural field. The question was asked in a way that they could refer to urban spaces in London as well as to places of knowledge and cultural production like museums or other institutions. Also they could refer to places in the city where they felt comfortable or just enjoyed going to. And of course they could refer, and many did, to the absent and inaccessible place – Vienna/Austria, the place where their relatives and friends had been killed, the place where they or their (grand)parents had to flee from, the place, where they could never come back to without immediate suspicion and prejudice, especially today. One of the women interviewed discussed the meaning of place and its role in defining one's identity. She said that she – whose parents fled from Vienna, who had to deal with their history of escape, holocaust and emigration in her childhood and youth, who went to Israel to find out if she wanted to live there – could never think of a place as her 'own'. We, on the other hand, the interviewers living and working in Vienna, have a place, more precisely we 'own' this very place, where our (grand)parents weren't killed in the holocaust, where no one ever questioned that we and our relatives and friends are where we are and what we are.

Concept and Position.
When talking about presence and absence, about lack and loss, this means entirely different things – according to who is speaking. Thus descendants of survivors of the holocaust speak of 'The Presence of the Absence' (Katherine Klinger) and thereby mean the presence of the loss of their whole family, the loss of their parents' mother tongue, the loss of places their parents loved, places that still exist in Vienna – unchanged until today. But what does 'The Presence of the Absence' signify for us, as descendants of the perpetrator society? It means to deal with 'The Past in the Present' (Ulf Wuggenig), to work against the old and new anti-semitism and racism that Jews and Migrants are confronted with in Austria today.

From debates, discussions and co-operations with migrants we have learned that majoritarians (which we both are: white, citizenship-owners, non-Jewish, non-migrant ...) have to reflect their own history and position in society, and that differences between women have to be discussed and negotiated in order to develop strategies to act up against the old and new racisms (and sexisms) which are more and more legitimised especially in Austria, where a racist party is in government now.

It is this context, the participation of the racist freedom party in government, the normalisation of SS slogans like 'Meine Ehre heißt Treue' (which was used by a politician of the freedom party without any consequences), the increasing violence against migrants and members of the Jewish Community in Austria which led us to the project: 'Things. Places. Years'. We think that a public visibility of anti-racist positions of Migrant Wo/men and Jewish Wo/men is necessary in order to establish a political counter position against state racism (and - sexism) in Austria. With the project we want to contribute to a discussion between Jewish Wo/men's and Migrant Wo/men's politics and think about ways of making these discussions, positions, politics more visible in public.

Photo Research and Video.
The photo research shall document the presence of Jewish Women's cultural production in London and other cities of the UK. A presence which is an absence, a loss in Vienna, the city where Jewish culture and knowledge has been expelled from forcefully, the city where both of us live. Where in London, in the UK are books, works of art or music visible that these women have been and are producing? Who makes their knowledge accessible to others? And in which ways? How is Jewish Women's knowledge represented in these cities' libraries or other spaces of education and cultural production? Which meaning and importance does it have in every day life?

The video shall comprise interviews with Jewish Women who emigrated from Vienna to London, to England. We also want to talk to their daughters and grand- daughters, to represent the view of the 2nd and 3rd generation of Women with a Jewish background, to find out about their interests and experiences, and about the impact of their histories of emigration, of diaspora, of the holocaust on how they see themselves in society today – socially, politically and culturally.

Furthermore we want to interview those women, who are collecting, cataloguing and systematising Jewish (Women's) knowledge thus making it visible and at the same time accessible to others – in libraries or museums for example.

Way of Working.
Finally one word on our way of working with film and video: Klub Zwei see their projects as co-operations between us and the women involved. We want to question authoritative film- and video making that reserves decision-taking for the film-makers only while the ones interviewed are regarded as objects. Therefore we aim to establish co-operative structures in the process of making a film or video. Both content and visual realisation of the video shall be discussed and decided upon together with the women interviewed.

Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves and not anything else, by the immobility of our conception of them. For it always happened that when I awoke like this, and my mind struggled in an unsuccessful way to discover where I was, everything revolved around me through the darkness: things, places, years.
(Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, p. 6, translated by C. K.Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin)

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