Here and and the floor is yours
Okay. Well, thank you. Thank you so much. Lori Thank You. Sarah - everybody here with PPAC
Old friends
Family new friends. I'm really glad to be here. I just want to make sure
Because we're all connecting virtually that you can hear me. Alright, cuz I got these new
Headphones, okay
Good
So I'm gonna talk to you tonight about my book a wall of our own an American history of the Berlin wall
I'm gonna share my screen in a moment. It's a book that I spent over ten years researching and writing and thinking about
while in Berlin and a few other cities and then coming home to Philadelphia to finish it and
I think you know in my work I look at border walls and monuments and how artists help us understand
Generational forms of social change how to take some of the most painful traumatic and unjust stories and
places and sites and aim to not just
mark them but really to confront them and to be democratic visionaries, and when I started this project, um
I wanted to write ten different
books, and I was in graduate school and
I went into Pro Chile's things and where I found a crossroads for all these ideas was the city of Berlin, you know
I am a
Jewish queer person who did not grow up dreaming of writing about Germany. It was told to me in my
Communities that it was a place of pain and you know and visiting as a college student and later as a graduate student. I actually
of course encountered the stories of
Trauma and of violence, but also a city in Berlin
And people who were really coming to terms with some of the most weighty history and finding all these ways to move forward by having
forms of memory live with them and art at its center and I always thought
you know Berlin moves back and forth between these different cycles of freedom and repression and
kept realizing that I was not the only one doing this and so the story of this book which I'll share with you in a
Moment is a story of a few American Berliners, but I want to bring us up in a few it's one before I begin
I'll share my screen so you can at least get the cover of the book here as we talk
Can you can you see the cover here
Let's do fullscreen. Alright, so first I want to just um
Say for tonight a person that's really important to this photograph in the story is Bridget Freed. She's Leonard Freed's
Widow and the one who printed these photographs and Bridget is feeling a little bit under the weather right now
So I'm just sending good energy out to Bridget
Because she's really a key thought partner in my work, I mean of course of Jamel Shabazz the photographer and your friend whose work
um, I
first encountered him as a college student, but I'm reading his
One of his books and identification too. One of the first photograph photographic books
he saw Leonard Freed's black-and-white America, which I'll show you is when I kind of point out that um, you know,
My work is not as an art historian
I'm trained as a historian and a curator and I used the work of artists to tell history
and so you sometimes learn the best history and the best approaches to dealing with the
challenges and struggles of history by looking to harness and learning with artists
and so I'll begin there and I'm gonna take you on a kind of
Arc of of this project and explain how the photograph you're seeing here on the cover of this book
Was taken in Berlin days after the wall went up and it's the photograph that inspired
This book my my dissertation, but also really what began my work as a curator to understand how a photograph taken
without
The intention of knowing where it would go
Led to some of the most important conversations for one photographer, but also signaled a broader
History as well
so the name of the book is a wall of our own and wall of our own it comes from a
Speech set in Berlin by an American politician with the last name named Kennedy
But it's not from the speech ich bin. Ein Berliner in 1963 said by President John F Kennedy
it was his brother who actually went to Berlin while the wall was up before him in February of
1962 and just as a quick refresher
you know after world war ii
the
the defeat of Nazi Germany the four
powers the US the British the French and the Russian split up
all of Germany and then the city of Berlin and the three Western forces the Americans
British and and French joined their forces and
Soon after we entered into a cold war with Russia, and there was no wall for the first
Approximately 15 or 16 years there was much antagonism between the two
superpowers and in August of 1961
In the middle of the night
East German government with Soviet help encircled West Berlin's
allied sectors
So that's August of 61 and by February of 62 the Attorney General Robert F
Kennedy goes to Berlin and he does all the things that were very familiar with like he goes at that point
It sees the wall and he looks over it into East Germany. He's from the west side
he's greeted by a hundred thousand and
West Berliners and at the end of the day he gives a speech at the Free University
founded with American support in 1948 and he gives a speech talking about the Cold War and how
The other side is bad and we're good
But he also says this he says for a hundred years despite our protest protestations of the quality
We had as you know
A wall of our own it's a wall of segregation erected against Negroes and his words. The wall is coming down. I
Just read this and I thought
his government his administration is
both talking about this in the past tense as if the oppression happened in the past but is
Perpetuating it in the same moment and it at the same time. It was a rare moment of reflexivity to say
Hey, I'm here to talk to you about
Democracy from the West but we have our own wall and I thought this was remarkable
but then I thought back this is six months into the wall being built and I
Look back and from the days that the wall went up
African American artists activists journalists
called attention to the contradictions of the Cold War which is that we were
Guarding democracy abroad the practicing segregation back home here the Chicago Defender the Pittsburgh courier
I've looked on and when you look in the african-american press you would see these scenes here
The Atlanta's Berlin Wall. No Warsaw Ghetto open, Payton Road
We're talking about either physical boundaries across American cities that marked segregated lines or the understanding
Of de facto segregation the violent. Yeah. Sorry takes qtr you advancing in the slides
I am okay so I can you see it now. No, I think what you should do is unshare and reshare
And then let's try to start the slideshow
Yeah, unsure and reshare because that we weren't advancing
Here we go and maybe can you see it now?
Yeah, and and just maybe I'll just do it like this
Is this a little bit better? Can you see it? Yeah, that works. So the play button didn't work
Okay, there we go. So you can see this one of Atlanta's Berlin Wall. Got it
Okay. Thanks for calling that out got it. So I just wanted to call attention to like this story across a lot of American cities
Where there's either an actual wall or a fence or the symbolic ones?
here in Philadelphia
Martin Luther King in 1965 talked about the well all-around drug College
And he said that this is symbolic as the Berlin Berlin Wall is symbolic
in Selma, Alabama
on the the long struggle to
march to Montgomery to
guarantee for black residents the right to vote one day the public
official tied a rope across the street and
Residents and protesters started singing to the tune of Joshua fit the Battle of Jericho. We got a rope. That's a Berlin Wall
so I want to bring all this up because if
You know about the Berlin Wall in this and if we were in a room together
I'd ask who has a piece of the Berlin wall at home. And where do you keep it?
You know, there are certain stories that rise to the fore ich bin
ein Berliner tear down this wall, but I wanted to try to tell a different story one that took into account the
incompleteness of freedom these barriers of
Democracy that live in the United States and how looking from an artist's perspective
We can understand that and it all started with this photograph
And this is a photograph that I first read about if you can see and I saw it as a thumbnail
Online and I wrote in my grant application as many of us do when we write grant
Applications and we hope we'll find something out and we're not sure I'm going to Berlin this summer
To find more about Leonard Freed's work and I really did not have any idea
How I would do that and I really lucked out in serendipity that Leonard Freed's retrospective worldview was on display
At the CEO Museum in Berlin and I went I saw this photo
the same week that I saw candidate Barack Obama speak before the first his first presidential election and
I was with my actually my dear friend
Um Carmen Wynette who's a celebrated photographer but back then we were just like kids kicking around Berlin
She lent me money to buy my first leonard freed book and it started from there and in this image
Which was really important in Leonard's Hoover and I had never seen in person when you see something in person a photograph like this
You see details. So I saw the wall behind this
Unnamed african-american soldier I saw
Another photographer in the frame looking elsewhere. I saw this
um
You are leaving the American sector sign and it haunted me and I and I tried to learn as much as I could about this
photograph and
um, this is what kicked off the project and so when I looked into it
I found out a number of things one. I found other photographs of the Berlin Wall
if you can see here the famous leap of freedom taken by Peter leave knitting and in days after the first
Erection of the wall, but you don't see a wall here
There's just barbed wire and is from the perspective of the fleeing of an East German soldier into the so-called free West
But I also looked at all of Leonard's other photographs taken in Berlin. He went to Berlin in August of 1961
He was working on a book about German Jews who moved back to Germany after the Holocaust in the 1950s and 1960s
And when he news that
The Germans were dividing themselves yet. Again. He went to Berlin and
Many of his photos are stalking this area of the wall as we know it though. You don't really even see the wall
But he was drawn to American soldiers and in most of the frames he's taking them
Most of the images and you go back to his contact sheets. You see multiple frames
You see that he's really trying to figure out where to stand how to gather and most of the soldiers he interacts with are white
Leonard is white and Jewish and so when he is in
Germany he's thinking a lot about the reckoning the German culture has to do after the Holocaust
But in certain contexts, especially in multiracial spaces Leonard as a as a white person and he's navigating the complications
And his own privileges around race, but when I tried to find the soldier image
I looked and actually back in his contact sheets. It's a single shot
And when a single shot means we're not on our iPhones were you know?
Noah or in a different era that you're not gonna see the image you take for several
Several days if not weeks if not months
And what you see here is a whole range. We'll get the
And so it was amazing to see this and what this did is
Affirm a story that Leonard told in the book black and white America where he included this image
And you can see what he says it opens up this book
about segregation in America
It's the only photo not taken in the continental United States
And it's arguably American soil because it's the edge of the American sector in Berlin
We he and I two Americans we meet silently in part silently
Between us and pregnant will and as deadly as the wall behind him is another wall
It is there on the trolley tracks that crawls along the cobblestones
Across the frontiers and oceans reaching back home back into our lives and deep into our hearts
Dividing us wherever we meet. I am white and he is black now
I want to remind you that at the same time Leonard's working on several books about
Germany where he is taking to task the kind of
incomplete
Reckoning and reconciliation after the Holocaust we have to care for German democracy in this moment and on the flipside
He after taking this photograph in 1961 goes back to his wife in Amsterdam where they are living at the time
He's an expatriate. He says I have to go back to America
America is sick with racism. I have to understand this to me is the contradiction of American culture
He goes back to the United States on two different trips
photographs in his hometown in New York City in Brooklyn that summer in 1963
He goes to the march on Washington. We did a book with his estate with the getti
getting
publications on his unpublished book published photos from the march on Washington and
Then the next year he comes back and does a road trip starting in Baltimore the day that dr. King is
announced
In the United States that he has the Nobel Prize and then goes down to Washington DC
the first time black residents have the right to vote and goes down throughout the south and he is interested in not just
telling the story of segregation, but
Understanding the ways that white people and black people
Either see each other or fail to see each other the way that the white gaze in
One sense can overtake and be a form of dominant control but on the flip side
valuing black life black contribution black beauty culture
Some of the photographs from Leonard's work have been included in
Projects by dr. Deborah Willis
imposing beauty
and I think that there's something really important about
Leonard's work and what he's navigating is back and forth this idea of
When he is an insider when he's an outsider, and as I write about in the book trying to find a middle distance
to not on one hand
escape from the implication of being in the photograph were or implied by the photograph but also
giving enough space to recognize and meet his subjects with a kind of deference or
Understanding that there is a buffer between them
this is the only image in the book in which that
distance is fixed between him and his subjects and throughout the rest of the book the depth of fields closes in and he's really
Doing the work of encroaching upon
the color line
That led me to other stories and anyone I wanted to write about
essentially any artist from Nina Simone to Paul Robeson David Bowie to Keith Haring
Michael Jackson got Alvin, and the Chipmunks like everybody had a berlin wall story
So I went back and tried to look who are the American Berliners who are the people that felt at home in Berlin?
But haunted by Berlin and they went to Berlin to understand division in America, especially
Racial division racism sexism homophobia more clearly Angela Davis is one of those people Angela Davis
Goes to Germany for the first time as a college student when she's on
exchange
and then goes back to be a graduate student studying at the noted Frankfurt School and an inner autobiography which is
edited by the late
Nobel
Nobel
laureate Toni Morrison she shares about her encounter in the city of Berlin and
She talks about the fact that while she was a student in West Germany
She and she visited West Berlin with her
Fellowship group she felt more at home in East Berlin and in part it was of course meeting with the friends
and
We from Birmingham John Jameson and Esther Jackson
Traveling members of the Cuba Cuban National Ballet
There's also her experience at the border where she felt like she had more solidarity from border guards seeing her
Um and recognizing her then she did from the the waves of white tourists chanting the words of ich bin
ein Berliner, but in her book and
Actually anywhere else that I could find. She did not articulate the phrase Berlin Wall she talked about
The wall in her autobiography and scare quotes. Um
This is a book that's dedicated to people behind walls
There are chapters that are titled walls behind walls turn sideways or bridges
She references walls all the time
But she's talking about the walls of mass incarceration and her experience as a political prisoner in the United States
Um, I couldn't actually find a reference to the Walt one and I think in part it's because she was a celebrated
Honorary citizen of East Berlin and in East Berlin and East Germany. There was no wall
There was an anti-fascist protective rampart. The wall was not something that was talked about. It was not part of custom
um, it was really
Forbidden from sight let alone from language and so in a way, she's honoring East German
Conventions, but he's just fascinating because I've still tried to trace it
In fact as late as 2010 when she does a public dialogue with Toni Morrison at the New York Public Library
They're talking about walls and Toni Morrison brings up the Berlin wall. Not once but twice and
Angela Davis answers her and full but never says the words Berlin wall
And so I wanted to look at what other walls was. She pointing us to by not saying the wall
But at the same time how do we understand this in my curved broader?
political imagination so I found other images of
Her in East German archives that are available
Today and it's just fascinating to see and a lot of people say to me like, oh are those propaganda images?
I
Have to say I'm not as interested in knowing insane like what is and what is not propaganda?
Because we'd have to apply the same logic to the Western press and Radio Free Europe
And all kinds of other things but what I am interested in is seeing how a solidarity movement for her freedom
involved East German state officials in East German children
And there is a love and appreciation that extends even to this day at the same time. There are photographs of her by the
What we would call the wall like the Brandenburg Gate
there's even guard towers and the wall itself and
Maybe it's the fate of photography. You never see her facing it, but you do tell see an East German publication
she says I am gonna take home the
Stories of you border guards to her heroic and tell the true story to the American people
I just found it fascinating for someone. Who's a
visionary prison abolitionist like the wall was not visible to her or at least she
Strategically did not want to bring it up in this book
There anywhere else?
Shinichi Tajiri is another person I focus on I found out about him through Leonard Fried's family and through shaquiesha to Jerry's
daughters Renu and geo - who have been really generous interlocutors and I found out that
Richie Giri, I think the Nisa of shinkichi is actually a temple professor as well
xin qiji is very special as a figure and
And he grew up in the United States in and turned 18 the day of the Pearl Harbor attacks
his family lived in Southern California and um, you know as as the US government, um,
You know turned
Against Japanese American citizens and rounded them up into American concentration camps Shin Ki Chi's family lost their home
He gained freedom by fighting for the US military in world war ii and while he came back to the united states
he said he still felt like he was the enemy and so he took his GI bill money and he left the united states for
the better part of his life
He never renounced his citizenship
But he made home elsewhere and in part it was settling first in
Amsterdam and nearby it and barlow where he and his family, um set up shop in a former castle and built a foundry
Um, but he decided to teach in berlin in the 1970s and 80s and he did not have his foundry
He had a great arrangement two weeks a month
He would live in his studio and be available 24/7 you can see him here with a tent
Where he would see people all the time and the other two weeks
He would go home and raise his daughters and make big sculptures, but washing he was in Berlin
The wall was the most interesting sculpture in the city. So he set out to document it photographically and
To kind of scale it in a way and this was a time where more and more artists would go to Berlin
Josef boys famously said the Berlin Wall shouldn't come down. It should just be raised six centimeters to have better aesthetic proportions
and
This is not a time yet where graffiti is famous on the wall?
and so Ashley shinkichi ended up documenting the renovation of the shoddy wall this kind of
You know ill-fated infrastructure
Mm button from the western side more so than any other source
But what I found interesting is that when you look throughout these scenes, you see all of these leaving the American sector signs
These are made from a time when there was no wall
but they've been left behind and like throughout his work what you end up seeing is
the way in which
Sometimes our renovations and the sign got pulled up and it's sitting there
It looks like any construction that you see around any major city, and I think there's something mundane about the work
there's something that
Conjures his memory of being interned in the United States
He is reckoning with the history of American military throughout the rest of his life
And in fact posthumously was awarded
Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama as being a member of the nice city soldiers the people who fought for their freedom
While their families were imprisoned in camps shinkichi was fascinated by the wall. Um, I don't think I can show it to you here
I'll try
He flew over the city
In a helicopter with a giant Sony Porter pack 200 meters away 200 meters above 200 meters of tape
Um, he made these giant
Panoramic shots with a Y deluxe camera he and he printed them on linen and he called them Berlin ins
And then later on he kept going back to the city of Berlin
He actually had an art opening the night of the wall was breached in November of 1989 and continued to go back
When I visited his studio he's now passed away, but his studio is intact
There are pieces big chunks of the wall lining the windowsill
and then finally the last the last subject I focused on is the
poet black lesbian mother writer Audrey Lorde and Audrey Lorde
Despite facing many kind of urgencies in her life in the in 1984
she
Had just returned from her parents native land of Granada which was invaded by US troops that she wanted to survey to the land
she was editing the pages to her first book of essays sister outsider, which is now a
classic and a must read
And she was facing a likely prognosis
Of cancer, and she said I'm gonna actually still go to Europe and follow up on a commitment
I have to teach at the John F Kennedy School in Berlin and
The people around Audrey Lorde her her partner, Gloria Joseph her friend Dagmar Schultz, who is a filmmaker behind the work?
Audrey lured the Berliners said that Berlin added years to Audrey's life. She was prolific there
But she also faced really intense
points of challengers
She was put on s khador which is a kind of
mistletoe
homeopathic treatment that alleviated her she wrote poetry
Famously Berlin is hard on colored girls
This urn contains. The earth of German concentration camps. She was fascinated by the ways that
German white women German Jewish women
Ephraim and women would communicate to each other or not and is credited as one of the founders of the afro German movement
And she only went to Berlin for seven years of her life
But it is actually one of the places where her ashes are spread now
Berlin has thought of us as very intense place for her, but I kept finding with artifacts of joy of
Curiosity, but also ever critical eye here is a party in the lesbian. Uhm
pretty serious beginner and
I
Find these I've read her journals from both published and unpublished
that are at Spelman College and also at the John F Kennedy School in Berlin and
She would say dancing the night away is it can brings you joy in Berlin?
But also she's confronting the legacy of anti-semitism the attacks on afro
German and German Turkish people and
so what I
found in her
Writing that's mostly published are the stories about other people when you look at the drafts and you look at her even her
Photographs you see her wrestling with what it means to be in Berlin. I
Mean her archivist. I found these snapshots that she took in the city and you know
I have to say for those who visited Berlin and you're taken by the ground the hard edges of the city
Um, I found several snapshots of her taking photographs of like German pig
sidewalks and roads and
You can see in her berlin
Poetry she talks about the texture of the city, um the view in the bottom left-hand corner
but the flower is out of her apartment in teal Park in West Berlin in a park and she read it's a lot about the
space as a space of healing but also of separation, um,
I could find two images that kind of place her in a global political context
I know that she went to East Berlin to meet with East German writers, but I couldn't find poems reflective of that
But the image on the top right is in Alexander Platz
And it's the world clock that you can see at a distance. You can still see that structure today
And then the bottom right-hand
Corner. I saw this image
Dozens of times but looking at it with a closer. Look I saw that there's a
see if I can zoom in here for you a
Giant mural in the background this is you know, I'm frightened
Hindu vague von Nicaragua a you know
hands off Nicaragua and so while she's in Berlin you can did in way she talks and the way she
Sure. She's thinking about at that point us Cold War policy and intervention into Latin America
So audre Lorde's global crossings whether it was in East and West Germany South Africa contesting the part
I'd Latin America. These are the crossroads of Berlin
These are the stories of Americans in Berlin that I kept finding in these examples and others
And again and you can see this in her work and I should say like Angela Davis
Before 1989 I never saw her use the words Berlin Wall. She would say the wall. I'm
Listening to what fear teaches me in a land where um, you know, I'm orange poppies
Would you say the bruised leavings jump an insurmountable wall all were the glorious Berlin chestnuts an orange poppies. Hi detective
Is it spray bullets? Which kill?
After 1989 she starts using the phrase Berlin Wall to caution against the violence that afro German and Turkish people
Experienced in this wave of freedom rate and I think she wrote open letters
Her partner to the German Chancellor and other poems' that pushed us
I'm I'm gonna close in a moment
But I want to kind of say a few final things what I found fascinating about this group of people
Is that after the wall was dismantled in November of 1989?
They didn't stop going to Berlin and they didn't stop having these encounters that are encapsulated in photography
Leonard freed photographed an East German soldier days after the wall was breached in November of 1989. You wrote a caption later
days ago if this soldier smiled he might be
Court-martialed her shot today is a different story and I worked with the freed estate very closely
And I had the great opportunity to do a book
With with the family and steidel publishers in Germany and the museum folk song where he gots a tape Leonard's
Unpublished writing looking back at 50 years of photographs of Germany and put them into a book
It was the wildest weekend if you've ever seen the documentary how to make a bookish title
It's like a world-famous photo publisher
It was a wild ride, but it was amazing to have this layered experience in Germany around these intersections
Angela Davis, I couldn't find stories of her mentioning the wall
But all of these other powerful moments and when I say the wall, I mean the Berlin wall
But I saw other walls other boundaries here
Several years ago she spoke outside
of a fenced-in area where
refugees in Berlin had been contesting to have more
More rights and more free movement and so yet again
Davis found herself on this frontline of freedom and repression that you can see
powerful images of her now in the protests in the movement for black lives in Oakland
I'm ching-he cheery went back to Berlin and was fascinated with the
Changing evolution of the wall and kind of sculptural facade that it was
Evolving into and that kind of breaks within it and in his home
like I said
I found all these pieces of the wall
And I think that there's kind of ciphers for him to understand his relationship to American militarism
and then finally Audrey Lorde there's several images of her like laughing next to open air market where people are selling
pieces of the wall, she's there with her friends dagmar Schultz, Antigua
Marshall but then this image which is far more serious, which was taken by guide marshals in front of the wall
Not while it's an intact border
but you can see in the first free elections after and she's very weary of the rise of right-wing populism and
governance, and so what I love about this image is not only um
You get her in this moment of curiosity and criticality
But she has what appears like a small bag and perhaps a camera with her
and so I think for me what I want to emphasize as I close, I'm interested in walls and monuments not because I believe
We need them
Necessarily not because I believe they either save us or simple because I'm really interested in the way that artists in
particular are able to take
Interactions engagements with those pieces of monumental infrastructure and
dismantle them and if they dismantle them not in a day, but over a generation they help us understand the
Social walls and boundaries between us and I always thought you know
there's pressure to say like I'm gonna write a history of photographers at the wall, or I'm gonna write a history of
writers or
musicians and all those books should would be fun and please someone go write that because there's a great book about
man, golden and Richard Avedon and
Others that should be written about photography the wall. I wanted to know more
organically how
Artists working across different formats help us understand generational problems and therefore lead pathways for understanding
and more
More enhanced approaches to freedom booth and historically but also today
I'm gonna stop sharing my screen. Come on back
Yay, that was amazing
Thank you, Paul. I forgot to say in the beginning. I'm a terrible introducer, but we're celebrating
The launch of this book a wall of our own
Which was just released last month
So I just I neglected to say that but so congratulations in this book
We would love to hearing questions and make us a conversation
Please unmute yourself if you have something if you don't want to add a comment or want to ask a question and Michelle
wonderfully put the link to the
The I think it's them how to make a bookish title. It's a I don't know. That's that's the document
That's the documentary the book that we did is a new version of Leonard Freed's
Made in Germany with a special booklet called reading let's read
Well, I didn't the thing that is amazing to me about this this book is how
It's not complete but it's it is like you said it leads to pathways for understanding and and
And I find that very inspiring and it's it's a useful way to think about
All of the things we face as a society as a country as a city
The fact that you know
Everybody's doing everybody can do a little bit and be thinking a little bit about how to understand
the big problems that we create as
Well with each other
There's a question as a Jewish young person. How did you feel in Berlin?
Yeah, I appreciate the question and
It was complicated but really productive
So I think I would say the first thing I felt um
You know was a little bit of fear like I you know
I try to say it like this like sometimes I would walk in and I feel like oh my gosh, I'm in Germany
it's like you're walking through gelatinous air or like, you know, if you ever get a feeling you're in a store and
You're 99.9%
Sure
you didn't shoplift, but you walk through the the
Detectors and you like what if I did shoplift and you feel like you've done something wrong?
so I felt like that but um
It was I started
Mother things and I had a lot of revelations when I went to Berlin for the first time as college student
I'm in 2004 one
I had been living in Europe abroad I felt more comfortable being Jewish in Berlin that I did anywhere else in part
I mean a lot of Germans grew up speaking English as
Another language. I'm not anything I guess a second. I had more conversations about
contemporary Jewish identity sold with respect and I had
In all the rest of your and in part that's tied to an educational system and mandates to talk about Jewish culture
I don't believe it's true everywhere of Germany
So I don't want to paint a picture like there is right-wing violence all over Germany as well
But my personal experience was one more of comfort. I was taken by
The way the memory lived in the city
there were all these stumble stones these small bricks that were put into the sidewalk versus a renegade project in a municipal one where
you'd walk down the street and you see these little bricks and you read them and they're the names of
Jewish people and other people who were
Deported during the Holocaust and murder and it says their name and it says were they were they were exported?
- and where they were murdered and I just felt like I mean it was a like outside the pizza store and outside my apartment
And it was no way to escape it and then I went to the new synagogue which is not a new synagogue
it's an old synagogue that was heavily bombed and destroyed and
You know desecrated and it was rebuilt, but the only thing that was not rebuilt was the chapel and you walked through this beautiful ornate
Traditional looking synagogue and he's just see um a window into an empty gravel filled lot and I was just blown away by that
I said like presence and absence lived here together
The other thing that came up I started thinking well, I'm feeling like this as a Jewish person in Berlin
What does it mean to be Native American in the United States? Like where would you go that?
You don't feel that same feeling that the air is heavy with pain and with trauma if you're african-american
And you're going through not just a segregated south, but anywhere in the United States where discrimination is part of the way
where would that where would you go and I thought maybe
What I could do is learn from people who came to Berlin where the burden of history is heavy to understand America
and I remember thinking back then and in
2004
Well, we've had hundreds uprisings in the United States related to police brutality and I've only seen a historic sign in
one city
You know, and I just I think about that
I was not the first person to think that but again like we're confronting that right now and having
Unrecognized suffering for generations, so
Berlin for me was and still is a place where I feel haunted and I also feel at home
And I realize other people feel the same way
from all over the world, but especially
Americans it's that balance. It actually gives you perspective
Okay, Frank
I
Don't know if well
He wants to share a story and then but I don't know if I'll have time for
Photographs today cuz I want to make sure that we keep talking about with you. I don't I don't have photographs now
It's just a very quick story email them. Okay?
in
1969 I traveled on a train through East Germany to get to Berlin and
Was confronted by soldiers on the train who saw me taking pictures out the window and frightened me. I felt like it was the Gestapo
but they were representing the Soviet Union there when I got to Berlin I got there the
Next day is when we landed on the moon
1969 the next day I crossed through
Checkpoint Charlie to go into East Berlin and it was fascinating and also scary
I too AM Jewish and I felt this fear
Which I couldn't explain because nobody was threatening me for the most part, but I will get in touch with you in the future
So I may have some slides or some pictures that I took as I was in East Berlin
Wow, that's thank you for sharing that that's so powerful and there's all these amazing stories and what it means to kind of walk and
Move back and forth between you spaces. I was 22 years old. I didn't know what I was doing
Thank you, thank you
Hi
Hi Paul, thank you for this I have comments and and questions about walls and memorials
And I'll start with a stole Pristina the largest
Dispersed Memorial I think in the world, right?
Which is the the shields that you saw?
Which the name of which derives from an anti-semitic saying
When you stumble in German you say well you used to say or some people used to say
Here on you the conflict gob ensign here a Jew been buried here
So the stumbling stones as they're called our name and it's a so
It's problematic that that concept of the of the monuments
which is very powerful is very problematic because of the name right and I'm thinking about
you know the the referent like
You were talking about
whether Angela Davis says
appearances in front of the wall
were
Crop again, of course, they were propaganda. I grew up in the Soviet. Amasova Jew I grew up in the Soviet Union
I've never seen Berlin without the wall. I've seen Berlin from both sides with the wall. I was lucky enough to
West Berlin when I was a teenager just before it fell but
Angela Davis was a big deal in the Soviet Union
She was a big part of the propaganda machine and the Soviets
Being extremely racist had a very dirty ditty about her
That was probably how most people heard about her was through this absolutely vulgar
Ditty
So so they it's not even ambiguity of
Monuments and memorials. It's like the multi-faceted nasai you were talking about sejoon trying to come to terms with how
like what that wall is and what they
Was being in Berlin is the question or rather
The question I have for you is what?
As we're thinking so much about monuments and
Commemorations
in this country, but also
In the world right now
Do you believe this in Senegal which has been independent for 60 years?
There is now a real live
animated discussion among
intellectual and
political and cultural elites whether or not to remove the monument to the French colonial
governor who massacred people by the village which still exists in some way the former colonial capital of
French West Africa, so what did what is the conversation?
what is
knowing about the wall and people having and you create your preamble about like having pieces of the wall and your by
Really such a strange thing. Well, I would like to tell something like that in your in your space. You know, what what do we?
Where can we take that conversation?
Into the now and into the future
Thank you, yeah, thank you. Thank you for sharing
You know like you put a lot of life experience into the just short anecdotes, and I know there's volumes more
so thank you for for sharing that um
you know, I've been talking a lot about
monuments and about the wall recently in part because I think you know
There's a there's a saying that goes with the piece of the wall
And I'll try to touch on a few things you said but I may not can alter it. But I appreciate all that you said
Which is that?
The the wall pieces were self-evidently called pieces of history. And I mean that in terms of the
label at the Smithsonian that
Hat they own pieces of the wall. Um
The book 101 objects like America explained in I saw the cover of the book a few years ago
And I said there's a piece of the wall. I didn't even know that the spray would be that a future goldman sachs
Representative when in his 20s and with a duffel bag and like took pieces of the wall and that's what's in this myth. So
I
bring it up because there's this notion that the piece of the wall equal history and
I think it's not that the equal history is that they but but their shorthand for it. So what's going on there?
It's a temptation to say that history is more simple
History has endpoints that history is one-sided or if not two-sided and that's it
And I think of the work that pieces of the wall have to do
Even in in museums and public spaces around the country very similar to monuments monuments are not history
Monuments represent the past but monuments shaped the past more than the past. She's a monument
Because they are stories. So if we change our
framework to understand
Any of these repressive structures
Especially I'm thinking of border walls, but you know, you can also put Confederate monuments and other kind of monuments of colonial power
They're trying to convey a story about
About control, but they're just materials and once they crumble and once they're demolished or once they're dismantled they always become
Unintentional monuments to their own demise and so I just think about this and I also think about the pictures in Richmond right now
Which are riveting like some of the most important images or at least meaningful to me, which is on the monument lab
Instagram page or Twitter you can see we did a
Took of a video of one of someone III scanned and and I think it looks like the Berlin Wall and remember the Berlin Wall
Was not was graffiti in the 1980s forward including by people like Keith Haring so I had the shirt. Um,
But it wasn't a precious space. Well sitting gallery it was
Instead a lot of the graffiti that airs on pieces of the wall was painted after 1989
um in fact
I
And I know Nessa of sheep in that like even today there's one really
surviving template that people utilize on am our part and
The cover of the Berlin Morgan Post a few weeks ago had a mural. That's that African
I'm sorry a Caribbean German man. Put up of George Floyd on the piece of the Berlin Wall
That being said just because its historical doesn't mean that it holds all of history
And so what are other ways that we can understand history?
Sometimes it's the actions on top of divisive infrastructure or that changes in them or their evolutions over time
History doesn't have
Any points there is unlike what Francis Fukuyama and conservative commoners called the end of history the end of struggle in 89 didn't end
History, it was a continuation. It was a pivot. So, how do we
You know to quote the writer Ralph Ellison think of history not as the arrow
But as a boomerang and get your helmet because it's coming back around right?
So just there's a lot going on there, but I just wanted to end with that
But once there is also an interesting thing happening. Once the Berlin Wall stops being functional it becomes a
monument and
once a monument becomes a a
backdrop for a projection and a piece of argument a
Piece on the chessboard of argument it becomes history, right?
So these objects they have this power of transcending from one to the other
Okay, I'll stop yeah very fascinating, thank you
I did ask this before when did Angela Davis go to?
Berlin what year was that? What was her travels so as a student she went in
1966 and 67
she lived in Germany and
then
Left went back to the United States and she went back to East Berlin in
1972 and almost a few weeks after her trial and she was in the midst of a tour of the Eastern Bloc. Um
Especially to countries that had participated in our solidarity campaign the letter-writing that went to the judge
to free her
Free her on bail and the East Germans had a campaign million roses for Angela and she was writing her autobiography
rafi according to Toni Morrison that Angela did not feel safe in the United States to write
So she spent a lot of time outside of the country
writing
And then I should also add she went back in 73. She went back in 75. She finished her PhD
at
In in East Germany
And has gone back
numerous times she spoke at Occupy Berlin
she liked a
Lot of the people. I was drunk, too
I mean
There's people who went once and I'm interested in they got a footnote and they're really interesting stories the people who were American Berliners
The people who by habit or by decor kind of their own
by their own actions
Keep going back to Berlin habitually. Those are the people I'm very interested in as
kind of, you know, we have these books about
Americans in Paris
Or if you were seeking the open road of the American West you get your car as a beatnik. I wanted to establish
understanding of Berlin
especially divided Berlin or even
Continually, the legacy of divided Berlin has a place of American pilgrimage for artists and writers seeking critical distance
What are you working on more of that? What are you working on now?
Well
I
am I'm kind of a lot of my work is on monuments, and I'm
as Laurie said
Co-coo founder and artistic director of monument lab and we work
Around the country and and now outside of the country
on
Past present and future of monuments. We actually have a project sponsored by the German government right now
Looking at transnational memory workers. So people around the world, who are
Really trying to change the way we make monuments and you know anywhere you see a monument
Removal either by official decree or by people toppling it in the last few weeks
There's years of activism and organizing an artwork that goes around it. So that's something working on and
I had been interested in trying to do a kind of similar project to this in Berlin wall on the us-mexico border
and if I don't do it, I hope someone else does and there are people doing very similar work, which is looking at the
changing landscape of
border fence and now increasingly border wall and
people like Anna Theresa Fernandez artist, Michelle, Angela Ortiz and others who are
working to
understand
The dangerous
And harmful and militaristic nature of that border, but also are working to dismantle it even before it's completed
And seeking to understand connection across the spaces
I
Wanted to because we're a photo talk not a monument. I'm no I'm kidding. I
wanted to
see if you wanted to just talk a little bit about some I mean your passion for photography is is
is wonderful is incredible and also the way you approach it and one of the
papers that you wrote a
Critical paper that you wrote was about the photography used in the wire
Show the series and how
Photographs choreographed like who knew what and and who was left out and you want to talk a little bit about
that passion in the study of photographs in the wire and and and
How it connects to all of these?
Threads that you that you pull on and stories that you tell through through the use of photography. Yeah
Yeah, so I would say, you know again I'm not trained as an art historian if anything
I'm like a feral art historian because I like to really think about
Artwork in different contexts. I love going to museums. I love going to galleries but I'd like to stumble upon things outside
and understand them from different perspectives in context and so I'm really I am interested in part in things like
Monuments not because of them being on their own
But the way they're embedded in a landscape and that's really how I came to love photography and my first work as a curator
was dealing with
mmm
Really not only finding out the history of that image of the black soldier in Berlin
But whose whose identity I have yet to be able to find I have gotten his battle rank. I've gotten members of this battalion
I've spent years finding and I welcome
Knowing it, but his name tag has not blown up at the highest resolution. And so he remains
Unknown, but I'm interested in some ways like the moment that Brigitte freed handed me a folder. That's an unpublished German book
That Leonard had left behind in his papers after he passed away
So when I saw the HBO show The Wire and I would say this of a lot of TV shows
I started noticing that how photographs were kind of used throughout the series like they weren't just props though. They were
elaborate
Props but like they were really key pivot points
And so if you you know, you could say the same at least from my perspective
I don't want a ton of TV, but but I go deep when I do
Mad Men The Watchmen
But then even other kind of shows like you look at the desks of people and their wall collages
so with the wire
I just look for every instance of a photograph on the show and what I what I found were Polaroids
snapshots on the walls of
drug, kingpins and police middle-management
and what I basically found was that if you were a police person
Photographs held a magical and you had a magical power a we use both an art and a science
That you would understand and be able to unravel
Things and you would hold them like the character
McNulty relay
take a photograph and stuff it in his pocket or you have the folder and I'm wield it and is very much connected to the
history of photography and policing which is that police hold the art and science of photographs in order to implicate the criminal
what I saw on the other side though was happening throughout the show people like D'Angelo Barksdale if you know the show someone who was
You know someone who had been involved in the in drug trafficking
He would hold on to photographs in the show
And he couldn't let go of them and it was too sentimental and it resulted in
His demise
And then there were other characters like Omar
President Obama's favorite character who had these Polaroids
He's a queer figure
who had
polaroid pictures left in his apartment of him and his boyfriend and when he had to like run and leave the apartment and hide he
Left the photographs behind so actually think it's useful because of all the kind of cop shows
That are getting any critical eye now to understand who is being
Criminalized in these shows and who's being celebrated like the wire is one of the greatest shows of all time
I'm not the only one saying that but I'll I'll have a good discussion with you about it
But still on a show that's trying to critically unpack policing if you are police
You have a magical power and you hold on to photographs to solve truth. And if you are anyone else?
Photographs mark your demise there your sentimentality there what you can't let go of and yet
when you die on the show because a lot of characters died you keep living as
Photographs and your photograph keeps hovering around often as police fodder
And so it just creates I think maybe something for us to think about which is you know, who has the power of photography
To bring about change and and empower themselves and identify themselves
We're very close to the end but Sebastian has a comment
Hey, I
Yeah, that would take another hour so I'm just gonna say thank you so much and I'll email you
I
Feel really inspired and I'm excited to read your book. I this is super relevant to a current project
I'm working on I was raised by a Holocaust survivor
I've lived in Berlin and I
I mean, I I would love to hear you talk about what you think of the Jewish memorial there and
also
You know
Kind of the role that monuments play in the way that trauma is is dealt with
Between generations because that's really the focus of my current work
But that obviously is a longer conversation. So so hopefully we can connect later about that
So if you have any quick comments about it, otherwise we can we can talk later. Thank you. Yeah, yeah
Thank you very much. And again, I'd like appreciate a lot of people have a Berlin story
or Berlin experience and if you don't
you know someone who does you have another city back you will identify with and it's part of the complication of
Understanding either American identity or other kinds of identities crossing over time. I would just say quickly that
There are a number of projects like about that particular memorial and photography that intersect
and I think it's a it's a very photogenic place and it's also a
Traumatized space and so one thing I would just say quickly. There's a lot more to say about it
But is how do we think about?
The photography tahg Rafi as a as a memory practice and of itself. There are the ways that people
Either, you know
I think of like Joel Sternfeld work in particular
like looking for sites that are marked by
official decree that there's a lot of money time and resources poured into them and what I want to know in those cases
Not Joel Sternfeld cases, but like I want to know about how people utilize them and how people make it their own whether its
sacrosanct or sacrilegious and how does it live and evolve and
Work like Joel Sternfeld are others who find sites of trauma that have not been
Photography stands in it's a way to say there is no monument. There is no marker, but I need to register this site
for
Register how it lives in time in its own way
Photography is just as static as a as a statue
but the uses of photography the transaction the movement the
Rearticulation the framing these are all things that lend themselves to kind of more dynamic exchanges as well
Thank you more to say, but thank you
It's I think it's time to close thank you very very much Paul. There's just no way to
Compress all that you bring into these conversations into an hour
Thank you so much and thank you everyone for coming
next week Brad McCollum is going to be the Thursday night photo talk speaker and
we've just put up the
Overview of his talk, so please go to ppac s website and check out our next week's speaker
Thank you all for sharing this time with us and I hope to see you next week. Thank you, Paul. Oh
Thank you, thank you everybody. Good night
See you again, that's right Thank You PPAC
Thank You pool
