My name is Ori Gersht, and I was born in Israel in 1967.
I moved to London in 1988. My main focus is photography and film.
Since a very early stage of my career, I have been on long journeys.
I saw them as some sort of geographical, physical expeditions,
with an open end. One of the journeys I took on was to Poland in 1999,
from Krakow to Auschwitz. It’s a very short route, but emotionally,
was very loaded for me. Most of my family perished during the
Second World War. I was taking the same train that those prisoners
were taking from the ghetto in Krakow to the camps in Berkenau and Auschwitz.
Things were passing across my screens or my camera very, very quickly,
and I was, most of the time, too slow to react. Therefore I kept on missing.
And this entire journey was a journey of frustration, of me trying to
capture something and constantly failing. Only when I arrived back to London
and started to process these images in my studio, did I realize that something
greater had happened. And the fact that this whole series is about this attempt
to hold onto something, and then capturing only those smudges,
those moments that are passing by, somehow emphasized the relationship
between memory, the desire to remember, and the inevitable failure.
[clip from Evaders: “But a storm is blowing from paradise . . . ”]
"Evaders" was setting out once again on this journey,
a journey that is an absurd journey. I was trying to cross a border
that no longer exists, a border that divides France and Spain,
a border that so many people lost their life over, and that all of a sudden,
since Europe has been united, has been deserted.
And this figure is walking through those severe geographical climatic conditions.
On the one screen, the figure is facing the camera. It’s quite confrontational—
it has this kind of physical presence. While on the other screen,
the figure is always walking away, with his back to the camera,
and tends to dissolve into the landscape—seems to be more of an
ephemeral figure, a figure that does not have any tangible relationship
to the physical world that we are living in.
The character relates to Walter Benjamin, or to the Angel of History,
the "Angelus Novus," the Paul Klee paintings that were so significant to
Walter Benjamin. Maybe because the idea of dialectics was so important
to Benjamin, I chose to present the film on two screens.
This is a method that later on I developed, with other films I produced,
like "Will You Dance For Me," and after this, "The Offering," the film about the
portrait of the matador. Two screens allow me to present two opposing views,
or two opposing positions—two moments that somehow complement each other,
and at the same time collide with each other.
The last shot in "Evaders" was taken from a deserted property on the border
between France and Spain. And what it allowed me to do was to somehow
pan across, to have an overview of the entire journey.
I played this shot in reverse, which for me resonates with this idea of the
passage of time, and also Benjamin’s depiction of the Angel of History
that is moving backward into the future.
This journey is very much raising questions for me about the nature of borders,
the relationship between culture and nature, and the arbitrary nature of humans
to split, to divide the land. All the camera is capturing is those
ephemeral moments, those intangible visual traces of an experience that
somehow evaporated and we’ll never be able to retain or regain ever again.
