Vergessen und Erinnern // Forgotten and remembering  (version 3, 2017)

Photo projection, HD 16:9, time 7' 56", colour, sound

When Françoise Caraco reminisces about her year in Paris, she says: ‘I’m homesick for the city in which I spent a year feeling like a stranger.’ A series of 80 shots are projected and commented with an offstage voice. In the first person Caraco talks about Paris, which for her remains a place she stayed in temporarily, comments on spontaneous impressions and juxtaposes singular moments with general situations: ‘My studio in the sunshine; actually in rained all summer long’, or adds tersely, ‘Some photos I quite simply like.’

Altogether there are 1900 photos, taken ‘lightly and quickly’ with a Smartphone. The resulting effect is that not each and every shot is a remembrance – not the place, not the mood, not one’s own presence there. It is equally a well-known effect that sifting through photos evokes other emotions than those felt when and where they were taken. Photographing appropriates the exotic, supplemented with one’s own memories becomes transiently part of oneself, and is ultimately mirrored in the work realised by Françoise Caraco under the title "Vergessen und Erinnern".

Text: Ruth Horak

Drancy, mémoires à vif  // Drancy, Memories of Lives (2015)

Video, HD 16:9, time 13' 44'', colour, audio

For a number of years Françoise Caraco has occupied herself with her family history in her work. As a descendant of an immigrant Jewish family to Basel at the beginning of the nineteen-hundreds, like many others her history has been marked by the Holocaust that cost a number of her relatives their lives. As an artist, Françoise is interested in the entanglement of personal stories, imaginary tales and collective historical awareness. In her current work, like many other descendents of Jewish families, she traces the imprints of her origins. Letters, photographs, stories and documents lead her to the Drancy internment camp outside Paris, which nearly all French Jews passed through prior to their deportation.

The unique systematization of the genocide – the inescapable net of the bureaucratic rationale of the persecution of the Jews – is crudely mirrored in the rational modernism of the housing project (Cité de la Muette), which even prior to the defeat of France had been converted into a prison. Used as an internment campy by the Vichy government, the complex not only has an architecture-historical importance but houses residents again and is presently undergoing rebuilding to return it to its original function as social housing. Over the course of decades various memorials have been installed in front of the courtyard of the U-shaped building complex, the last being a deportation railway freight carriage donated by the French railway company.

As recently as 2012 François Hollande officiated at the inauguration of a lavishly laid-out Shoah Memorial Centre opposite the site. The new building for the project was financed with monies from the unclaimed assets of Holocaust victims.

Walking around the courtyard behind the deportation carriage, now echoing with everyday life, it requires a considerable leap of imagination to be able to picture the scenes that once took place here. Realities, times clash. The residential building complex is not accessible. In Françoise Caraco’s eyes it is the run-down park at the end of the courtyard where the mood of the place is best captured. The stretch of green is barely used, looks untended, as if pervaded by a strange sense of bodily trepidation, shame. Even in the moment of one’s own physical presence there, the experience is dominated by the templates of received narratives, or equally the pre-configured perceptions formed by historical photos that permanently transmit themselves, filtered through vague insights into the history of one’s own predecessors and the notions derived from them. As the video work shows, this mediation results in still and personal reflection coupled with a gazing around the scene. An ‘active commemoration’ that distils one of the effects of the Holocaust for the descendents:  a paranoid whispering – an everywhere out there whispering – soliloquy; a glance answered by the world with forbidding; a cultural unease. With her work Françoise the artist finds a stable form for this snare-like shadow on reality. She spent a year, together with her family, researching the project in Paris, where under the Nuremberg Laws she would likewise have been persecuted and deported.

Text: Oliver Caraco