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Fri10 Apr03:25pm(20 mins)
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Where:
Teaching and Learning 202
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This paper interrogates Ukrainian histories from the Holodomor, or Great Famine of 1932–33 through witness testimony. I focus on the archival collection of letters from Jerry Berman, a South African engineer who documented his experiences working in Ukraine in letters to his friends and family. “There is a terror of a cry. Men go crazy! Understand. Bread — that is all — and that is missing”.[1] In objective detail, Berman documented his experiences of food shortages, working conditions and prices of goods in Ukraine. This Digital Humanities project explores technical knowledge models to toggle between distant and close readings of archival testimony. The process is a mediation between the ethical demands of encountering archival testimonies, and statistical representation of events in data. Results of the project are three animated short films. A combination of geographic analysis, digital mapping and interpretative historical practices.[2]
Precedents include Lawrence L. Langer’s critical evaluation of the nature of true art and its ability to discover new spheres of human consciousness. Langer’s ideas on the ‘literature of atrocity’ following the Holocaust are relevant also to the Holodomor. Langer describes autobiographies as difficult because “the enormity of the atrocities they recount finally forces the reader to lose his orientation altogether and to feel as though he were wandering in a wilderness of evil, totally divorced from any time and place he has ever known”.[3] It is this navigation I explore through the visual dimension. Re-embodying the ‘ghostliness’ of archival voice in an attempt to give presence to that which was denied during the persecution.[4] Using ideas from Geoffrey Hartman, Oliver Grau and William Kentridge I focus on Forensic Architecture’s approaches of ‘ground truth’, anchoring digital process to “a precise location in the real world”.[5] Through drawing I attempt to bring missing voices from the past into the present.
1. Jerry Berman to Israel Berman, December 30, 1932.
2. Anne Burdick et al., Digital_Humanities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 39–48, Proquest Ebook Central.
3. Lawrence L. Langer. The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 75.
4. Geoffrey Hartman, Ian Balfour and Rebecca Comay, “The Ethics of Witness: An interview with Geoffrey Hartman,” in Lost in the Archives, ed. Rebecca Comay (Toronto: Alphabet City Media, 2002), 490–509.
