De-Ciphering
“A cipher is any method of encrypting text (concealing its readability and meaning). Its origin is the Arabic sifr, meaning empty or zero.”
In her text on Souvenirs, Susan Stewart writes: ‘The souvenir is destined to be forgotten; its tragedy lies in the death of memory, the tragedy of all autobiography and the simultaneous erasure of the autograph. And thus we come again to the powerful metaphor of the unmarked grave…’
As we attempt to locate and de-cipher traces of our ancestors, we hit many problems. We are having to negotiate multiple languages and translations, from Lithuanian to Russian to Yiddish to Hebrew and around and around in a never-ending circle of confusion. Names have been recorded in one language, translated to another, then another, through several scripts. We hit on using google translate in a playful advertising campaign around Vilnius old town, pretty sure that the mis-translations offered by a cybernetic interpreter reflect the truth of our search.
In a short text published as part of Documenta 2012, Eyal Weizman talks about the ancient greek idea of prosopopoeia, or translating or interpreting the inanimate, giving a voice to objects, to cities and buildings. This idea of buildings/places as sensors/agents, somehow aware of what passes through them, is correlated in Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s (Documenta curator) text in which she asks, do objects of art which observe traumatic events become themselves traumatized? If our role as artists is therefore to somehow read and interpret these objects or places, the fear that one can encounter is of the emptiness of the cipher, of the futility of the search. We seem to keep drawing blanks (literally), in following the official routes of historical source materials, museums, archives etc.
Perhaps this is where as artists, we do have another mode of translation to offer, that of embodying the past in the present, which can offer another, richer, re-reading of these sites. As Anke Bangma writes in Experience, Memory, Re–enactment, ‘Remembering is an act in the present…(it is) an ongoing process of mediation;…memory is not something we have but something we do, in an act that does not merely reflect past reality ‘as it was’ but acts upon reality by organizing it and attaching specific meaning to it.’ We write our own biographies back into the places or ancestors lived, the autograph returns, the cipher is not deciphered, necessarily, but a new script traces over the old, giving it form and meaning, not emptiness and erasure.
K Beinart
refs:
http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/definition/cipher
Anke Bangma and Steve Ruston (eds), Experience, Memory, Re–enactment, Piet Zwart Institute, 2005;
Documenta notes No. 62, Eyal Weizman, 2012.
Documenta notes No. 40, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, 2012.
Brian Dillon (ed), Ruins, Documents of Contemporary Art series, Whitechapel Gallery, 2011.
