The potential of artistic practice in facilitating the collective narration of historical events

ABSTRACT

Using two of my performance pieces as case studies, this paper analyses the use of oral testimony and listening in contemporary performance to activate a narrative reaction from the public. Describing how unique spaces of participatory art for activating individual and collective remembering among witnesses and listeners were created, it highlights the potentialities of artistic practice in dealing with memorialisation issues and expanding the authorship of a narrative and the group of people it represents. Furthermore, it contributes to the understanding of memory-making as a dialogic process. In the first case study, Un lavoro per Camporovere (2014), the public listening to a sound installation – comprised of interviews – brings together the two halves of a village divided by Nazi arson in 1944 and helps the citizens to create a new collective narration of the event. In the second intervention, the collective performance Mellah (2017), the creation of a safe, symbolic and dedicated space favours the telling of the unshared memories of Moroccan Jews who migrated to Paris. This paper illustrates in both examples, the role that public reaction and stories play in making heritage as always in a state of becoming.

KEYWORDS:

• Audience narrative
• reaction
• performance
• witness
• dialogic memory-making
• listening

Disclosure statement

At the start of each performance, as well as before the screening of 5 vues sur 5 témoignages, I explained to the audience that I was an artist not a historian, and that I was not presenting an historical reconstruction of the events, nor the ‘final’ truth about what had happened, rather a multitude of experiences. Each performance was introduced as a performative space of encounter, not as a quest for truth.

I was prepared for some visitors, after realising that I was working on a Jewish subject, might come to my performance in Paris to protest against Israel. However, while there were no moments of conflict during the performative events in Paris and Camporovere, disagreements were expressed on three occasions during the screening (outside of Morocco) of the documentary about the Parisian performance.

In a projection at the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue of Montreal, a small number of Jews from North African countries complained that their experience had been worse than that of Moroccan Jews — on that occasion the situation was mediated by prof. Yolande Cohen (who organised my screening). 

After a screening at the Espace Culturel et Universitaire Juif d’Europe in Paris, a person complained to me personally that he was against my project, because it focused on Jewish identity at a time of ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine. Finally, at Maison du Maroc in Paris — an institutional space belonging to the Moroccan state – some spectators voiced their unhappiness that witnesses who took part in my performance had referred to ‘problems’ they had had with Muslims in Morocco prior to their departure.

Notes

1. Translated from the French by the author, ‘L’artiste se fait “ passeur de paroles “, endossant tour a tour les habits de l’historien, du journaliste ou du documentariste’. Naessens, Ophelie. 2017. “Temoignages filmes: du document a l’oeuvre d’art.” n.p., online. Available at https://hal.univ-lorraine.fr/hal-02045809

2. Translated from the French by the author, ‘la mémoire collective est le souvenir ou l’ensemble de souvenirs, conscients ou non, d’une expérience vécue et/ou mythifiée par une collectivité vivante de l’identité de laquelle le passé fait partie intégrante’.Nora, Pierre. 1978. “Memoire collective.” In La nouvelle Histoire, edited by Jacques Le Goff, Roger Chartier, Jacques Revel. Paris: Cepl.

3. Interviewees and participants are identified with pseudonyms and not with their real names.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alessio Mazzaro

Alessio Mazzaro is an artist, environmental engineer and an affiliate to UCL MAL -Multimedia Anthropology Lab (University College London).He has an interest in narrative processes where meaning is something created between different speakers and not held by someone. His works initiate a space of encounter and coexistence through conversation. He did field research in Paris, Casablanca, Montreal, Sao Paulo and the northern Italian mountains; working on the moroccan Jews migration, the oral memory of a Nazi arson that divided a rural village, and imaginary urbanism. He makes use of an hybrid approach between performance studies, linguistic anthropology, documentary practices and ethnography, editing his researches in polyphonic sound installations and videos.