"Present Traces of a Past Existence: A Photographic Research" investigates the story of the dutch intellectual Etty Hillesum (Middelburg 01.15.1914 - Auschwitz 11.30.1943), combining archive research and photographic intervention. Hillesum started a diary on Sunday March 9, 1941, in Amsterdam during German occupation. She began writing diaries on the advice of the psychochirologist Julius Spier (1887-1942), with whom Hillesum had just begun therapy. Taken together, the collected diaries show Hillesum’s deep inner transformation and manifest her keen literary talent. Deeply influenced by Hillesum’s writings from my teenage years, I began my work with the archived images in order to explore their materiality and to trace a concrete and respectful distance from a figure who deeply affected my inner perception. I started thinking of every single document, from pictures to letters and diaries, as visual fragments, thereby beginning to reframe those details through my perspective. Subsequently I shifted my focus from the archive to the outside world. I organized trips to Middelburg, the Netherlands, where Hillesum was born, Deventer, Amsterdam, and to Camp Westerbork, in the northeast of the country where she was interned before being deported to Auschwitz. I tracked down and researched the houses where she had lived and the spaces that may have influenced her perception. In the meantime, I wondered: What happens to a space once it has been inhabited for many years by different people? Could the presence of a previous tenant still be sensed in any way? Is space something architectural, or does it pervade the acts of the subjects themselves? Can a space be bound to the subjectivity of former occupants? This photographic investigation is a dynamic framework within which I explore these questions.
Inspired by phenomenologist Edith Stein's notion of empathy, this project aims to deepen understanding of her life and enact an embodied manifestation of empathic experiences. Stein's archival material becomes subject of empathy, inviting interaction with historical contexts, fostering an intertwinement of sensations. By integrating Stein's insights with photographic methods, photography becomes a means of phenomenological investigation, viewing objects and places as conduits of historical sensation.
I like to work with my diaries. Between 2017 and 2018, I have developed a new form of archiving my visual memories, in which visual and textual narrative levels have been newly combined. The nonlinearly used photographs are set associatively with my handwritten fragments. The text is arranged chronologically, the pictures are not. The booklet develops through associations in search of a connection among the different visions I had before or had not yet perceived; that is supposedly against the linearity of a diary. The text is not only intended to be a readable and understandable series of lines, but also as visual sign.
Lucrezia Zanardi
Lucrezia Zanardi (1994, Bologna) is multimedia artist, researcher and lecturer at Dortmund University of Applied Sciences and Arts. She is completing her PhD at the Radboud Institute for Culture and History at Radboud University Nijmegen. Lucrezia studied Multimedia Arts at the IUAV University of Venice and at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design, earning her bachelor's degree in Venice in 2016. MA in Fotografie - Photographic Studies at Dortmund University of Applied Sciences and Arts in 2020. She is board member and exhibitions curator at the non-profit Etty Hillesum Huis in Middelburg.
Lucrezia's work focuses on two main themes: individual and collective perception and mnemonic practices in archival research. Materiality, its three-dimensional presence and tactile sensations are essential for the elaboration of her photographic research, which takes shape in the moment of installation and fruition. The initial focus on an inner perception has developed over the years into a reflection on the perception of archival material and the layers of memory, leading to a phenomenological investigation of the photographic act.
