Translate, repeat, retrace
Film and publication, 2016.
Florencia Levy, an artist-resident at POLIN Museum, conducted a series of interviews among the members of the Jewish community in her home city of Buenos Aires, speaking to Polish immigrants, their children and grandchildren. She brought the collected material, the testimonies of three generations of Polish Jews, to Warsaw where she actualized them in the contemporary landscape of the capital. She met with the representatives of local Jewish communities, querying their members about locations in the city that contribute to the building of their identity. She attempted to focus on the details that tend to be overlooked in the accounts of witnesses of history, such as places or flavors remembered personally or learned from the stories of relatives.
Based on the memoirs gathered in Argentina, Levy also created a script in which she attempted to objectify the experience of her interviewees. The text in three languages: Yiddish, Polish and Spanish, attempts to represent the mode of action and the imperfection of memory.
The artist's stay ended with a meeting held by Isabella Main, PhD, a historian and anthropologist associated with the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology and the Centre for Migration Studies at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. As a result of the meeting Ms. Main created the following text about the project: The Memory of Generations – a reconstruction of the stories of Polish Jews from Buenos Aires in Warsaw.
