“The Camp of the Jews”: Uprooting, Refugeeism and Immigration, 1998–2005, installation
The documentary You Are My Witnesses included in the installation, was produced by Geva Films for Keren Hayesod and The Jewish Agency in 1963. Length: 18 min

“At the end of World War II, Marseille housed political prisoners, exiles and refugees in 130 ‘barracks’. […] From the late 1940s to the mid-1960s, Holocaust refugees from Europe and Jewish immigrants were housed at the site on their way to Israel. It became known as the ‘Jewish camp’.
On October 27, 1998, I opened a ‘Memory Lab’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Marseille, a model structure of a ‘barrack’ in the ‘Jewish Camp’. Through seven ‘archeological’ layers of the camp I examined the memory boundaries of forms of displacement states and the dialectical relationship between these situations and the concept of ‘camp’.”

Ilana Ortar