The installation Sprach, sprach. War, war originated in a project presented by Maya Zack in Berlin at the end of her residency as part of a student exchange program. The exhibition featured a rather small table tilted to one side, under which brown cardboard boxes were crammed. The boxes were tightly organized so as to take up every available space between the table legs. A camera documented and screened the boxes on the board of the table tilted to the side. The installation evoked the image of a forgotten warehouse where boxes where hastily piled up, packed with personal effects and documents left behind by their fleeing owners, awaiting their future return. At the same time, that installation, with its unique materiality, was also reminiscent of office frugality, ungainly bureaucratic thrift suggestive of the spying eyes of a surveillance camera – part and parcel of daily routine in the former East Germany, where the Communist regime maintained close supervision of individual lives. In its present, extended incarnation, the office desk and the cardboard boxes organized underneath it can be easily recognized. . It seems that the pieces of furniture have penetrated and became interlaced with one another: the table leg has pierced the seat of the chair, while the chair’s leg has punctured the bed board.
Disjointed roots, they converge deeper still, clasping one another in an inextricable and unsettling grasp. The old warehouse of boxes and papers brings to mind an inscrutable, enigmatic archive. The boxes are carefully wrapped, softly sealed and bandaged, protecting against oblivion in their own way, like the stones of an ancient wall, safekeeping the records and testimonies stored within them.
Who is the owner of that desk? A clerk or a poet? The installation’s name refers to Paul Celan’s verses in Stretto. Celan was one of the most important poets who wrote about the horrors of World War II. He did so in a heavily charged, painfully symbolic language, with his poetic journey transporting us into the past that is no more. We viewers observe Zack’s works like detectives in a crime scene, gathering bits and pieces of information. The remaining objects are the safe keepers of testimony. Time is submerged in the characteristics of the material and its colorful design. Theoretician Peter Wollen characterizes crimescene or forensic art as an obsessive preoccupation with describing the surface. This is in contrast to the reconstruction of the crime itself, or detailing its horrific consequences.
This starting point actually produces a sense of alienation, or even distance. This position presents to the viewer an image of an indifferent, obtuse world. At the same time, the emptiness also indicates the occurrence of such a terrible disaster, that it is completely beyond expression or representation.

The etching was produced and printed by the Jerusalem Print Workshop.
Photography: Avraham Hay

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