Habeas Corpus
Ilana Salama Ortar
Curator: Yair Barack
“According to Walter Benjamin, if we wish to talk about the human condition, we have to stop thinking big, in theses, categories, and overarching concepts, and start thinking small, about fragments, about relics, about leftovers, about traces. The modern scholar, whether he is a philosopher, historian, anthropologist, or cultural critic, should operate like a collector. If the human condition is an arena of devastation and ruin, then, just like in a disaster area, first, you have to collect the pieces. Benjamin knew well that even when their collection and repair will be complete, the complete picture will remain fractured. Human existence has never looked more post-traumatic.”
How can we talk about a site that does not exist? What do we know about a past that has faded away? How can the artistic act reconstruct a repressed consciousness?
For almost three decades, Ilana Salama Ortar has been researching Le Grand Arénas – a refugee camp in Marseille, where her family stayed after their expulsion from Egypt in 1951. Salama-Ortar, who arrived at the camp as a baby, attests that she remembers nothing of the camp, and yet, the place has been seared into her body as a primal imprint. The renewed relationship with Le Grand Arénas began in 1998, when the artist was invited to create a project at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Marseille. She created a laboratory of memory inside a shipping container, where she tried to reconstruct a nebulous memory ingrained in her mind and in her soul.
Salama Ortar’s multifaceted artistic practice, which spans a wide range of mediums and scales, explores questions of historical memory through the habitus that shapes it. One of the key images in her work is the “ceramic rocket,” which served as a basic building block in the construction of the camp’s barracks. The ceramic rocket was produced during the German occupation by forced labor in a tile factory in the city’s Saint-André neighborhood, under the management of the German Organisation Todt. In a defining moment in her research, three years ago Salama Ortar discovered the remaining ruins of the Kaufering subcamp – a part of the Dachau concentration camp system. During WWII, Kaufering held Jewish prisoners who were sent from other camps (mainly Auschwitz) as forced labor, where they built underground bunkers for manufacturing aircrafts. This work was carried out under the management of the German Organisation Todt, in brutal conditions: half of the 30,000 prisoners perished from exhaustion, disease, and hunger, or executed.
Later, Salama Ortar was amazed to find out that the structure of the women’s barracks in Kaufering still exists. Astonishingly, it was built from the same elements as the refugee barracks in the Marseille transit camp, of which no trace remains. After the war, the ceramic rockets were confiscated and stored in the American army warehouses in Marseille. Architect Fernand Pouillon, who was appointed by the city to build Le Grand Arénas, made the daring decision to reuse them as the camp’s basic building materials; the very same ceramic elements that built the death camp are now the cornerstones of a site of life. Behold – history recounting itself through the material.
Salama Ortar’s emotional and physical experience during that visit, the embodied contact with the ״ceramic rockets״ as she walked into the building that remained intact in Kaufering – a building constructed from the bricks that were manufactured in Marseille, transported by train and used by the German war machine – engendered a profound, deeply transformative change in her. It is possible that the encounter between her real, corporal body and the physical reality of the space triggered a transcorporeal experience. The “ceramic rocket” became Salama Ortar’s catalyst, agent, and object that transcends the boundaries of the body and exists through and between bodies. The encounter marked a dramatic turning point in Salama Ortar’s artistic practice: Instead of creating spaces that recall the refugee barracks in Marseille, she turned to sublimations of the hazy memory and started to explore the body. “Bringing the body” to the material.
In her current exhibition, Habeas Corpus, Salama Ortar expands the relationship between object and body, memory and place, adding another dimension to her layered yearslong practice. The elements featured in the exhibition space are based on the fundamental archetype of the “ceramic rockets” from Arénas/Kaufering, mediated through a sculptural, quite literally corporal process, while the origin remains a distant and dim echo. The building blocks are now replaced by elongated, white and almost nondescript elements; like a featureless face; anthropomorphic models resembling truncated rockets, human body stumps, bones, archaeological findings that lost their identity, leaving only the trauma that shaped them. These elements have a distinct phallic quality, but on closer inspection – some of them also have vaginal characteristics. In a way, they offer a distilled encounter between desire and the dead body, between eros and tantos. Inevitably, this conjures the immediate and horrific connection between sexuality and war. Between rape and acts of vengeance. The psychosis that war brings with it and the fundamental undermining of the boundaries between passion and death.
A beautiful photograph from 1853, which has gained iconic status in the history of photography, depicts a dirt road in the Crimean Peninsula, with dozens of cannonballs scattered across and along it. The silent, still stone balls serve as damning evidence of the violence and carnage that raged during the intense battles between the forces fighting in Crimea. The photograph, taken by Roger Fenton, does not present explicit war scenes. It contains no dead bodies or wounded people, no suffering or pain. It contains a silent testimony, carried by spherical elements, of what took place outside of the photographic frame.
The impact of Salama Ortar’s sculptural elements in the exhibition space involves a similar magical quality. They are the erased faces of the immigrant, the refugee, the soldier, the leader. They are the forgotten image of the war, they are the body brought to court, whose silent presence attests to its erased past. The French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas wrote extensively about the responsibility we have when we look towards the face of the Other. In the encounter with the face of the Other. He writes: “The other metaphysically desired is not ‘other’ like the bread I eat, the land in which I dwell, the landscape I contemplate, like, sometimes, myself to myself, this ‘I’, this ‘other.” Salama Ortar’s bare elements are the face and body of the Other, and looking at them is the ethical act embodied in the reading of the past.
The works in the exhibition are based on a repetitive, typological structure: A series of gray display units that carry two objects. A sculptural element laid along the horizontal plane and a two-dimensional drawing placed along the vertical plane. We could think of this display arrangement as the display of forensic evidence. As if the bodies were brought from the crime scene of history. And perhaps that is their true status. Salama Ortar’s drawings are also based on the basic grid of the military-camp-turned-refugee-camp in Marseilles. But these undergo complex process of treatment and erasure, forgetting and recalling, engraving so deep it actually pierces through the paper. They become vulnerable skin tissue and create surfaces that are both body and place. Salama Ortar speaks about the drawings as an act of lingering: “We have to look for this element that slips away, by lingering in the work, and then it becomes an event in itself, and not an event that holds a message, but an event that we can try to name, follow, interrogate, search for, and try to find the traces of erasure and oblivion.”
Habeas corpus is a legal term that refers to a court order. Its name is derived from a Latin phrase that can be translated in two ways: “bring the body” or “you have the body.” To me, this poetic duality touches the most profound layers of the work before us. On the one hand – the evidence that stands in the presence of the object brought to the scene of testimony, and on the other, thinking about the remembering body of Salama Ortar’s, who experienced the displacement and exile but does not remember them – the body’s right to remember and to sear becomes the core and the motivation of her art.