The Landscape of our Memory is an art project created by Gabriela Bulisova and Mark Isaac – two Fulbright scholars in Poland (2022 – 2023). Their cooperation concerned the dispersed Holocaust, also named as the Holocaust by Bullets and its purpose is to commemorate those who were murdered not in the concentration camps, but their own native towns or their neighbourhood.
The artists’ work traces us back to the landscape of the Holocaust which, thus, enables us to understand, commemorate and transform the events of WWII. The core of the project is the series of portraits of those who were murdered during the dispersed Holocaust. The artists made the images using the old-time photographic technique of anthotypes in which photographs are developed by the use of natural substances. Before the got down to preparing photosensitive emulsion, they gathered on their own plants and flowers growing on mass graves. Next, they exposed the images towards the sun, paying affectionate tribute to list lives.
In order to commemorate anonymous victims whose photographs are lost, the artists used the analogue camera from the times of WWII. They also designed several collages – the portraits of three-witnesses, that is trees which grew where mass murders were taking place. Furthermore, they made lumen prints from the sold collected from the land of mass graves and watergrams from the water of the rivers where the ashes of the victims were thrown. The exhibited works are linked by the probability of the presence of the traces of victims – both on the molecular level of the space and in the images.
Gabriela Bulisova and Mark Isaac are multimedia artists whose work oscillates between fine arts and documentary practices. In their art they refer to photography, video, texts and music and try to focus on such social issues as memory, reconciliation,and environment protection. The Fulbright scholarship that they were given to work in Poland resulted in the artistic project whose purpose was to commemorate the victims of the dispersed Holocaust when people were murdered in their native towns or in their neigbourhood. The Landscape of our Memory project is based on several different techniques, old and new, which are all linked and related to the landscape of the tragedy. Thus the project is the beginning of the exploration of the ecological history of the Holocaust and its reference between genocide and ecocide.
The artists worked together in the Czech Republic and in Cyprus (2021 – 2022) on the project called A Tree for the Forest whose focus was the role of trees for the climate in crisis.
Between 2018 and 2019 they made The Second Fire (a multimedia exploration of the ecological dangers to Lake Baikal). Between 2017 and 2018 they were working in the south of Ukraine on the documentary A Divine River about fighting for the environmental dangers of the south of the Bug river.
Another project of theirs, Amoric Monumentum, focuses on love, loss and memory; it uses and presents bleak, damaged photographs found in the cemeteries of Europe and Siberia.
The work of Gabriela Bulisova and Mark Isaac has been shown in Canada, Cyprus, Finland, the UK, Siberia, Slovakia, South Korea, the USA and Ukraine.
To find out more about the artists and their work, visit their webpage which is linked here.
The Landscape of our Memory is going to be shown in the White Synagogue till the autumn of 2024.