2014–2023
installation, dimensions variable
„An inheritance is never gathered together, it is never one with itself. Its presumed unity, if there is one, can consist only in the injunction to reaffirm by choosing. ‘One must’ means one must filter, sift, criticize, one must sort out several different possibles (…)around the secret. If the readability of a legacy were given, natural, transparent, univocal, if it did not call for and at the same time defy interpretation, we would never have anything to inherit from it. We would be affected by it as by a cause—natural or genetic. One always inherits from a secret—which says ‘read me, will you ever be able to do so?’”[1]
What can we do with the tangible memories of generations of life? How do we relate to the known and hidden stories of our beloved ancestors? Are family heritage and social archives compatible? Would we donate the intellectual products of our heritage to an open community collection where it can be researched by anyone? Can a family history be a universally understood, universally valid social past?
In her art projects, Judit Flóra Schuller primarily uses the medium of photography, supplementing it with subtle material, media and text-based installation elements. Her complex installation unfolds narrative fragments presenting different strategies for dealing with the past (repetition, re-appropriation, reconstruction and the performative gestures of these), through the story of emptying and clearing out the apartment inherited from her grandfather, the filmmaker and cinematographer Imre Schuller. She is concerned with the micro-histories of her immediate family, through the study and artistic interpretation of the legacy, with fragmentary narratives that are part of the narrative histories of East-Central Europe, and that could in fact be our own. The inheritance is twofold: it is both a burden and a treasure. The gestures and emotions of respect and commitment to our ancestors and the traumatic memories transmitted through generations coexist in it. While an inheritance has a significant emotional content, an archive is based on the pragmatic exploration, collection, classification and preservation of objects. Inheritance involves both the act of remembering and preserving, but also sorting, processing and thus forgetting, in other words, it also displays an attempt to end the mourning process, which is reinforced by the involvement of the Schuller family in the Holocaust.
Judit Flóra Schuller explores the impacts of the narratives, inherited and sometimes traumatic memories, personal and collective memories and forces that affect our identity. Through personal and family elements, she describes unresolved past events with a sense of passing and loneliness, where symbolism, abstraction and condensation are used to promote collective reconciliation.
[1] Derrida, Jacques: Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New
International, trans. Kamuf, Peggy, New York–London, Routledge, 1994, p. 18.