Emily Jacir & Susan Buck-Morss

This notebook combines photographs by Palestinian artist Emily Jacir with a text by political philosopher Susan Buck-Morss, who teaches at the City University of New York, written in response to the images and to conversations with the artist. Jacir’s photographs depict the former Benedictine monastery of Breitenau, near Kassel. A prison camp in the Nazi era, it became a girl’s reformatory after World War II. These images as well as other photographs taken in Kassel are accompanied by selections from the artist’s diary entries, which investigate questions around the histories of the represented sites. Recalling Walter Benjamin’s reading of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, Buck-Morss’ textual response unravels how truth and collective memory are established and how the inextricable relation between knowledge and power leads to the selection of what is archived and remembered.