A Political Act: Unraveling the Legacy of Alice Salomon in Visual Art and Imagined Dialogue
Tue, December 17, 1:30 to 3:00pm EST (1:30 to 3:00pm EST), Virtual Zoom Room 03Abstract
In this interdisciplinary performance, I engage in the “political act” of exploring the life and legacy of Berlin-born, social work pioneer, Alice Salomon (1872-1948), through an imagined conversation and collage.
Through the conversation, I reflect on my personal-artistic relationship with Salomon, drawing parallels between our lives and connecting themes such as loss in the Shoah, forced exile, and gender inequality. Salomon died in the year of my birth (1948), solidifying my connection with her “in spirit.” This directly relates to the session’s emphasis on the impact of nonhuman entities on researchers and the relationship that inevitably develops when engaging in biography (Lieblich).
My collage, “An Intensive Life,” is a reflection and extension of this imagined dialogue, incorporating symbols that reference Salomon's transnational travel, prolific writing, and feminist and worker rights activism. In the collage I bring together elements and material that exist separately, creating new interconnections; this is a political act.
Central to “An Intensive Life” is the “Phoenix” sewing machine, symbolizing women's work and cyclical regeneration - new life and continuation - mirroring Salomon's dedication to social reform and transmission of knowledge to future generations. I share this value of continuity, because of my children, who are central to my life. This provides intersubjective intuition into Alice’s experiences.
The collage also depicts the traumas of war, violence and illness, activism for the poor, women’s rights, and children’s education, reflecting her and my own diverse achievements. I utilize an autoethnographic approach, including my father's medical background, my mother’s needlework, and childhood observations of poverty and homelessness, to deepen my insight into Salomon's emotional and embodied world.
By intertwining personal experiences, archival research and Salomon’s autobiographical writings, I mobilize discernment of Alice’s context and legacy. My work revives the biographies of those not well known, facilitating their reach to a wider public, for example, my paintings inspired by Viktor Ullmann’s Piano Sonata No. 7 (1997) or my tribute to Kaufhaus N. Israel (2003).
Through visual art and imagined dialogue, I explore the intersubjectivity between Jewish women of different generations - myself as artist and my muse, Alice Salomon.