Harris Bauer
Summer Residency 2020
This residency examines the ways in which a tangible exchange of objects and papers serves as physical representation of my grandmother’s form of preserving memory and legacy. With the accumulation of these materials, resulting in one archival facet of a multi-tiered exploration of story telling, contextualization and reception, I’m thinking and writing through the space that personal archives maintain between history and memory. The result is an amassing of information that speaks towards personal history in the form of a self-reflecting testimonial.
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My grandmother goes through papers. My whole life, her occupation with this task has been frequently voiced to the point of familiarity. She sorts and files; she makes photocopies of photographs, book excerpts, newspaper clippings, other photocopies. When I enter her apartment, I never leave without something that she has placed in my hands. Sometimes small objects, or single books, other times large bags of clothing, a tape without a tape player, etc.
Examining these items brings tangibility to her form of storytelling when speaking about family history and personal hindsight, as well as her experience pre-- and post--WWII as a Hungarian Jewish Survivor of Auschwitz. The private and the public spheres of sharing, when it comes to how she tells stories, are intertwined by the underlying current of historical significance that leads to a, perhaps, manipulated translation of her experiences and personality.
My grandmother incessantly annotates, highlights, and clips writing to form context around her understanding of a certain material or moment. She hands these items to me: a physical portrayal of inherited memories I have already received, although without such a literal transaction.
I have brought the various papers, photographs, and recorded public speeches that have been given to me by my grandmother to LACA. In examining how sentimentality distorts my own interpretation of these items, I am pressed by the ways in which history becomes a distorting factor for any other viewer. The organization of these materials from an archival stance allows for a collapsing of these views onto one another, with the intention of creating a format that can be cross referenced in culminating writing. An accompanying collection of writings work to untangle the ways in which memory transference is exemplified within this particular relationship between myself and my grandmother.
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Harris Bauer is a writer, editor and facilitative producer based in Los Angeles. Her work seeks to navigate the intangible intersection of memory and history, and explores the unreliable, often nonlinear, narrative as a means of studying various forms of literature and testimony. Along with collaborator Rachel Zaretsky she runs Hosting Projects, a platform founded in 2013 specializing in site specific installation, conversation, and development of new works from emerging artists. She has worked on publications, projects and programming for Wendy’s Subway, Ugly Duckling Presse, and the Los Angeles Contemporary Archive. Her work has been published by American Chordata, PressPress and Ginger Magazine. She holds a BFA in Visual and Critical Studies from SVA.