Yael Bartana
And Europe Will Be Stunned — The Polish Trilogy, 2007-2011
3 channel video and sound installations
11, 15 and 35 min
Edition of 8 + 2 AP
B-YBARTANA-.15-0026
Mary Koszmary (Nightmares) is the first film in the trilogy 'And Europe Will Be Stunned' and features a young activist, played by Sławomir Sierakowski, founder and editor of a Polish...
Mary Koszmary (Nightmares) is the first film in the trilogy "And Europe Will Be Stunned" and features a young activist, played by Sławomir Sierakowski, founder and editor of a Polish left-wing magazine. In a speech delivered in the abandoned National Stadium in Warsaw, he urges three million Jews to come back to Poland. Both a cinematic fiction and Sierekowski’s actual views, his improbable call addresses the question of anti-Semitism and xenophobia in Poland, resonating with current issues of immigration and the question of “return”.
In the second film of the trilogy, "Mur I wieża (Wall and Tower)", the vision of the first is being realised: men and women dressed as Jewish pioneers erected a Wall and Tower kibbutz in the Warsaw district which used to be the Jewish residential area before the war, and then became part of the Ghetto. Like Summer Camp/Awodah, the film aesthetically references Zionist imagery from the 1930s. Upon completion of the construction, a flag is raised, designed using hybrids of Polish and Jewish emblems, while the Israeli national anthem is played backward, as if to signal the reversal of a historic event.
The gripping final part of the trilogy, "Zamach (Assassination)", features the funeral ceremony of Sławomir Sierakowski, leader og the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland, who has been assassinated. The speeches at the ceremony allow for a multiplicity of voices to be heard-of both real people like Anda Rottenberg, Alona Frankel, and Yaron London, and fictional characters. It is by means of this symbolic death that the myth of the new political movement is unified, in the hope that it will become a concrete project to be implemented in the years to come: “Join us, and Europe will be stunned."
In the second film of the trilogy, "Mur I wieża (Wall and Tower)", the vision of the first is being realised: men and women dressed as Jewish pioneers erected a Wall and Tower kibbutz in the Warsaw district which used to be the Jewish residential area before the war, and then became part of the Ghetto. Like Summer Camp/Awodah, the film aesthetically references Zionist imagery from the 1930s. Upon completion of the construction, a flag is raised, designed using hybrids of Polish and Jewish emblems, while the Israeli national anthem is played backward, as if to signal the reversal of a historic event.
The gripping final part of the trilogy, "Zamach (Assassination)", features the funeral ceremony of Sławomir Sierakowski, leader og the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland, who has been assassinated. The speeches at the ceremony allow for a multiplicity of voices to be heard-of both real people like Anda Rottenberg, Alona Frankel, and Yaron London, and fictional characters. It is by means of this symbolic death that the myth of the new political movement is unified, in the hope that it will become a concrete project to be implemented in the years to come: “Join us, and Europe will be stunned."