Curated by Giulia Simi & Elena Pirazzoli
With the support of Settore Biblioteche e Welfare culturale del Comune di Bologna nell’ambito del Patto per la lettura di Bologna
Sponsor: Gruppo Hera
In collaboration with Adelphi
This edition features again the section Poetry, Diaries, Novels. Home Films and Literature, which each year includes an exchange with a writer or novelist who particularly dealt with the theme of words as a means of investigating personal stories intertwined with collective history. Life fragments make up the mosaic of history: past, present, future. In their research, the media that record reality – photography, cinema – are often to be found underground: evoked, investigated, questioned.
This year we invited Katja Petrowskaja, a German writer of Ukrainian origin, who made her debut in 2014 with Maybe Esther: A Family Story, an attempt to reconstruct her own painful family events branching between Ukraine, Poland, Russia, Austria, Germany, as well as between the Jewish world and the Soviet world, between Babi Yar/Babyn Yar and Mauthausen, confronting the traumas left by wars on bodies, psyches, and genealogies. The stories and memories handed down need evidence in order to emerge from uncertainty, from reconstructions marked by “maybes”: the photographs become in this way focal points in the research.
Katja Petrowskaja. Observing is a way of posing
“Images overwhelm us from all sides: from newspapers, books, billboards, exhibitions, smartphones, and the Internet. Talking about just a single photo was my attempt to stop and pause. I wanted to put an end to the inflation of images, not for the whole world, but for me, as if observation was a slow, somewhat old-fashioned process.” This is how Ukrainian-born German writer Katja Petrowskaja describes the process that led her to write every three weeks, for seven years, a text about a photograph of her choice, which was then published in the culture insert of FAZ (the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper). The chosen photographs came from family archives, found at flea markets, in catalogs or art exhibitions. Petrowskaja experiences the relationship with the image as an encounter, as if it were a person, since this medium bears the trace of people, whether they are the subject portrayed or the ones that take the shot. And from that encounter comes the ekphrasis, the narrative description of the image. The term comes from the Greek and means “to describe elegantly” as it indicated, in rhetoric, the ability to describe places and works of art with such a high style that their expressive force rivaled the object they described. This is not just analysis of the image, but interpretation arising from observation.
Fifty-seven of these encounters with images, which turned into ekphrases, are collected in the book Das Foto schaute mich an (“The Photograph Looked Back at Me”, not yet translated into English, published in Italian as La foto mi guardava) on the cover of which, in both the Italian edition and the original German, appears Maya Deren, an experimental filmmaker, as well as a film theorist, dancer, poet, and scholar of voodoo culture. Petrowskaja and Deren (born Eleonora Derenkovskaya) are united by their hometown, Kyiv, their Jewish origin and their ability to navigate reality by changing it, thanks to a transformative gaze.
“Each photo safeguards something transient,” Petrowskaya writes, looking at the photograph depicting two children on the harbor of a Black Sea town. They are looking at something outside the frame; we will never know what the reason for their astonishment is. Their gaze draws ours and opens wide questions. As Roland Barthes writes in Camera Lucida, photography is what “once was”: an instant captured by a mechanical eye, imprinted through a chemical process and therefore able to transcend that particular moment, extending over time. Thanks to digital means, this possibility seems to have expanded exponentially. Storing an instant and giving it the opportunity of existing far beyond its present means that other gazes, very distant in time, as well as in space, may rest on it, on what the photographer’s eyes caught in the past: it means implying another gaze, turned toward the camera or toward a mysterious object. Therefore, observing the images means interweaving gazes through time. A relationship between people, between similar, opposing, assonant experiences.
Elena Pirazzoli
About the author
Katja Petrowskaja was born and raised in Kyiv. She studied Literature and Slavic studies at the University of Tartu (Estonia). In 1994-95, thanks to a scholarship in the United States, she attended Stanford University and Columbia University; in 1998 she received her PhD at the Moscow State University. In 1999 she moved to Berlin where she began working for several Russian and German media outlets (including the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, taz, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung). Her debut book Vielleicht Esther (Maybe Esther, translated by Shelley Frisch, 4th Estate, 2018) was awarded the Bachmann Prize (2013) and the European Strega Prize (2015).
In October 2015 she carried out a project at the IFK – Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften – International Research Center for Cultural Studies in Vienna entitled “Alles, was der Fall ist” (“Everything happens as it does happen,” which takes up the incipit of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) on the relationship between photographs and observers. In 2022, he published Das Foto schaute mich an (“The Photograph Looked Back at Me”, not yet translated into English), translated into Italian by Ada Vigliani (La foto mi guardava, Adelphi, 2024).