walking | Forced Walks

Cut Flowers

admin on April 15, 2017

exhibit wide3 Cut Flowers at the Beaumont Gallery, Mere currently features work from the Forced Walks: Honouring Esther collection. Cut Flowers runs until Sunday April 23.

image courtesy Beaumont Gallery

image courtesy Beaumont Gallery

B Gal soil In addition to work from Lorna’s practice exploring inherited trauma, the exhibition includes the Honouring Esther soil installation with sounds from the walk assembled by Richard White. On the opening night of Cut Flowers Richard created a ‘pop up installation’ of the films he had made from the walks projected over a tea service in a shed in the foyer of the Beaumont Gallery.

shedprojection2

shedprojection tea

Image courtesy Beaumont Gallery

This is a joint show with Andrew Walworth who also curated the exhibition: “This exhibition comes from a need to articulate what a refugee from a foreign state means to a person living well away from the actuality of war, how refugees are perceived in the modern world – their almost universal no-status – and the way in which they are treated. I invited Lorna to exhibit as she has personal knowledge of the worst aspects of war and the subsequent fallout. Her works also act as a prompt, a historical reminder for us to think about when reading opinions about current wars and refugees.”

Click to view youtube clip of installation

Esther Brunstein

admin on January 19, 2017

Esther at 70

Esther Brunstein, the Esther we honour in this project and series of walks, the Esther who has been our inspiration throughout, died earlier this week.

The closing exhibition of the Honouring Esther project is deliberately timed around the Holocaust Memorial Day events. One of the objectives was to explore how we might find new ways of working with survivor testimony in the sure knowledge that they wouldn’t be with us for much longer. Esther is no longer with us.

Esther Brunstein was one of the key figures in the campaign for a Holocaust Memorial Day. She became active as a public speaker challenging Holocaust deniers during the period covered by the forthcoming film ‘Denial’ speaking at major public events and schools colleges and universities up and down the country. As a child Esther was immersed in the philosophy of the Bund, the Jewish workers socialist movement and the vibrant Yiddish culture of pre WW2 Europe, she was a passionate internationalist and human rights activist. She spoke at the United Nations on the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Esther’s is one of the voices you will hear if you visit the Holocaust gallery at the Imperial War Museum. She touched thousands of lives including that of a school boy now a doctor who cared for her in her last days. He remembered her speaking at his school when he was a sixth former.

We pay our respects, celebrate her life and continue in that spirit of love and intenationalism. The exhibition will run, 26-29 Jan as advertised in Bath at 44AD Gallery.

Honouring Esther: End of Project Exhibition

admin on October 15, 2016

Richard White and Lorna Brunstein present documentation and new work from two walks hosted by the artists in Germany and England

Frome to Bath 2015 on the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Belsen
Ovelgonne to Belsen 2016 on the 71st anniversary of a Nazi Death March

Wednesday 25 January – Sunday 29 January 2017

Thursday to Saturday 10.00-18.00. Sunday 11.00-16.00

Click to book with Bath Spa Live for these free evening events:

Preview

Wednesday January 25 18.00-20.00

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“those we met along the way”

Absence, presence and resonances on a death march transposed to Somerset and returned: a conversation about the work and the walk.

Thursday 26 January 18.00-20.00

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Holocaust Memorial Day

view the exhibition and reflect on the themes of the day

Friday January 18.00-20.00

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screen grab from Viewranger click to interactive view

Exhibition in Bath

admin on July 16, 2015

The exhibition of work from the Somerset walk is currently up and running in central Bath. In the first exhibition room we have curated a series of 10 panels using research and documentation from the walk. In the glass box there are ‘relics’ gathered by the walkers and in the alcove, the notebooks they kept on the walk.

The second room show a series of floor pieces. Each room has its own looped audio ambience forming a randomised mix of bird song, trudging feet and comments recorded on the walk. These sounds mix with the voices of tourists and their guides, buskers, abbey bells and city seagulls calls filtering in the open door. A unique audio experience in each room. Every hour on the hour the exhibition sound is silenced by the call of the shofar and the sound of one of the interventions is played as a memorial candle burns momentarily. At the end of the intervention the sounds return and the air is briefly tainted with the smell of burning.

An orchid blooms in the darkness, a resonance of the orchid farm supposedly operating from the site of the Waldeslust slave labour camp.

The light from the projection reflects into the installation room. A series of short films representing the experience of the walk are projected across the hall disappearing along the wall out to the door. Sometimes it seems like a walker has dissolved out of the film and into the world and sometimes it seems that an exhibition visitor disappears into the film. Across the digital divide.

On the corner of Abbey Street we look out on the Abbey, the Roman Baths and the ceaseless ebb and flow of tourists. This week is Bath Spa University Graduation week, students in gowns and proud parents getting their souvenir shots in front of Bath’s historic architecture. Strange and powerful juxtapositions.

The exhibition runs at 44 AD Gallery, Abbey Street, Bath until Sunday 19 July at 16.00

Briefing for supporters, Frome Tuesday March 17

admin on March 3, 2015

Join artists Richard White and Lorna Brunstein to hear the story of the Forced Walks project at a briefing in the Cheese and Grain, Frome on Tuesday March 17. The briefing will run twice once at 4.00pm and once at 6.30pm in meeting room 1.

An opportunity to find out about the background to the project and to get involved. There are still places for those wanting to join the walk, come and find out more. The artists are continuing to reach out to local historians and human rights activists interested in being involved in this creative walk-in-witness. They are keen to meet descendants of veterans of the Somerset Light Infantry and other soldiers who may have taken part in the liberation of Belsen as well as those who may have family stories of exile to share.

Remembering the march to Belsen

admin on February 16, 2015

The March from Waldeslust to Bergen-Belsen

Esther remembers….

We were told that the camp would be disbanded. And we marched. I don’t know whether anyone knew, maybe some, but the destination was Bergen-Belsen. But I remember, during that march, and even during times when I was taken out to work, and seeing little houses, and especially on that march, you know, red-roofed, pretty little houses, it was a very pretty little area where we were. And curtains, windows, lace curtained windows, and people peering out and staring.

And I often wondered what went on in their minds when they saw these so-called people were being marched in their concentration garb, and to me, I remember thinking, my this…the world like that exists? There is another world. That I used to be quite incensed when told after the war that the majority did not know what was going on. I don’t know. I just knew that people looked at us. Maybe they were not aware of everything that went on, but we were certainly in their midst.

I don’t know exactly how long the march lasted. But it was not one of the worst marches, because it did not take weeks. Hanover is quite near Bergen-Belsen.

…from Esther Brunstein’s testimony held at the Imperial War Museum

Recce for Honouring Esther

admin on February 3, 2015

I did a complete walk of the proposed route today almost 70 years to the day when Esther was forced on her march from the slave labour camp to Belsen. It was cold and there was a sharp wind but I just keep thinking how this was nothing to compare with what she experienced. I was well fed, I had had a nice breakfast and was armed with plenty of goodies to keep me going.

I heard woodpeckers and thought of machine gun fire, I trudged along frozen ground and through small settlement. I was consumed with thoughts about this parallel journey, the one in my head and the one I was walking. I kept thinking about the cold and Charles Wheeler’s newsreel images of Kurdish families at a cold and windswept at a mountain pass in some recent war came to mind.

As my body kicked in to remind me I forced myself to run and walk at pace to hear the voices in my head keeping me going. I could slow and relax at will though.

So for those thinking about actually doing the walk with us…day one is quite a stretch an all day walk including the ‘interventions’ which we can now start planning. Muddy with a couple of steppish climbs and descents. Walking boots definitely and maybe a stick for the slippy bits. All walkers are asked to register and will receive detailed updates about route and meet points etc

A two day walk to Bath

admin on January 13, 2015

The Honouring Esther walk is now shaping up well ahead of the launch of the project on January 27, the link up with historian and librarian, Peter Jackson, is generating powerful material informing the walk.

Further research with Esther supported by contact at the Bergen Belsen Memorial Museum indicate that the death march took several days. Esther recalls the feel of the cold frosty ground, it must have been a desperate experience, starved half to death, worked to the point of death and then forced to march in flimsy worn out clothing with no protection against the elements. In winter in Germany. There were deaths along the way.
This map of shows the route of the February 1945 death march. The caption says ‘On the way past forests, villages and a school. The route taken by the evacuated Concentration Camp prisoners to Bergen-Belsen. The crosses mark the sites where prisoners were buried’.

In consequence we are now planning for a two day walk, beginning in Frome, Somerset on Tuesday 14 April and walking to Hinton Charterhouse, then on Wednesday 15 April walking from Hinton Charterhouse to Combe Down Bath. It looks like there will be approximately 10 points where the actual walk coincides with the symbolic line of the death march, in principle each one of these will be the site of some kind of intervention. Strangely some of the graves marked on the map are almost exactly at points where the actual walk we will do in April cross the symbolic line on the map.

reference: ‘Besondere Vorkommnisse nicht bekannt: Zwangsarbeiter in unterirdischen Rustungebetrieben: wie ein Heidedorf kriegswichtig wurde’.The author is Annette Wienecke, who was a school teacher in Hambuhren and wrote the book in 1998.

Esther’s Walk transposed to Switzerland

admin on October 10, 2014

We have had a request to provide the line of Esther’s walk to a colleague visiting Switzerland during the time that the project will be taking place. Here is the ‘line on the map’ with a destination yet to be finalised.
[googlemaps https://www.google.com/maps/d/embed?mid=zG0FerrHE65o.kGgIneoaR1Io&w=640&h=480]

Honouring Esther walk ready for ground truthing

admin on October 1, 2014

I have now re drawn the route that we think Esther might have been forced along from the slave labour camp back to the death camp at Bergen Belsen taking into account her testimony and our research. Roads will have changed since 1945 but this is mapped against a current road route rather than tracks through the country. So we have a river crossing and a walk through at least two settlements. I have transposed the shape and orientation of that route to England in Scribblemaps as described in the route finding section of this site and hooked it to our chosen finish point in Bath.

I imported the .gpx file of the death march Esther was on from Scribble maps to Viewranger

Using a combination of Viewranger and Scribble maps I have now worked out a route in England. More or less from Frome into Bath. This weaves like a memory or a DNA spiral around the historic route and provides us with a series of intersections where we can plan moments of memorial and reflection.

Here’s the link to the routes in Scribble map, the red indicates the ‘historic route’ same length and orientation as the walk Esther was forced on in 1945 and the green indicates a possible route of a walk in Somerset retracing that historic walk as closely as possible. This could give us up to 10 intersections.

[googlemaps https://www.google.com/maps/d/embed?mid=zG0FerrHE65o.kag4W27uQz-M&w=640&h=480]

I’ll publish this to Viewranger when I have ground truthed it. About 15 miles with up to 10 point of intersection. At these points we will create some kind of intervention reflecting on those who did not survive, those who did and those who are still walking from war and persecution.