Invisibilities, Osynligheter

In)visibilities

"Barely visible to the naked eye, concealed, impossible to see or secret. Thus can graphic characters appear at a distance in my minimalist, threadlike word drawings. But on closer observation, a tiny script appears expressing such phrases as "on certain days I feel like a line" or "two threads almost meeting", or even the single word "yes" written in densely packed text hundreds of times on a sheet of paper. The language is condensed, repeated, broken down and visualised as long, thin threads that now intertwine, now separate, again and again.

The letters Os in osynligheter (Invisibilities) are also those of my grandmother Duifje's family name. Van Os's Jewish-Dutch family was almost completely eradicated during the Second World War in Amsterdam. There are, despite the underlying history of this ball of thread, many loose ends, kinships, cracks and links to the branches that have stopped growing at one end but budded small shoots at the other.

It was long before I began working with art and when I was a teenager that I would often wonder about what really happened to all my grandmother Duifje's cousins and her father Hartog's siblings before and after the war. I would often receive unsatisfactory answers, but sometimes more tangible details would arrange themselves into possible destinies. Yet I had no distinct picture of what I wished to know more about, or could put a face to all the relatives that died at Sobibór or their many unknown fates in and beyond Amsterdam.

It could have been an involuntary silence. For what can be said of the fragments or the people that cannot be talked about when traces, documents, details, side-tracks, close relations or personal associations are obliterated or inaccessible. Yet at the same time there is an insight that survival and the ability to accept the state of things lead to a concrete understanding of remnant historical connections, while a perpetual focus on what exists in the here and now, a fear of history, is tantamount to an avoidance of hidden, negatively charged spaces and zones.

I arrived in that part of the city along Jodenbreestrat, in the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam, where Nathan Van Os and Kettje Wessel grew up in the late 1800s. The street where Kettje and Nathan were born is now called Houtkopersdwarsstraat and lies just by Waterlooplein square. It was originally called Vlooienburgersteeg and was a little street off the main Jodenbreestraat. Steeg means avenue.

This vibrant thoroughfare, Jodenbreestraat, as well as on the nearby Sint Antoniebreestraat, was once bustling with crowds and market traders. But the growth in traffic and the rising number of cabs and vehicles became too much at the turn of the century, leaving the street woefully congested. The town planners wanted to move the market square to an adjacent site a block away. Waterlooplein was built in 1882 when Leprozengracht and Houtgracht canals were filled in. The square became a market place in 1893 and was open daily except for Saturdays, the Jewish Sabbath.

Many buildings in the post-war Jewish quarter were so dilapidated that they had to be pulled down before they collapsed under their own weight. Their condition was so poor since they had been left empty and deserted and unheated for so long, but also because the severe winter and famine of 1944–1945 forced the desperate residents of Amsterdam to scavenge wood from the former homes of the deported Jews.

During the Second World War, the Jewish quarters were emptied as Nazis dispatched the residents to concentration camps. A very small proportion of the five per cent who survived returned. After the war, when the Jewish quarters had been depopulated and abandoned, Waterlooplein became the home of a flea market and curiosity shops. And so it remains to this day."

Invisibilities is an artists' book that is a part of the book project "innocent people" by Karl-Johan Stigmark
Osynligheter är en artists' book som är en del av bokprojektet "innocent people" av Karl-Johan Stigmark