Felix Kalmenson

7.5% (Dybbuk) as part of
’Obsessions’ Curated by Anastasia Sosunova
NAC
Nida, Lithuania
21 July–8 October 2023 LINK

Reviews:
Arterritory
O Fluxo Echo Gone Wrong

7.5% (Dybbuk) emerges from out of two encounters, one with memory and the other with circumstance. The memory is one that can be found in nearly identical form within any Litvak family’s history: my grandmother's sister Donya who was the only one to return to their village in Belarus after the war, found their house occupied by their neighbour who subsequently invited her into her own home and served her food on her own plates. Despite the fact that those very neighbours had in fact informed on them to the occupying Nazi forces, it was the feeling of alienation and estrangement from ones own home and the materials of it which ensured that neither she nor anyone else from the family would return to that house again. The circumstance occurred when I recently moved to Brussels and walking through a park I encountered a torn suitcase with a damp and rotting manuscript in the mud alongside other artifacts. I could discern the first few handwritten lines, which read: “Once upon a time, it was so that for insulting or hurting a person, the offender was called to dwell by the victim. 

7.5% (Dybbuk) emerges from a simple premise: prior to WWII and the massive waves of refugees entering Lithuania, there was a Jewish population of 153,743 or 7.6% of the population (1923). In the last census where the ethnic category is cited (2011), Jewish people accounted for 0.1% of the population or 3,050 people. The project very simply suggests that 7.5% (the net absence) of the current and future Lithuanian pavilion’s at the Venice Biennial are allocated for the Yiddish Pavilion in a spirit of reconciliation and repair. 

The proposal at once satirizes the way restitution is calculated and the objectification and enumeration of loss. At the same time the initial proposal spatializes this loss, as the consequences of the apocalypse of the Litvaks is stubbornly material and prone to ongoing negotiation over territorialized memory and real estate, as can be most readily identified in the Jewish Ghetto and the Sports Palace in Vilnius. Contestation over physical spaces remains in the absence of those bodies, and in fact introduces a host of 'speakers for the dead' who come to mediate the demands of the departed. This is where the analogy of The Dybbuk becomes pertinent. As in the play The Dybbuk, or Between Two Worlds (written by S. Ansky in 1916, and performed by Vilna Troupe), a ghost who possesses the body of a living woman is put on trial to ascertain the nature of its demands of the living present, to which it no longer belongs.To facilitate such a testimony, a space is demarcated by a divider, allocating a spectral container which exists alongside and contemporaneously with the space of the living, through which the process of truth and reconciliation can be staged.

But the question still remains, how can we conceive of the process of repair and restitution as something more akin to the temporalities of what was lost, how to restitute centuries of worlds/lifeways beyond the EU mandated memory parade? It is for this reason why I insist on this project existing not as an intervention but as an ethical injunction, a hauntology which makes itself perpetually present rather than historical. In this sense 7.5% (The Dybbuk) would intrinsically be mutable, hosting not only what was lost but also functioning as a place to call the present and the future to testify through the past, reflecting on contemporary forms of apocalypse and collapse which implicate Lithuania; such as its position on the bleeding edge of Fortress Europe in the time of mass migration.