Fantastic Wednesday: Aline Benecke Event

„Elle est loin la Lumière de la Méditerranée…”

The PhD in Practice invites to one of their Fantastic Wednesdays/Thursdays events where one of the candidates presents part of their artistic research to an open audience. Screenings, performances, discussions, and an open bar!

In 2012, my aunt sent me this photograph. I hadn‘t any family photography in my possession or in my memory… At that time, I was preparing a Performance, later entitled picture this … For me, nonextant photographs left space for fabulation on cultural heritage, belonging and subjectivity. By montaging photographs and linking them to different stories, I created a visual narration of my family’s life during the Algerian War using found vernacular. The performance opened up the idea that a photograph’s scenario and it‘s indexicality are not objective, static facts but re-created in the moment the photograph is read. The poetic, montaged way of storytelling took into account that life in the diaspora is characterized by fluidity and dispersed or nonlinear narrations. The photograph sent to me depicts the front of a house and its front yard. In
front of the house, there are two clotheslines. My aunt wrote on the backside with a ballpoint pen the names of the people depicted in the photograph - in case I wouldn‘t recognize them. At that time, I missed one striking piece of information she had written: Casern in Nantes, our first home.

In her performances, Aline Benecke creates essayistic, narrative formats based on private, historical photographs.
She wishes to invest in the images as material for thought. She twists and turns them, questioning inscribed inherent ideologies and visual narratives through historiographical practices.In her Ph.D. Project “Aesthetics of Wit(h)nessing” she re-creates scenarios of missing photographs in her family album: Her aim is not only to visualize these images but to re-embody the haptics around these missing objects via the tools of performance and Installation. Since seeing and looking at photographs involves touching them, sending them to someone, gluing and sorting them… She considers her practice as emancipatory as it produces heterogeneous narrations that resist linear and normative modes of subjectivization.