SONDERBAUTEN / SITE SPECIFIC at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust

SONDERBAUTEN: THE SPECIAL BLOCK

by Quintan Ana Wikswo

performance work by Alexx Shilling and Quintan Ana Wikswo

Performance excerpt:

SONDERBAUTEN: THE SPECIAL BLOCK

A Site-Located Meditation in Poetry, Movement, and Music

The Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust

April 26, 2012

Text, Concept and Direction: QUINTAN ANA WIKSWO

Choreographer: ALEXX SHILLING

Music: ISAAC SCHANKLER

Voice: ANNA LISA BLOTH

Dancers: CHEY CHANKETHYA, SARAH JACOBS and ALEXX SHILLING

Violin: ANDREW THOLL

Translation into German: DOROTHEA HERREINER

Special thanks to the Center for Cultural Innovation, Yaddo, the ARC/Durfee Grant, Puffin Foundation, Dragon’s Egg, Oberpfaltzer Kunstlerhaus, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Yeshiva University Museum, and to Perla Karney, Joanne Jacobson, Zachary Levine, Ute Herreiner, Deborah Poe and Noah Saterstrom.

A suite of interdisciplinary works in multi-panel photographs, film installations, original text, and live performance collaboration in dance, music, film and text, SONDERBAUTEN: THE SPECIAL BLOCK explores the unmarked and unmemorialized ruins of the forced-sex rape brothel at Dachau Concentration camp.

The work is a powerful, luminous inquiry and meditation surrounding the obscured and suppressed histories of gender-based war crimes and State-sponsored violence against women. In 1941, several hundred female prisoners were transported from Ravensbruck to Dachau – some were forced into slave labor at the rape brothel, and the others were forced to manufacture cameras at the Agfa factory sub-camp of Dachau in Munich.

In 2009, multidisciplinary artist Quintan Ana Wikswo recovered several of the Nazi military film cameras manufactured by these women, and worked with their cameras to photograph the unmarked site at Dachau where the rape brothel once stood. Today, the site remains unmarked, and the experience of these women prisoners remains largely unmemorialized, unacknowledged and undiscussed.

In 2011, SONDERBAUTEN premiered in an eight-month solo museum exhibition and live performance in New York City at Yeshiva University Museum at the Smithsonian-affiliated Center for Jewish History. In 2012, SONDERBAUTEN will be adapted by Quintan Ana Wikswo and Alexx Shilling for site-located meditation in the amphitheatre at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust. The artists and performers will present a work that moves within the naturalistic setting with spacialized voice, movement, and sound.