“The Polish-Jewish relationship is the embattled terrain of several collective memories, each with its claim to moral legitimacy, and each charged with fierce and sometimes vehement feelings.”1 These contested histories are the source of tension and animosity between Poles and Jews to this day. Unlike the German-Jewish relationship, where “the moral rights and wrongs were starkly clear,” Poland’s past is far more complex.2

B'Seder is a system for storing and retransmitting contested histories. The system uses photography, nomadic performance, cartography and the ancient technology of memory palaces to produce a long-term relational aesthetic practice for conflict transformation. B'Seder follows Pierre Janet's methodology of post-traumatic therapy by seeking to transform fragmented memories into cohesive, flowing narratives.

In formal artistic terms, the project begins with a photograph of an empty room — an imaginary space for new things to be composed. The artist acts as an intermediary between the image and the audience, collecting anecdotes from conversations and shared readings. He then translates these anecdotes into visual mnemonic objects, continually accumulating new material as he and the work travel through new sites with new participants.

After an extended period of research and collecting, the system transitions into an editing and organizing mode where these anecdotal objects are rearranged in support of a singular narrative. Finally, the image is memorized by the artist (and others) and recounted as a long-form story in a public space.

1 Hoffman, Eva. “Complex Histories, Contested Memories: Some Reflections on Remembering Difficult Pasts.” Occasional Papers of the Doreen B Townsend Center for the Humanities, 23 (2000) : 9. Print.

2 Ibid, 10.