Roy Menachem Markovich’s And we worked… also utilizes a form of testimony. Its first part shows an elderly Jewish woman trying to recount her memories of a concentration camp, constantly interrupted by the family members speaking nearby, the grandson coming for a visit, or the pizza delivery person. The camera continues filming during those moments, breaking the conventional lie of the documentary format—a lie founded upon the inherent distance between the documentary action and the order of reality prior to the arrival of the camera. This is a distance we ignore as viewers: the distance between the natural and the represented. The second part of the work exposes us to the way the apartment is being set up prior to the filming, as well as to the makeup artist’s concerns regarding travel reimbursement—in other words, to the mechanics of manufacturing documentary truth.
curatorial text by Ran Kasmy Ilan
"And We Worked.." examines the documenting mechanism regarding the collective memory of the Holocaust . The
video constructed by three acts that show three different documenting procedures. The routine of a testimony, of
telling a story. Revealing the infrastructure of preserving the truth of an eternal national trauma.
In the first Part , "And We Worked.." , Elisheva , a holocaust survivor is trying to tell her life story, from life in the small
village to the horrifying memories from the concentration camps, as the family members repeatedly interrupting her.
The pizza guy is coming, the interviewing daughter needs to go to the restroom in the middle of an interview, the
family is being noisy and the tape reaches its end.
The CDA's archives are operating with the support of the Ostrovsky Family Fund and Artis
