Exploring the Domestic and Benign: Materiality in Perpetrator Spaces

This paper explores how three art projects I made at and in response to Nazi sites can facilitate discussions and engagement with Europe’s conflicted past. Art offers a medium through which to explore some of the more controversial narratives and ‘many truths’ that exist concerning the crimes of the Nazis in a way that might not be permissible in a purely historical context. I explain how my practice has developed to focus not solely on traumatic pasts, but on how we look at perpetrators in a contemporary context using familiar material culture. This position allows me to unsettle prevailing paradigms that may omit perpetrators' personal lives as part of the complete story of the camps. In the art projects discussed here, a variety of contexts, audiences, and frameworks were developed to confront challenging aspects of perpetrator life and in particular the problematic nature of including their narrative in the history of the Nazi camp system. Three projects will be presented and I will describe how the work was developed and conceived and discuss its intended impact on audiences. The three cases address efforts to use historical material alongside conceptual art to invite the audience to consider new ways to tackle less prevalent paradigms in Holocaust discourse, related to some of the more ordinary aspects of the perpetrators. It will also demonstrate how art offered the means to explore wider questions beyond the fields of science and remembrance to engage the public in new theories and narrative.