The War Heritage Institute in Brussels is currently exhibiting “Snapshots”, a selection of photographs of the still visible traces of the Nazi abomination taken by Luc Mary-Rabine. He presents them as follows:
For ten years or so, I went from camp to camp, from ghetto to ghetto, from cemetery to cemetery, and I photographed barbed wire, watchtowers, dissection tables, crematoria, gas chambers to the point of disgust. The camps where the Nazis tortured, shot, gassed millions of men, women, children, because they were Jews, Gypsies, Russian soldiers. The camps where they exterminated by work, by hunger, blows, typhus, those they had reduced to slavery: the Jews whom they had not shot at the edge of a mass grave nor gassed when they came out of the wagons, the resistance fighters, the Communists, the German and Austrian Social Democrats, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Polish intelligentsia, all those who refused their hateful and perverse ideology. Sometimes there is nothing more to see, because the Nazis erased their crimes and destroyed their extermination facilities themselves, not that they had any remorse, no, these deaths were still too present, it was necessary expel them from history and there remains only a piece of railway line, a mound of ash and the site of mass graves where the earth still rejects bone fragments and buttons of clothing today.
It was not a duty to remember, it was a work of mourning. From camp to camp, I wanted to physically experience emptiness, absence, hear the echoes of silence, this “noisy silence of the innumerable cry” and translate my mourning into my own mode of expression.
Luc Mary-Rabine
The « Snapshots » exhibition is part of the Parcours Photo Brussels Festival.
It runs until March 31 but could be extended.
Musée Royal de l’Armée, Museum of the Armed Forces and of Military History, Parc du Cinquantenaire, 3, 1000 Bruxelles.
https://www.hangar.art/tour20-1
