Lumiéres
by Sara Rosenberg
Millions of innocent people were killed
by the Nazi regime during the Holocaust.
While the sheer mass of those murdered during this time is devastating
and horrifying, another part of the Holocaust is largely overlooked: the hidden
children. To escape being shipped to
concentration camps or killed, children in Nazi Germany often hid in cellars,
attics, chicken coops, and barns, where they had to remain completely silent for
hours on end. Any suspicion from
neighbors might prompt a police raid, which could result in the discovery and
execution of the hidden children. These
children experienced little to no human contact while in hiding, and slowly
lost pieces of themselves. The hidden
children’s sense of identity was taken from them by the horrors of the
Holocaust, and artist Christian Boltanski strives to convey this in his piece, Lumiéres.
The piece consists of a square composed
of forty-eight naked incandescent light bulbs with black wires hanging
vertically, connecting them. In the
center of the bulbs is a picture of a little girl, whom the artist has named
“Sylvie.” The girl is visible only when
looked at from the right angles, and even then one can only make out
generalities about her. The light bulbs
do not cast light onto the picture, but rather onto the viewer, and when one
stands directly in front of the picture it is not Sylvie that is visible within
the frame, but the reflection of the viewer.
This piece expresses two forms of
identity loss: the identities of the children that were lost during the
Holocaust, and the sense of identity loss that continues into modern day. From any angle, it is extremely difficult to
clearly see all of Sylvie’s face, and the viewer realizes just how difficult it
is to regain identity once it is lost.
When looking at the piece straight on, the viewer sees his or her own
face where Sylvie’s should be, and the effect is striking. Boltanski makes the viewer feel as if they are
in Sylvie’s place, and by doing so confuses them about his or her own identity. The piece asks those who see it to put
themselves in the shoes of a hidden child from the Holocaust, connecting the
two time periods and the fact that identity loss does not go away with time.
The piece is moving and interesting to
look at, and the more one moves around the piece, the more meaning can be
found. It is definitely a piece worth
finding if you ever find yourself wandering through the exhibits of the Museum
of Fine Arts in Boston.
"Life in Shadows: Hidden Children and the
Holocaust." Life in Shadows: Hidden Children and the Holocaust.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, n.d. Web. 13 Mar. 2013. http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/hiddenchildren/insideX
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