A walk by Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman

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Friday, June 22nd, 2018
Start: 9:00 a.m.

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"I plan to walk 16 kilometers across Berlin with a rusted car exhaust pipe secured to my chest, the word Gaza painted across my shoulder blades, and thirteen stones I collected in the streets of Warsaw piled on one hand. My intention is to realize a series of images I saw in my mind while returning from Warsaw to Berlin during the massacre of 62 Palestinians in Gaza. My intention is to intervene in a racist discourse that exploits my body and cultural history to ghettoize and disappear Palestinian life."


The walk is part of Lost in Jüdische Friedhof Weißensee, a durational, site-specific performance project by the artist Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman. Its site is the largest intact, active Jewish cemetery in Europe. Sniderman is considering its spatial, urban geographical, and historical implications in and around Berlin, working with and within it from varying proximities as a kind of frame and figment for his slow articulation of an alternative history of Jews. The project is divided into four different types of work, each representing different constraints, materials, collaborations, and considerations for approaching the history and aesthetics of Jewish diasporic identities by way of the burial grounds as a fermenting, material witness. The artist leans upon a methodology of lostness within the daily act of being inside or not being inside the site. Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman is a DAAD-research fellow at the Institute for Art in Context of the Berlin University of the Arts.