A site-specific performance for which the artist ran the 15km historic route of the “gas van” – a mobile gas chamber used during the Holocaust in Serbia during a 3‐month period in 1942. The piece deals with memory, post-memory, and dissociative tendencies, using the body to reactivate a landscape of trauma that has been integrated into the mundane local urban and suburban surroundings. A film has resulted from this performance that works with imagery and sound to both document and distort the performance action as a subject, focusing on bodily limitations, capacities, and functions. The film’s emphasis on sound carries a distinct significance as it uses repetition, reverberation, and feedback loops to manipulate and distort the original content; thus mirroring the experience of trauma, and its explicit and procedural memory.
Film excerpt available HERE.
“Running on Empty”, film (1hr 01mins), Elana Katz, 2018
Camera: Mihai Andrei Leaha, Maria Nastase, Nikola Polic, Montage: Branka Pavlovic, Sound Design: Exildiscount
This piece was the final site-specific performance within Katz’s <Spaced Memory> (2011-18). Its production was sponsored by the Trust for Mutual Understanding of New York, and realized in cooperation with the REX Cultural Center of Belgrade and the DFBL8R Performance Art Gallery of Chicago.