They were four photos taken clandestinely in an Auschwitz crematorium. Little is known about its author: he was a Greek Jew named Alex, a member of the Sonderkommando, the prisoner units forced by the SS to operate the gas chambers. The film reached the Polish Resistance and, decades later, was exhibited in Paris in 2001. Two years later, the philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman (Saint-Étienne, 71 years old) dedicated these snapshots, the only visual testimony known about extermination in Nazi camps, a controversial and seminal essay, Images despite everything. It is just one of the 60 books signed by this expert in the visual culture of our time, perhaps one of the most influential thinkers of the present. Now he is also the curator of the exhibition In the moved air…which opens this Wednesday at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, where it can be seen until March 17, 2025. Afterwards, the exhibition will move to the Center de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB).
With more than 300 works by 140 artists, the exhibition is designed as “a political anthropology in a poetic key” about “the transformative force of emotions.” The title comes from a verse of Romance from the moon, the moonpoem by gypsy ballad by Federico García Lorca, whose original manuscript is part of this demanding and essayistic exhibition, accompanied by works by Rodin, Giacometti, Miró, Dalí and his admired Goya. “Everything begins with him,” said the historian this week during the assembly of the exhibition in Madrid.
Ask. He says that each of his projects begins with a work by Goya. Because?
Answer. Goya is the greatest exponent of the union between light and shadow. He is the chiaroscuro painter, also in the moral sense. Being a man of the Enlightenment, he stated that his images had a critical function, that of shedding light, but then he introduced shadows into every corner. It reflected reason and the monsters of reason. His philosophical greatness is capital.
P. Is our century still Goyesque, in that sense?
R. I don’t believe it. His vision of society, history, beliefs and the foolishness of the world was a minority in his time and remains so today.
P. Is it still today?
R. Don’t you think so? Unfortunately, we don’t look like Goya. We look more like Spielberg…
“Goya was a minority in his time and remains so today. Unfortunately, we don’t look like Goya. We look more like Spielberg”
P. He dedicates his exhibition to emotions, in a world, that of contemporary art, that usually prefers coldness.
R. I am not for or against emotion. Emotions themselves are nothing, what matters is what you turn them into. Do you want them to lead to a Goya painting or a Trump speech? The fault lies with those who give them a bad image. I believe that you should never give up emotion, even for ethics. He who renounces his emotions represses them. And whoever represses his emotions is always someone very dangerous.
P. Twenty years after Images despite everythingwhere you controversially analyzed the photographs of the Auschwitz crematorium, do you think you or those who criticized you have won? Claude Lanzmann, for example, said that representing the Holocaust was synonymous with trivializing it.
R. Being involved in that controversy, I am not going to say who won. But the question is still there, just as valid…
P. What I ask you is whether censorship of the abject or the free circulation of images has been imposed, even when they are unbearable.
R. The debate you refer to will never end. The other day I was talking to a Lacanian psychoanalyst and we immediately clashed. He told me: “There should not be images of the Holocaust, it is not possible that there are.” The point is that historically it has been possible. These images exist, and I am interested in knowing how they dialogue with reality.
P. What do we see today in Gaza, Lebanon or Ukraine? What representation of these conflicts is offered to us?
R. I understand that, as a journalist, you want to end the interview with a topical touch, but I’m not going to answer you… (laughs).
P. Don’t worry, we’re not done yet. We’re only halfway done.
R. What arrives from Gaza every day dismays me, leaves me dejected. But, for me, it’s not the right time to judge him. You have to wait. We are required to take sides urgently and my political intelligence does not work with that immediacy. Someday I will talk about it, but I am working behind the times. Walter Benjamin was greatly impacted by the Civil War, but he never spoke about it.
P. Isn’t it also the role of an intellectual to comment on the present?
R. Yes, we are asked to judge the present and predict the future. For me, our function is to search for historical roots, to understand the future from the past. To talk about Gaza, we would have to go back to the Warsaw ghetto and see how the Israeli Government of Menachem Begin (founder of Likud, Benjamin Netanyahu’s party) exploited it. And remember that he trained in Mussolini’s fields. Menachem was, therefore, a fascist. If you ask me about what’s happening today, I wouldn’t say it as easily.
“What comes from Gaza every day dismays me, leaves me dejected. But, for me, it’s not the right time to judge him. “We have to wait”
P. It is said that there have never been as many images as today. Historical truth or mere commonplace?
R. It’s a reality, there are too many images. To which I respond: so what? No one is going to turn off their phone or close their social media anyway. I don’t have one, I have never entered Facebook or Instagram…
P. Are you not interested in networks?
R. They are a waste of time, and the most valuable thing in life is time. When I ride the subway, I prefer to watch people. In any case, yes, there are too many images, just like there are too many words. The question, as Kant said, is how to orient yourself, how to choose the right image.
P. What is, for you, that appropriate image?
R. It is the image that suspends all my conformisms, the one that immerses me in silence for a long time and forces me to reformulate my language, to reinvent it in a poetic way. The appropriate image is what a crisis provokes in you.
P. Do you watch movies and series?
R. I don’t have Netflix or other platforms, I don’t spend money on that. But once I tried it and saw what they offer and the addictive effect they have. And that, to me, doesn’t interest me. I’m not saying it’s bad, but I’m not interested at all. We have little time in life. I prefer to see a child draw.
“I don’t have social networks, I have never been on Facebook or Instagram. They are a waste of time, and the most valuable thing in life is time”
P. In today’s culture, is everything that does not fit on networks and platforms destined to become extinct?
R. Not at all. Do you think books will disappear? Always, throughout history, these things have been said: when photography was invented, it was said that painting was going to disappear, and look today. Let’s wait a little. One day there will be so many energy problems, because technology consumes a lot of energy, that the sheet of paper, an invention that does not require any energy, will regain its place. If no one burns down my house, my books will be there for my grandchildren and their descendants in 150 years.
P. Do you consider yourself an image addict?
R. Yes… (takes out a tiny digital camera from his jacket pocket). Since I arrived in Madrid I have taken about 700 photos. I like to make unframed images. I have a huge photographic atlas project, about 5,000 or 6,000 photos.
P. What will that atlas contain?
R. All my photos. In Madrid I have photographed the Rastro and the window of a pastry shop full of saint’s bones. I asked permission to go to the Prado and took photos of the painted details near the edge of the frames of some paintings. I am very interested in that border space. Taking a photo raises philosophical problems. As Lorca would say, it is game and theory.
P. “You have to look with the eyes of a child and ask for the Moon,” said Lorca himself. Is that your way of seeing the world?
R. Yes, with child’s eyes. And, at the same time, with those of an enlightened man who knows the subtle weapon of criticism.