Situated within the framework of the Asterisk* and presented in collaboration with Shimmer and Oy Vey, the Deviant Yeshiva will contemplate theoretical texts in dialogue with archival documents from the National Collection of Architecture and Urban Planning, housed at the Nieuwe Instituut. Such documents include correspondences from the collections of architects Abraham Elzas (1907 - 1995) and Joël Meijer de Casseres (1902 - 1990), amongst others. These items recollect and provide insight into the social and political climate in the Netherlands during the years leading up to and the decades following the Shoah (Holocaust). In particular, ruptures in public empathy and critical understanding are rendered palpable through personal letters, accenting an apparent sense of absence in the archive.
Guided by researcher Yonathan Busquila Listik and artist Hannah Dawn Henderson, the reading group will examine these archival artefacts through the prism of Derrida’s Archive Fever, amongst other philosophical materials and departing questions. The sessions aim to reflect on the emergence of post-WWII memorial culture in the Netherlands, and the significance and articulation of absence, debt and trauma in formal archives and collective memory. Further, we will explore how we may be interlocutors with archival items that are often seen as peripheral within an individual’s professional collection. Inspired by the pedagogical grammar of a yeshiva, the Deviant Yeshiva eschews the typical mechanisms and aspiration of dialectical debate — rather than truth, the Deviant Yeshiva’s desired destinations are that of question marks and all other forms of doubtful punctuation that embrace aporia.
Note: this reading group comprises two sessions. The second session will be announced later in the year. It is not obligatory to attend both sessions. Places are limited.
