Whispered – The Cassandra Project
Whispered gave birth to a character by tracing the visible contours of her absence.
In this project’s iteration as displayed at Gallery Homeland in Portland, Oregon, I assembled a ‘Holocaust Educational Kit’ for very young children according to the logic of a fictional itinerant teacher named Cassandra Wolf. This logic, at times compassionate and at other times careless, allows us to examine the contemporary social functions of Holocaust education. The historical ‘artifacts’ shown in the exhibit consist primarily of the lessons themselves in addition to Cassandra’s photo album with snapshots of her solitary travels across middle America with her kit. These lessons place students within different roles of 'victim' and 'perpetrator', calling attention to psychological processes which may inadvertently re-create xenophobia and discrimination.
This project traverses performative and disciplinary boundaries while addressing questions of identity, remembrance, and responsibility between teacher and student. The deliberately specific context of The Holocaust asks how people interpret historical meaning through multiple acts of mediation, in this case through a fictional character compelled to teach the sensitive subject against all odds of ‘getting it right.’
In this project’s iteration as displayed at Gallery Homeland in Portland, Oregon, I assembled a ‘Holocaust Educational Kit’ for very young children according to the logic of a fictional itinerant teacher named Cassandra Wolf. This logic, at times compassionate and at other times careless, allows us to examine the contemporary social functions of Holocaust education. The historical ‘artifacts’ shown in the exhibit consist primarily of the lessons themselves in addition to Cassandra’s photo album with snapshots of her solitary travels across middle America with her kit. These lessons place students within different roles of 'victim' and 'perpetrator', calling attention to psychological processes which may inadvertently re-create xenophobia and discrimination.
This project traverses performative and disciplinary boundaries while addressing questions of identity, remembrance, and responsibility between teacher and student. The deliberately specific context of The Holocaust asks how people interpret historical meaning through multiple acts of mediation, in this case through a fictional character compelled to teach the sensitive subject against all odds of ‘getting it right.’
