By Joshua Robinson – 

Writer Tom Hastings and translator Rey Conquer complete the line-up for Holocaust Centre North’s Memorial Gestures artistic residency for 2024. Both new residents will join visual artists Maud Haya-Baviera, Irina Razumovskaya, Ariane Schick, and Matt Smith to create brand new work inspired by the Centre’s archives and in response to its themes and collections around Holocaust remembrance and history.

Alongside the artists, Hastings and Conquer will now be immersed in the Centre’s memories, artefacts, and accounts covering themes of discrimination, displacement, trauma, migration, loss, memory, and hope – to respond to and translate them through their own, individual creative and artistic practices.

Rey Conquer is a writer working across essay, fiction, poetry, and translation, as well as a translation editor and critic. They have a PhD in German literature and teach German literature, film, and translation at Queen Mary University of London.

They commented: “I am very excited and honoured to be working with the collections at Holocaust Centre North and to be chosen as the inaugural translator-in-residence. I applied for the residency because I am interested in how difficult histories and texts are made available to audiences without being tamed or simplified. In the context of the Holocaust, which involves many languages, translation is central to this. I see translation not as a transparent window but as necessarily performing a kind of transformation; not just just involving the words on the page but also the choice of texts and how they are presented; and not just about making texts available to new readers, but making readers available to new texts. I want to use the residency to find out how translation can be used to show that the stories and experiences contained in the archive are ‘live’, possessing the power to transform us in the present. It will allow me to think in new ways about how we teach the Holocaust and its legacy in the UK, and to contribute work that allows people to think this through for themselves.”

Tom Hastings is a writer living in Glasgow. He lectures in dance at The Place, London, and holds a PhD in history of art from the University of Leeds. He writes about performance, forms of protest, and social history; his current research focuses on histories of gesture and decolonisation in Trinidad, India, Ghana, and the UK. Tom’s art criticism and essays are published in Art Monthly and other art magazines. Tom is working on a first novel.

He comments: “Reading through the collection of survivors’ stories on Holocaust Centre North’s website, I was drawn to the significance of gesture across letters, photographs, and other materials. The stories led me to reflect on the way details of embodied movement can serve to memorialise experience – something I know from my own grandparents’ story. The Memorial Gestures programme presents a unique opportunity to inhabit a living archive in dialogue with artists, the team, and the wider community. As writer-in-residence, I will produce an extended essay reflecting on gesture in the collections; in the process, I hope to consider how those sedimented acts transmit experiences of collective belonging, of survival, and of being in relation to the other in the present.”

Holocaust Centre North – based at the University of Huddersfield – tells the global story of the Holocaust through over 120 local stories and materials from survivors who subsequently created new lives in the north of England. Now in its second year, its Memorial Gestures Residency brings a new perspective to the collections and brings it to life creatively for future generations. This is the first year both a translator and a writer have been appointed alongside visual artists to engage and respond to the collections in this way. The new writer and translator residencies will run in tandem with the artists for the next six months – culminating in a final presentation and exhibition of all the new individual work created by all six residency holders at a gallery in Huddersfield in September.

Andrew Key, Holocaust Centre North Development Co-Ordinator stated: “ We are thrilled to invite Rey Conquer and Tom Hastings to be our inaugural translator and writer-in-residence, as part of Memorial Gestures. Memorial Gestures is our attempt to grapple with the question of how we find new ways to remember the Holocaust in a time when the first generation of survivors are no longer with us to share their stories. Holocaust history is inherently multilingual, and survivors who built new lives in the North of England had to learn how to communicate and explain themselves in a totally new context. Translation is at the heart of how we think about this chapter of our shared history, and it is a great privilege for us to be able to provide the opportunity to explore what exactly this means for our wider culture, particularly at a moment when questions about migration, traumatic history and cultural misunderstandings seem inescapable. Our archive is full of examples of survivors and their families writing about their experiences – in letters and postcards, but in stories, poems, and autobiographies too. There are countless untold stories waiting to be unearthed, and Rey and Tom will wonderfully compliment the excavations that our current and previous artists-in-residence have begun.”

To learn more about Holocaust Centre North, please visit: https://holocaustcentrenorth.org.uk/

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