Pressing stillness

Pressing stillness / Echo Eternal (2018) Selly Park (SEN) Secondary School. A collaboration with Richard Shrewsbury (music and sound artist)

Broadcaster Natasha Kaplinsky recently documented, one-hundred and twelve Holocaust Survivor testimonies, through filmed interviews with living survivors. Working with the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation, to share this serious subject, Echo Eternal is a programme that facilitates young people to explore this crucial aspect of our history, through creative projects—generating a series of echos. In 2018, a group of young people selected from Selly Oak Trust School (SEN) in Birmingham, received a testimony, from Holocaust Survivor Susie Lind.

Working in Special Educational Needs settings, one encounters young people who are wonderfully energetic, enthusiastic, emotional and unguarded. They freely share their thoughts, ideas and emotions. The challenge with this group is in harnessing productive ways to exploit their energy and passion. Printmaking, with all its practicality and diversity of materials and equipment, utilised that energy and kept their attention on the task involved. Working on a smaller scale, both enabled independent and individual expression and supported the young people to focus.

The young people endeavoured to understand the history, that Lind’s story relates to, and to empathise with the personal experiences that her testimony describes. Whist not easy for this group, to identify with the larger historical concepts surrounding the Holocaust, in the process of putting themselves in Lind’s shoes, images emerged from her story that deeply connected with the group. Their response was visually abstract but direct, honest and sensitive in its mark-making. Expressing emotions through drawing and printmaking, they sought to articulate elements of Lind’s story. Pressing her story onto paper, through a range of gestural marks, symbols and metaphors, it was abstraction that offered them a more direct path to emotional connection.

The most exceptional example, of the young people’s printmaking, emerged through a series of seven prints on cotton handkerchiefs. It possessed a particular symbolic resonance to Lind’s story—relating to a specific passage in her testimony, where she describes her mother’s final farewell at the Kindertransport. It’s an emotional parting that leaves the young Susie with a precious handkerchief: a tiny memorial of her mother’s love. In essence, the young people, narrate her story through the seven handkerchiefs.

“The handkerchief I’m holding goes back to 1939. My mother saw me off on the Kindertransport from Prague, and she took a handkerchief out of her bag in order to wipe my tears at our goodbyes. I knew I would never see my parents again. I have kept this handkerchief newly laundered ever since.”
Holocaust Survivor Susie Lind

Working with music and sound artist Richard Shrewsbury (Birmingham Conservatoire), young people in a separate group explored sound and silence, through sensitive audio recording equipment. Enabling a new understanding of sound and its impact: the weather outside, the sounds of the school, interviews with people, and their emotional reactions, led to them using sounds and voices to retell Lind’s story. The sound and spoken-word piece, combined with visual narratives created through printmaking, evolved into a collaborative multimedia film—Pressing Stillness.

Pressing Stillness was created in collaboration with Richard Shrewsbury, animating the young printmaking, sound and spoken-word together, in one collective creative interpretation of Susie Lind’s testimony.

Pressing Stillness featured in Echo Eternal Horizons performances at Birmingham Town Hall in 2019 and 2020. Echo Eternal was an arts, media and civic engagement project inspired by the testimonies of Survivors of the Holocaust, created for the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation.

Echo Eternal was developed by Core Education Trust with the following partners