photo by Julian Voloj
When I received a call for entries for the Orchard Street Shul Artist Cultural Heritage Project, I was intrigued. An opportunity for artists, designers and historians to come together to explore the past and present collective memory of New Haven's final remaining historic synagogue. I had just returned from Germany, where I spent the summer working on an art-based research project called Berlin's Eruv. I conducted interviews with members of Berlin's Jewish community concerning the highly visible presence of the monuments and memorials commemorating Jewish life (death) and the impact these structures have had on their individual and communal Jewish identities.
Fascinated with the idea that history and community can be present but appear to be invisible without communal engagement, I wanted to apply this concept to a new project. I asked my father, Gonzalo Escobar, if he would be interested in collaborating with me.
For the last 13 years, my father — whose background is in education, psychology and socio-cultural anthropology — has produced a weekly radio show called Si Se Puede. He focuses on issues affecting local, state, and national Latino communities. My father has the amazing gift of connecting with people and making them feel comfortable. His interviews are never pre-scripted. Instead, his interviews are created dynamically, in response to what interviewees say about their personal experiences and the feelings about their topic that they project.
He agreed to work with me and the two of us drove from Chicago to New Haven to conduct interviews with former members and friends of the Orchard Street Shul. Since this is a community based, site specific project, we really didn't know what to expect prior to our arrival. Ultimately, whatever my father and I made would be created in response to the needs and wants of individuals we were about to meet.
Our interviewees told us stories of flirting on the front steps of the shul, eating herring and kichel, speaking Jewish (Yiddish), finding first jobs, going on first dates, learning bar mitzvah portions, and hearing (or having) loud conversations in the women's section. Their collective energy and enthusiasm was far too contagious to pass up and we determined that the actual act of sharing of stories (telling the stories, listening, engaging) was equally as important as the audio that we collected.
Not wanting these stories to begin and end with our recordings, but instead to inspire and trigger more conversations, we attempted to create an environment conducive to chit chat and shmoozing. Our piece, entitled Talking about Orchard Street is a low-tech installation where visitors will be invited to sit in comfortable armchairs, sample herring and kichel, listen to excerpts from interviews and engage in dialog with each other.
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Maya Escobar is a performance artist, Internet curator, and editor. She uses the web as a platform for engaging in critical community dialogues that concern processes by which identities are socially and culturally constructed. She performs multiple identities, sampling widely from online representations of existing cultural discourses. Her identifications as a Latina-Jewish artist, dyslexic blogger, fitness enthusiast, activist, and educator are indexed by the blogs she keeps, the visual and textual links she posts, the books, articles, and blog posts she cites, the public comments she leaves, and the groups she joins.
Escobar received her MFA from the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, Washington University in St. Louis, and her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has exhibited work in Spain, Guatemala, United States, Germany, Venezuela and Chile.
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this piece originally appeared on MyJewishLearing.com
