Total Station

“Total Station” was developed at Treblinka during an IC-ACCESS project workshop. It utilizes video and split-screen editing to create a moving collage where the artist (Branthwaite) controls the flow of images pertaining to the site. In this case, the notion of investigating and discovering a site is alluded to by airborne LiDAR data that pans from top to bottom as a backdrop, offering an aerial and topographic view of the region in which Treblinka is located. This work, along with several others developed by Branthwaite, highlights the paradoxical juxtaposition of beauty and horror at Holocaust sites. Many camps and killing sites were situated within tranquil, remote fields and forests that ultimately became scarred by the events that took place therein. Whilst as Pollefeyt (2013:10) argues ‘in the first place the Holocaust was a human catastrophe, an evil committed against humanity, not against nature’, for the crimes to be perpetrated, the landscape had to be changed. Nature also became a coincidental, yet passive witness to human acts of violence; both a metaphorical and physical sense. Vegetation, for example, may become a ‘living memorial’ or an indicator of the presence of buried remains in a forensic sense (Malczynski 2010: 27-38). The work also alludes to the fact that within the modern landscape nature has all but recovered, even if people have not.