Necessitating my alliance: A meditation on the Plaszow concentration camp

The writing that follows is a part theoretical, part-discursive response to a site of Holocaust memory and is an interaction with extracts from my ongoing journals. It is an examination of how established positions of objectivity and subjectivity as defined by the traditional academic thesis can be challenged when fused with practice and explores whether there are ways of bridging the gap between different writing genres in order for new forms to emerge. The article discusses writing as a further agency of my creative practice, its potential as an artistic form and as an additional method of critical enquiry. The article then investigates how the gesture of drawing as a projection of the body and the mediator between mind and world is an alternative vehicle to be ‘with’ and encounter the topography of the Holocaust. In relation to events as ineffable as the Holocaust, the article concludes by looking at how, by reaching for meaning through written or arts practice, we can perhaps begin to determine a contribution to what is, as Ava Hoffman describes in her book After Such Knowledge, an appropriate and measured response before, as we approach a time without living survivors, the Holocaust passes fully into history and myth.