Remembrance as Resistance and Transformation

Louis Burkler, Marina Rosselle and Romuald Jandolo at the Rivesaltes Camp Memorial:

Remembrance as Resistance and Transformation

The Rivesaltes Camp Memorial exhibition, Le Camp des Familles (15.03.2024 – 14.02.2025), explores the persecution of the “Nomads” in France during WWII through history and art. Featuring works by Louis Burkler, Marina Rosselle, and Romuald Jandolo, it merges archives, personal accounts, and artistic expressions to examine memory, identity, and resistance. Louis Burkler’s paintings document a vanishing way of life, Rosselle’s engravings and videos unearth the site’s traces, and Jandolo’s baroque installation reimagines resilience. This exhibit challenges silence and celebrates the enduring spirit of the voyageurs, engaging us in a dialogue on trauma, history, and transformation.

Introduction

The exhibition, Le Camp des Familles — Persécutions et internnement des Nomades à Rivesaltes, 1941-1942, presented at the Rivesaltes Camp Memorial in France (15.03.2024 – 14.02.2025), stands out in its desire to shed light on a dark page in the history of the voyageurs[i] within the administrative category of people known as “Nomads” in France during World War II, who still largely suffer from a lack of institutional recognition. The exhibition consists of a historical/ scientific part, based on archives and personal accounts, and an artistic part, bringing together the works of three artists: Louis Burkler (1938), Marina Rosselle (1980) and Romuald Jandolo (1980). This dual approach provides a complex framework for reflection on memory, identity and reconciliation, and on the issues involved in presenting artwork within such a historical context. Above all, it is the first exhibition in France to bear witness to the systematic persecution during the Second World War through the works of artists and heirs to that history.

In the exhibition, the three artists, through their backgrounds, histories and practices, approach the subject of memory in radically different ways. According to William Acker, General Delegate of ANGVC (Association des Gens du Voyage Citoyens) and artistic curator of the exhibition: “The idea was to give pride of place to Louis Burkler: he is the first person we see in the space because it is he who passes the torch to the others. He is in the foreground”. Louis Burkler, a survivor of the Rivesaltes camp, embodies through his work a direct and intimate memory of the atrocities he suffered. It was more than 70 years after his internment that he bore witness to it as a self-taught artist, through paintings initially intended for his children and grandchildren, depicting a changing (semi-)nomadic way of life partially eradicated by the war. Marina Rosselle presents a series of engravings and videos based on the earth, plants and traces of the site. Finally, Romuald Jandolo presents a baroque installation inspired by the world of the circus. The cross-generational dialogue between the three artists creates a polyphony in which each generation and each discipline contributes to a memory under reconstruction. The presence of a self-taught artist alongside trained artists is part of a twofold transcendence, touching on both the question of generations and that of artistic hierarchies. This dialogue challenges the traditional distinctions between “legitimate” and “amateur” art, valuing works not for their conformity to academic standards, but for their ability to embody a collective and personal memory marked by trauma and reparation.

Louis Burkler, first-hand witness

Three-year-old Louis Burkler and his family were arrested at home by the French police in 1941 and interned at the Argelès-sur-Mer concentration camp (Pyrénées-Orientales) before being sent to the Rivesaltes camp, from which they managed to escape in August of the same year. This experience, marked by persecution, permeates Louis Burkler’s paintings, although they are not a literal representation of internment. For Gigi Bonin, publishing director of the Mémorial des Nomades[ii] de France and co-advisor to the exhibition, Louis Burkler represents the paradox of an artistic approach in which expression implies a vulnerability of the subject: “Every time someone exhibits, they expose themselves”. This passage of testimony through painting renders this form of expression a means of indirect revelation. Around 2018-2019, more than 70 years after his internment at the Rivesaltes camp, Louis Burkler suddenly painted some thirty canvases, embodying his statement: “I had to get it out”. These works, presented for the first time at the Rivesaltes exhibition, depict scenes from the daily life of voyageurs: departures from and arrivals to the villages, activities and trades (fishing, basket-weaving), evangelical missions and gatherings. Louis Burkler does not explicitly depict internment, but he evokes it by documenting the evolution of travel. In this way, he offers a narrative that, in the words of Gigi Bonin, “tells without telling”. This reservation, whether conscious or unconscious, highlights a fundamental tension: that of the legitimacy of the testimony and its reception by the viewer. As Gigi Bonin reminds us: “As long as it doesn’t come with photos of what happened, it doesn’t exist”. This reflection goes beyond artistic expression and examines the complex mechanism of the reception of traumatic testimony, where veracity and credibility are at stake, in a constant and unfortunately persistent opposition between art and document.

Louis Burkler’s work echoes the questions posed by Michael Rothberg in Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (2000). According to the author, “traumatic realism” is an approach that combines the ordinary and the extraordinary to represent traumatic events, such as genocide. This realism does not seek a literal or documentary representation, but superimposes everyday experience on extreme elements, thus bringing history into the present. For Louis Burkler, this question of representation is woven between symbolism and the spontaneity of the artistic gesture. In Niglo, a hedgehog, a protective figure, is depicted with great tenderness in the centre of the Roma flag. Between the blue of the sky and the green of the earth, the sanctified animal becomes an emblem of resistance. Next to it, the nail of Christ symbolises repeated persecution, and the flowers bloom as a sign of persistent hope. The exhibition also features a triptych illustrating the evolution of travel through the ages. The first painting shows wooden horse-drawn caravans, emblematic of a bygone pre-war era. The second introduces the first motor caravans, marked by a technological and cultural transition. Finally, the third shows the total disappearance of caravans, replaced by modern cars. In these three paintings, we can see the administrative and social constraints that hindered the freedom of the voyageurs, but also their religious faith and their adaptability through the ages: “We have always adapted”. By tracing these transformations diachronically, the three paintings position Louis Burkler as the witness and guardian of a changing way of life confronted by modernity.

Marina Rosselle: The Passage of Time

Of the three artists in the show, Marina Rosselle is perhaps the one who offers the closest possible representation of the camp, through its remains, its ghosts, its earth, its birds and its plants that still seem to bear the imprint of the past. Using a variety of media, including engraving, video and mixed-media installation, the artist creates an intimate correspondence between the traces of the past and their survival in the present. She says: “Rivesaltes was a shock: I arrived in the ruins, where lots of groups, not just voyageurs, had been interned. The first thing I did was walk. I walked around and filmed. It was very moving. It gave off a creative force. I wouldn’t have thought it would because it was all so sad”.[iii]

Phangnalon sordidum, an engraving on a zinc plate representing a plant present on the site, is an example of the intimate process of observation and sampling that she developed on the Rivesaltes site. The artist chose not to exhibit the final print, but the matrix of the engraving itself. This choice gives the plate the status of a witness, like a memory card bearing witness to the experiences of the internees. This process of engraving, of “biting” into the material, recalls another form of engraving, that of the marks left by the passage of time on the stones and earth of the camp, and echoes the practice of digging in the ground to find traces of the past.

This to-and-fro between an intimate memory and a collective memory, between the environment and history, runs through all of Marina Rosselle’s work. The video, Pierre de mémoire [Memory Stone], shows drawings made in situ, projected onto a monitor placed on a piece of tile from the Rivesaltes camp. In Les oiseaux connaissent le temps qu’il fait [Birds know the weather], three etchings enhanced with watercolour, the animals symbolise the messengers of history that continue to exist and carry a silent memory through the cycles of the seasons. In this way, a hollow memory emerges, like a mould, which is only revealed by its traces and its absence. Through the representation of birds or plants, they symbolise resilience, the resilience of life that persists in an arid environment, and the resilience of memory that is shaped by time and persists despite efforts to erase it. The earth is literally and metaphorically turned over, as if to unearth a buried truth. Marina Rosselle speaks of a “kind of vital force, of rage, of anger”, and makes the link between the historical archives of police records and the current plight of voyageurs, questioning the oppressive continuities between past and present. Even so, the artist admits that “it’s difficult to talk about these issues in France”, even through certain forms that only art allows.

Romuald Jandolo: “Le coeur se brise, le coeur se bronze”

For his installation at the Rivesaltes memorial, Romuald Jandolo used the motif of the heart to establish a dialogue between the spectacular and seductive world of the circus and the solemn weight of history. The title of the installation, Le coeur se brise, le coeur se bronze [The heart breaks, the heart bronzes], is an allusion to an expression used by Robert Badinter, the former French Minister of Justice. It refers to human responses to suffering and trauma. According to this expression, some souls “bronze”, becoming stronger in the face of adversity, while others “break”, incapable of resilience. This duality is embodied in the central element of the set design: two large, raised eyes with two sides. On one side, the eyes are wide open, as in the circus posters or tarot cards to which Romuald Jandolo refers; on the other, the eyes are closed and about to cry. Here, the gaze becomes an instrument for questioning history: stare at it, assuming its weight, or shut it, shying away from it. But the motif of the overhanging eyes also echoes the surveillance mechanisms inherent in the camps. According to Michel Foucault, the panoptic system “creates spatial units that allow us to see continuously and to recognise immediately” (Foucault, 1975, 202). At roughly the same height as the watchtowers that surrounded the Rivesaltes camp, these two eyes call out to the viewer, who is both the watcher and the watched, investing her/him with an ethical responsibility situated in the present. Finally, the duality at the centre of the installation can be seen as a reference to the ambiguity of the human condition described by Milan Kundera. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the writer describes how the human experience oscillates between the heaviness of suffering and the lightness of transcendence. Romuald Jandolo responds to this tension with an installation traversed on both sides by a principle of transformation, the only way to combine elevation (feathers, light, glitter) and anchorage (bronze, burnt earth).

Romuald Jandolo’s installation is made up of a wide variety of materials and motifs, salvaged objects and fabricated pieces. It includes a chandelier, a small children’s chest of drawers with three casts of the artist’s teeth, a ceramic foot with two glass wings, totem poles, containers, ceramics, magicians’ attributes, body prints, “bondieuseries”, and a peacock feather reminiscent of Rajasthan. Although the installation echoes funerary rites or religious syncretism through all these elements, its baroque and shimmering dimension echoes more what the artist calls a “gypsy aesthetic” of jewellery, often found in these communities. Through references to popular religion (ex-votos, relics), to the wonder of the fairground world and perhaps even more so in the vertical dynamics of his installation, Romuald Jandolo explores accessible, almost profane forms of sacredness, which allow a symbolic elevation in a mineral and arid space. For the artist, “this installation is about resilience”.[iv] The spectacular aesthetic, inspired by the circus, attracts attention and contrasts completely with the solemnity of the memorial site, whose architecture evokes an enormous tomb. Drawing attention through phantasmagoria can also be a way of opposing any attempt at euphemisation.[v]

Trace, Silence and Post-Memory

The theatrical forms of Romuald Jandolo, the archaeology of Marina Rosselle and the gatherings of travellers painted by Louis Burkler all seem far removed from the idea of the “document”, long considered by post-war historians to be the only “objective” testimony. For William Acker, the curator of the exhibition, the joint presentation of these three artists is part of a dynamic of “fighting back with the trace”, referencing Maxime Decout’s work, which influenced his preparation of the exhibition (Decout, 2023). Making traces appears to be a way of responding to the violence of history and the erasure of memories: “Rather than working on the subject of the victim, I wanted to work on the question of justice and reparation. The page can only be turned once reparation has been made. How can art be used to fill the gaps in memory?”[vi]

The artists each embody a form of transformation: Louis Burkler’s evolving lifestyles of travellers, Marina Rosselle’s erosion of time, and Romuald Jandolo’s transmutation through theatre. In their work, memory is transmitted in hollows, rejecting a literal representation of internment and the suffering of the camps. Instead, in William Acker’s eyes, they adopt an anti-victim stance, constructing an imaginary memory that is necessarily reconstructed in the face of the disappearance of direct witnesses. This collective work celebrates a travelling identity that is often silenced, while refusing to reduce these memories to mere sadness: it is a living memory, carried by a gesture of resistance and creation between denunciation and celebration. It is a living memory, carried forward by a gesture of resistance and creation, somewhere between denunciation and celebration. Art is perhaps a particular form that allows us to inhabit contradictions, to say while not saying. These artists are not only evoking a tragic period in history, but perhaps most importantly, they are referring to its silence. The fact that these approaches are made across several generations extends this observation.

In her essay, The Generation of Postmemory (1997), historian and theorist Marianne Hirsch uses the concept of postmemory to refer to the way in which subsequent generations experience and internalise the traumatic experiences of their ancestors, even if they were not direct witnesses to these events. Marianne Hirsch describes the memory of war, persecution or genocide as being transmitted not only through explicit accounts, but also through gestures, objects, images and silences. Silence, according to the author, is not just an absence of verbal communication, but can also be a form of expression of suffering or a defence mechanism, particularly for survivors seeking to protect their descendants from the weight of trauma. In this way, memory is a permanent tension between absence and presence, and it is transmitted as much through what is unsaid as through what is said.

[i] I prefer to keep the French term « Voyageur/Voyageuses” rather than the English “Travellers” so as not to be confused with the English or Irish travellers. I do not use the expression “gens du voyage”, as it is an administrative category which cannot be posed in the singular. See William Acker, Où sont les “gens du voyage”?: Une histoire actuelle de l’antitsiganisme, pp.89-108.

[ii] http://www.memorialdesnomadesdefrance.fr

[iii] Interview with Marina Rosselle on 07.10.2024.

[iv] Interview with Romuald Jandolo on 06.11.2024.

[v] In her article recently published, Lise Foisneau clearly shows that historians’ research into the internment of “Nomads” in France during the Second World War contributes to a logic of euphemisation that denies the racial dimension of these camps, the French government’s desire for extermination (before and after the arrival of the Nazis), and justifies internment on the grounds of security. (Foisneau, 2024)

[vi] Interview with William Acker on 01.10.2024.

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Works Cited

Acker, William: Où sont les “gens du voyage”? : Une histoire actuelle de l’antitsiganisme. Rennes, Éditions du Commun, 2021.

Decout, Maxime: Faire trace: Les écritures de la Shoah. Paris, Corti, 2023.

Foisneau, Lise: “Le génocide des « Nomades » : figures du déni.” L’Homme, no. 249, 2024, pp. 113–30, http://journals.openedition.org/lhomme/48415.

Foucault, Michel: Surveiller et punir. Paris, Gallimard, 1975.

Hirsch, Marianne: The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. New York, Columbia University Press, 2022.

Rothberg, Michael: Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

 

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Elora Weill-Engerer is a graduate of the École du Louvre, Paris-Sorbonne University (Paris IV), and Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, specialising in art history and museology. She is a research associate at the National Institute for Art History (INHA) and is currently pursuing a doctoral degree at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Her dissertation, supervised by Elvan Zabunyan and Pierre Wat, examines the construction of Roma, Manouche, and Gitano political identities through contemporary arts since 1971.

Active as a curator and art critic since 2016, she is a board member of both C-E-A (Association of Exhibition Curators) and the International Association of Art Critics (AICA). Weill-Engerer collaborates with artists on solo and group exhibitions and contributes articles to various publications, including Manifesto XXI, Crash Magazine, and The Art Newspaper. Her achievements include several prestigious awards and grants, such as the Dauphine Prize for Contemporary Art, the Ekphrasis Grant, the Point de Vue Prize, the AICA-France Prize, and the Traverses Grant for art criticism. She is currently preparing a monograph on Austrian Roma artist Ceija Stojka in collaboration with Galerie Christophe Gaillard. In addition to her research and curatorial work, she teaches at the École du Louvre.