Emotions are part of an argumentative process

Dr. Georges Roque

Bela Gold’s work does not try to move us. She is not concerned with that but rather with memory and oblivion. If so, the question is: How does she try to make us feel, through her work, that the Holocaust must never be forgotten, despite the passage of time? In other words, how is our memory activated? With indications, signs and silent words that calmly, noiselessly, speak to us, whispering that we must not forget. And therein lies both the problem and its possible solution: we have no guarantee that the written word, the trace of her work, will manage to speak to us. It is not a crude cry of indignation. Nor it is a work of political propaganda, but works of art whose semiotic functioning is neither mechanical nor safe. It requires a long road we have to take, a road to make us sensitive to the signs we sometimes do not wish to hear, to those words whose meaning escapes us. It is an unprotected road that requires us not to receive the work and its beauty passively but to go beyond, by making a personal effort: by becoming involved, shaking ourselves up, being committed and not allowing ourselves to be deceived by the beauty of the work but to listen out for the delicate signs that noiselessly link work and silence, so that perhaps the written word we must decipher will help us emerge from the silence of oblivion. Perhaps, like the Cabbala, Bela’s work speaks to us in silence, encouraging one interpretation and then another and another, an infinite series of interpretations of the mysterious signs that comprise her work. Her works never guarantee that we have the certainty of truth and will always leave us with doubts. This doubt is undoubtedly the engine that helps bring us closer to the multitude of signs that comprise her work in order to pay heed to all those silent words in search of our gaze that will rescue them from oblivion.