Lewis Hyde and Alexey Yurenev — on forgetting and trauma-incited misremembering

Lewis Hyde’s groundbreaking book with the self-explanatory title A Primer for Forgetting is dedicated to the memory’s ugly duckling sibling. On its 300+ pages the US scholar persuasively demonstrates that forgetting is actually a rather useful thing programmed in our bodies at the very chemical level for a number of reasons. It winnows the day. It shapes experience into a useful story, concludes Hyde in a chapter on autophagy and apoptosis — natural cell death forms, graciously compared with flower petals dropped off from flowers. This too shall pass. And while reading the book, I kept on thinking about a simplistic dualism of remembering/forgetting we have developed in the course of history, not least of all reinforced by popular self-help manuals where memory is frequently positioned as a precious skill compromised by accelerated technological advancement and social network abuse. Hyde in this regard is less alarmed and more realistic. Some things should and will be forgotten, or, as one of the participants of my own photobook The Art of (Not) Forgetting once said about her traumatic recollection, I don’t want to totally forget it — I want to learn to remember it differently.

The thoughts about the benefits of forgetting (or learning to remember differently?) developed in parallel with my intention to write about Alexey Yurenev’s multilayered project The Silent Hero I came across a few months ago at the exhibition Missing Mirror: Photography Through the Lens of AI in FOAM, Amsterdam. Conceived — in the vein of many exhibitions of the recent years — around the AI celebration, it invited visitors to look beyond the surface of AI in four broadly defined chapters that focused on something or someone missing: mirror, person, camera, or viewer. A closer examination of the projects — numerous, but somehow alike — did not bring dramatic revelations and, to a larger extent, manifested the artists' overall desire to quickly mark a newly formed territory, Yurenev’s work, luckily, being a marvellous exception.

"I felt I knew everything about the war but I knew nothing."

Only partly based on the AI images use, The Silent Hero went far beyond the borders of the postulated missing trope. Among the problems it addresses I can name the elusive essence of memory, the easiness of its external manipulation, and the scary resistance of trauma, where this too shall pass thesis remains an outcome one can only long for.

The project started with Yurenev’s family history. Belonging to one of the last generations of USSR-born people, the photographer grew up surrounded by war glorification and veterans heroisation. In the project intro, he shares some of his childhood memories of his grandfather, Grigoriy Lipkin, who would solemnly watch me reappropriate tanks, warships and planes into a jungle gym before we continued to the plaques of the fallen soldiers. […] At home, he would categorically refuse to speak about his experience and would either cry or make jokes when asked about it. While remaining silent about the war, he used to tell me that as his only grandson I am in charge of carrying his medals and his memory. When he died in 2009, I received his medals, but I did not receive his memories.

The paradox was apparent: the war was so close and so accessible through its poignant slogans, red flags, and solemn Victory Day speeches, but at the same time — so monodimensional and numb about the true human experiences that underlay it. Determined to do what many of his generation should also diligently explore, Yurenev starts researching what his silent hero had been keeping unsaid.

Photojournalism is modelled to bring us to places we cannot go to. AI’s promise is to bring us to events and places that never existed but could of, Yurenev comments on one of his project’s starting points in a YouTube episode New Histories led by the artist and writer Gregory Eddi Jones. Keeping this thought in mind, he trains Generative Adversarial Neural Networks (GAN) on the extensive dataset of portraits of soldiers posing in studios or battle fields and teaches the system produce new synthetic images — war photography without evidence that results from credible witnessing.

The dialogue between the referenceless collective archive and War Against War! manifesto published in 1924 by German anarcho-pacifist Ernst Friedrich becomes the material for Yurenev’s Seeing against Seeing artist book, but the function of the newly conceived visual palimpsest is not limited to this statement only.

In the next chapter of The Silent Hero, his heroes did start speaking.

"[I wanted to] depart from the photographic representation of WW2 […], to go beyond the iconicity and glory — the immediate, photographic, layer, — to get to some kind of subliminal knowledge that I was not able to get through by traditional means of research."

Silent Hero — No One is Forgotten is a short documentary in which Yurenev shoots WW2 Red Army veterans who currently live in New York commenting on his GAN-generated war images. Despite informed on their technological nature, the film’s protagonist, when shown synthetic pseudojournalistic pictures, is emotional in demonstrating the actual recognition of the elements and figures depicted. In AI-created deformed human faces and macabre scenes the veteran sees something that flashes back to what he himself had once experienced: tank battles that took people’s lives, burnt bodies, a wave of smoke, etc.

The monologue of his is worth a separate deep analysis — the war veteran appears not only getting visually triggered by the shots, he also mentions sounds, spots movements and smells the odors. The trauma that affected the man more than 70 years ago seems to be actively present in his life now, in another cultural and language reality. Listening to his intense remarks, one cannot but wonder about what was happening in the heads of other silent heroes — in the entire generation of our grandparents for decades forced to keep their painful traumatic memories repressed, locked, censored by the filtered rhetoric of unconditional victory and glory — the only notes the Soviet regime publicly allowed.

But the first thought I had after finishing Yurenev’s film was not about the ease with which unhandled combat trauma is activated in here-and-now mode — even as a response to something only based on visual accounts. The scariest thing is that the number of trauma affected people is only increasing. Past keeps repeating itself and these history loops might actually be a direct consequence of state-monopolized forgetting.

The return of the far-right in Germany, Italy, and France, nostalgia of the Soviet times as a state ideology in Russia, the re-creation of Gulag for political prisoners in Belarus… the loops of history are really what we are now observing in different parts of the world. And trauma which was a part of our ancestors' hidden mental everydayness is, like a relay baton, passed on to the younger generations: new wars' witnesses, hostages, victims… and perpetrators suffer from the same psychological consequences their grandparents did — with no lessons learnt.

If unhandled, according to Judith Herman, M.D, a specialist on post-traumatic stress disorder and incest, trauma reveals itself through a wide range of manifestations: from depression and disassociation to shattered sense of connections, diminished confidence in planning abilities, and the loss of trust. Another dangerous side-effect is trauma reenactment, or repetition compulsion forcing the affected person to re-experience some aspect of the trauma scene in disguised form, without realizing what they are doing.

And speaking about Russia, responsible for the long-lasting senseless war with Ukraine already resulting in 35,000 killed, 15,000 missing, 3,400 captured, and up to 100,000 wounded, Putin-run state itself would also have to deal with the hundreds thousands of Russian boys, who, upon returning to their Russian families, would continue reliving the behaviours of the crimes they had committed or witnessed on the front: stuck in the eternal past — disassociated, violent and mentally lost. Unable to own their crimes, to embrace the guilt.

"In Russia they say: true heroes keep their silence."

The trauma is resolved when the survivor develops a new mental “schema” for understanding what has happened, writes Judith Herman. Seeing the young neo-Nazis marching along German streets with I regret nothing banners repeating Eichmann’s infamous words or hearing a Russian mumbling An order was given, we went it as a lame justification of his participation in the full-scale invasion shared in a documentary aimed at showing the perpetrators as completely ordinary people and thus challenging the Western notion of the Russian soldiers as criminals, I doubt that new mental schemas are at the horizon. And neither am I inclined to think that under current conditions of cannibal capitalism, death of expertise and violence romantisation, it will be possible in the foreseeable future.

History shows pretty well that completely ordinary people are capable of committing completely extraordinary crimes. But who remembers of it?

The experiment so timely started and so beautifully implemented by Alexey Yurenev who genuinely wanted to make the silence of his WW2 war veteran grandfather’s memory speak, in my opinion, exceeded its intended purpose and provides much food for thought. Deeply impressed by the elderly Soviet man recognizing the actual battle scenes and commenting on the disfigured looks discerned in inexistent AI-generated characters, I feel that in real life the opposite also possible: confusing denazification with genocide, liberation — with mass murders, traditional values protection — with blunt discrimination. Seeing what is not there, choosing the selective vision (zone of comfort?)

Appropriated by totalitarian regimes and used by evil masterminds who value personal profit more than human lives, the arbitrariness of memory becomes a powerful tool of brainwashing and control. Forgetting does winnow the day and shape experience into a useful story. The question is useful for whom? And how can we regain the ownership?

Berlin, 24. 09.2024

PS Auschwitz is outside of us, but it is all around us, in the air. The plague has died away, but the infection still lingers and it would be foolish to deny it. Rejection of human solidarity, obtuse and cynical indifference to the suffering of others, abdication of the intellect and of moral sense to the principle of authority, and above all, at the root of everything, a sweeping tide of cowardice, a colossal cowardice which masks itself as warring virture, love of country and faith in an idea.

— Primo Levi, The Black Hole of Auschwitz