Eyeglasses belonging to prisoners at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp.
this picture stopped me dead, and now i feel so cold…
just… oh. oh. oh no. I wish this image weren’t so beautiful. oh, I am upset. it makes me think of how one of the most effective devices in With The Needle That Sings In Her Heart was the pile of shoes on stage. Something about the reduction of a person to an object rendering them incapable of human-object relations…. if atrocity treats a person like an object, someone into something, a thing cannot possess another thing in the same way, and so the discarded pile of their once-personal possessions reads like the pulled-off skin of their personhood. Forgive the incoherence of this ramble– I’m working on a play right now for which I’m doing a series of interviews with people about their relationship to objects in their lives, and I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately.