SUMMONING LILITH « Zuzanna Hertzberg

SUMMONING LILITH

(performative walk, spoken word performance, conversation)

25.08.2024, Jewish Culture Festival in Grodzisk Mazowiecki

Zuzanna Hertzberg, Summoning Lilith, 2024, Pro Choice / Pro Abo artivist action in Grodzisk Mazowiecki, Poland. Photo: Mikołaj Tym

Zuzanna Hertzberg, Summoning Lilith, 2024, Pro Choice / Pro Abo artivist action in Grodzisk Mazowiecki, Poland. Photo: Aneta Wawrzoła

Zuzanna Hertzberg, Summoning Lilith, 2024, Pro Choice / Pro Abo artivist action in Grodzisk Mazowiecki, Poland. Photo: Mikołaj Tym

Zuzanna Hertzberg, Summoning Lilith, 2024, obverse of the banner from the Pro Choice / Pro Abo artivist action in Grodzisk Mazowiecki, Poland.

Zuzanna Hertzberg, Summoning Lilith, 2024, reverse of the banner from the Pro Choice / Pro Abo artivist action in Grodzisk Mazowiecki, Poland.

A performative walk with Zuzanna Hertzberg led from the platform of the Grodzisk Mazowiecki railway station to the nearby Skarbek Park, where the artist shared stories about Jewish women activists fighting for social and reproductive justice from the first half of the 20th century till today.

Ever since a railway station was built in the city, Polish Jews started emigrating from this platform. Transports taking Jews to extermination camps during World War II also departed from here. Hertzberg invited people to take the route in the opposite direction, to the park that once functioned as a healing resort. The banality of this place, contrasting with the fate of the former local Jewish community, which no longer exists, was intended to highlight the socio-historical phenomenon of lack, obliteration and disappearance. In this way, the artist attempted to move from the perspective of the irreversible absence of people as witnesses, transmitters and monuments of memory of Jewish women activists to the perspective of action and active knowledge that restore and update this memory.

Zuzanna Hertzberg started her performative ritual from summoning Lilith, the person-demon, the first woman, the woman fighter, the foremother, a figure of the biblical rebel of Eden, marginalized by the canonical reading of the Book of Genesis. By contesting the gender binarity and the patriarchal world order, she voluntarily exiled herself from Paradise created by a male God. In the above mentioned park Hertzberg created a homey, safer space that was framed by a large textile collage depicting Lilith as the matron of abortion and banners referring to the practices of sisterhood. In the center, on the carpet, she placed wooden boxes, with collages made from archival materials, dedicated to women pro-abortion activists. The artist showed how the figure of Lilith connects with women’s struggle for social and reproductive justice. This was the starting point for recovering the herstories of the fights for the right to decide on one’s own body. By introducing the narrative about precursors of intersectional feminism, women’s practices in building social and reproductive justice, her storytelling demonstrated the contemporary relevance of heroins’ messages and actions.

Zuzanna Hertzberg’s herstorical artivism, based on archival research and an interdisciplinary practice, was also an act of constructing and sharing her personal affective counter-archive.

This artivist action was also an introduction and invitation to a conversation between participants about struggle for access to free and safe abortion. And about strategies that were used, that we use and the ones we could re-use, both in Poland and internationally. As knowledge and activist practices migrate like rhizomes, they can be transferred and rooted in other places, only seemingly distant from each other.