They had a beginning and an end. At first, I took it lightly but it quickly downed on me, changed my mood and propelled me on a pilgrimage along the road of a very personal narrative. I didn't hitchhiked, I didn't take shortcuts, I followed it most religiously from one end to the other. I actually don't believe I had a choice, Joanna Rajkowska's story had wrapped itself around my head, it had raptured me. Her tone was true, it was dense, full of promises. I felt like a voyeur.
Born in Berlin - A Letter to Rosa necessarily speaks about motherhood. Frame after frame, line after line of this public diary, the ties linking the soon to be mother and her unborn child unraveled. The voyeur assists to the birth of a relationship, always positive and reassuring, profound and warm, protective, welcoming, the nascent love of a mother. A very intimate experience.
Though Born in Berlin - A Letter to Rosa was merely a by-product of another project, it is as strong and harrowing as it can be. It possesses a voice and a life of its own. Sure, there, the subject of the original art piece still perspires through Joanna Rajkowska's handwriting and collages but it has lost its strength, its predominance. It has been relegated to the status of background babble and forms the weaving of this letter.
If I know the reasons at work behind the scene here, I can't help but question them. Not their legitimacy but their intensity. To me, the form appears stronger than the content and the unsaid speaks louder than the conceptual. Maybe because of the way Born in Berlin - A Letter to Rosa touches the storyteller in me. Maybe because this private diary was at first not intended for the public eye. It reads and feels like a letter, an open heart more than anything else.
In any case, the original and incestuous mélanges des genres seems to impede my understanding of this work. I can't reach or visualize the concepts so much. I know them but they seem remote, almost forgotten. Maybe they will emerge more clearly to me once I've seen Born in Berlin, the video for which Born in Berlin - A Letter to Rosa is supposedly only the storyboard.
But, for the moment, the experiences Joanna Rajkowska puts herself and her belly through appear only to be excuses, rituals tailored by and for her in order to get in touch with the life growing inside her. And possibly, pure speculation on my behalf, to get the illusion of control over the changes her body and life were submitted.
Born in Berlin - A Letter to Rosa is definitely more about the artist, the mother and her reasons to bring a new life in Berlin, than her daughter. Joanna Rajkowska presents Rosa to her future hometown, to which she will be forever linked. She shows her the urban geography of horrors, the debris of the war, the signs of the pain that was. She tells her: "You were meant to be a gift to Berlin, a city which generally brought destruction, at least for my family. A gift which was meant to disenchant everything".
Because this it, Rosa is a gift, a tentative to heal the past and give the present hope and freedom. And when the child is diagnosed nine month after birth with retinoblastoma, I can't help but wonder if she has not seen and experience too much and want to close her eyes to this terrible past she has nothing to do with. Or perhaps it is only a cruel joke of destiny and hopefully, she too will heal her wounds.
Hard and beautiful, I wish I could see more often works as intense as Born in Berlin - A Letter to Rosa.
