The murals are not to be “read” as much as they are to be experienced as a theater of alphabetic characters, from the fluid arabesques of Arabic to the geometry of Latin script. Ponizovsky Bergelson refers to her writing as “hybrid calligraphy” because she mixes different typographic systems and languages. For the mural project Among Refugees Generation Y, the Moscow-born and Jerusalem-raised artist used Arabic, German, and Yiddish.
The artist’s inventive street calligraphy takes its inspiration from the 1923 story “Among the Refugees,” set in Berlin and written by her great-grandfather David Bergelson, a prominent Yiddish writer who emigrated from Russia to Germany, returned to Russia during the rise of Nazism, and was later executed for his membership in the “Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee.”
In this Zoom-conducted interview, the artist discusses multilingualism and the development of her hybrid calligraphy.
—Eva Heisler
How did you get interested in alphabets and typography?
Where should I start? Even before I was born, no matter how far you look in my family’s history, everyone always migrated. It is since always that people in my family were multilingual. It generally has to do with the fact that we’re Jewish. There is the language you speak at home, and then the language you speak at school, and then another language you speak with a friend. It’s always very complicated.
As an artist, are you especially drawn to the visual form, or the shapes of the letters?
I perceive language mostly by looking at it, less by hearing it, and less by its content. I am inspired by typography. The way a language looks says a lot about the culture and the time period in which the typography developed. This is very clear when you compare Arabic to Latin. Latin, which developed much later, is based on the square, and there are only three heights for letters. In Arabic, there are many different heights and lengths that a letter can be, and the script is less analytical and more intuitive.
With your hybrid calligraphy, are you combining letters from different languages?
Hybrid calligraphy is a principle I’ve been applying to projects for the last five or six years. Sometimes I write a text in which every word is in a different language. Sometimes I recombine, in one letter, forms from different alphabets. Sometimes I create completely abstract letter forms, inside of which are meta-parts from different languages. I am trying to create an image that has more than one clear identity and can communicate to several cultural sectors.
Your concern isn’t with legibility?
When one deals with words or texts in the frame of the visual arts, it can be difficult because words bear a meaning, and that meaning is a responsibility. People, when they see words, immediately read them. I am trying to slow down this process. I am trying to take words out of their functionality and give them a subtext, which they bear already, but it’s less visible because the meaning takes over. It’s very aggressive, the meaning.
With the mural Where to? Where from?—part of the Among Refugees Generation Y series—there’s a general feeling of a text that you’re not able to read because every word is in a different language, Arabic, German, or Yiddish. The legibility is secondary, but it’s still there.
What is the relationship of this hybrid translation to the original text?
I was inspired by the story “Among Refugees,” written in Yiddish by David Bergelson in 1923. It is a story about a writer who is writing about another writer he meets who tells him a story about another writer, and they are all migrants. It’s a story within a story within a story. The first writer is an established writer with a job, family, and house; the second writer is a bit of a hobo without a sense of belonging to one place; the third is completely homeless, roaming the streets and asking for donations from neighbors. The story describes different writers in exile, and this fascinated me. The story takes place in Berlin and, even though it was written almost a hundred years ago, I relate to it.
For Among Refugees Generation Y, I was trying, not to recopy the story in public space, but to mirror its essence in the Berlin of today, to create the visual texture of cultures colliding.
David Bergelson was your great-grandfather. Was Yiddish a language you grew up hearing?
I wish I’d heard it growing up. It was my grandpa’s first language, but he never dared speak it after his father died. We would sing the “Happy Birthday” song in Yiddish, but that was the only Yiddish I heard as a child. I heard a bit of German only when my grandpa was speaking on the phone to friends. We spoke Russian. For my family, there was something very painful in speaking Yiddish.
When I moved to Berlin and began studying German, Yiddish became very accessible. Now, through the work I do and the poetry I read, I have learned Yiddish—or relearned it. I find so much meaning in how Yiddish makes use of the German language, in its manipulations and reflections of German.
For Among Refugees Generation Y, how did you select the public spaces for your murals?
It was not easy. I’m not allowed to run around with a bucket of paint and paint anywhere I want!
I looked for buildings that have a public function. I wanted contact with the street and the people living in an area. Once I selected a location, I read about its history and studied its contemporary function, and then I knew intuitively the fragments I would use from “Among Refugees.”
The mural A Door Facing a Door is located in the heart of the Neukölln district, known for its cultural diversity and ethnic collision. The pair of murals Where to? Where from? is located in Moabit. The building is now a contemporary art center (ZK/U), but during World War II it was a main deportation point of Jewish Berliners to ghettos, forced labor, and extermination camps. Overall, Among Refugees Generation Y is concerned with experiences of transition and temporality in Berlin’s public space.
