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Sleepwalkers by Pete Ellis
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Three pairs of striped pyjamas are hanging in the corners of a room with grey walls.
Between them are five lines of poetry.
Move closer and you see more lines of poetry embroided in metallic thread down the stripes of the pyjamas.
Click the forward arrow and the green indicator shows. The slide show will run automatically or you can click the arrows to go through it in either direction. If the indicator is on red...it's stopped; just click again and you'll get green for go.
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The words
The lines of poetry on the wall and the embroidery on the pyjamas are from three poems by the surrealist poet Robert Desnos who died in Terezin concentration camp in 1945. The words on the wall - rendered in gold with red lines running horizontally between them - are from his poem Sleep Spaces, written in 1925.
"I have so often dreamed of you, walked, spoken, slept with you
phantom, that perhaps I can be nothing any longer than a
phantom among phantoms, and a hundred times more shadow
than the shadow which walks and will walk joyously, over
the sundial of your life."
To read the words on the pyjamas you have to turn your head sideways and get close - there is an urge to reach out and touch them like braille - become intimate with the space around the words and the cloth; and reach into the spaces beyond the material, out towrads the people - those alive and those dead.
Alembics means? An alembic is a laboratory device that purifies through distillation.
Photo: Nick Dunmur
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The pyjamas
Just ordinary old-fashioned pyjamas - trousers with draw-strings and jackets with buttons. Pyjamas are usually symbols of comfort and security; things that are personal, safe, intimate and with the well-worn wear and warmth of a particular person. They are also often fun clothing - pyjama parties, 'The Pyjama Game', or 'Bananas in Pyjamas'.
But whose pyjamas were these?
The pyjamas in this work by Pete Ellis are those of his father. The artist found them after his father died neatly folded in a drawer.
Displayed like this they have sense of being: invisible men; sleep walkers.
great Photo: Nick Dunmur
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Half-remembered interview with Pete Ellis.
Where did 'Sleepwalkers' come from?
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I was in the Ukraine, the town of Lugansk, and visited the museum there. In a vitrine (glass case) I saw this small piece of cloth; rough, worn - just a scrap - with the single word OST printed it. OST means East. ...and there in that scrap of cloth was revealed the extent to which a people had been de-humanised...reduced to a cipher. How the Nazi ideology viewed the nations to their Eastern borders...not as humans or people but as industrial units - no name, nationality, culture or identity - just a something from out there, the East, beyond civilisation; beyond care. All this seemed held in this single, worn-out piece of cloth and the one word OST.
Workers wearing the OST badge. Photo: USHMM 19317.
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"I work with improverished materials...what Georges Bataille called 'base materials' - like the fragment of cloth with OST on it which had such a powerful effect on me. Bataille considered base materials to have a greater reality than the values given to the materials of high culture such as bronze and oil-paint.
"I saw an exhibition in Budapest by Picasso...etchings. In some of prints Picasso had taken the poems of Robert Desnos and made etchings from them. I read Desnos's poems...captivated.
"When I found my fathers pyjamas neatly folded in a drawer, somewhere along the line these other experiences came up through my memory and into my mind and involved themselves in what became 'Sleepwalkers'... The poems of Desnos; his death in Terezin; the material fragment with OST; writing on cloth; my relationship with my father; my knowledge of Holocaust; themes of loss, memory, dream, life and death... I took all of these into the embroidering of the pyjamas and how they were displayed.
Photo: Nick Dunmur.
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The Embroidery
The embroidery is by Amanda Crewe. Pete Ellis asked her to take the pyjamas and embroider a poem on each. Amanda was given freedom to choose the phrasing and placement on the pyjamas. "It's part of the element of chance I like to allow into my work," Pete explained; "they are so well embroidered...it was wonderful unfolding them and reading the poems in this new form."
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I have dreamed of you so much
"I have dreamed of you so much that my arms, grown used to being crossed on my
chest as I hugged your shadow, would perhaps not bend to the shape of your body.
For faced with the real form of what has haunted me and governed me for so many
days and years, I would surely become a shadow."
Who are the sleepwalkers?
The artist's father? The poet of dreams who died in a concentration camp? The artist?
Are we sleepwalkers too? Who do we meet?
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Camp uniforms
Prisoners in the Nazi camps were given uniforms of rough blue and white striped cloth as part of the de-humanistion programme which also included having their head shaved and their name replaced by a number which was tattooed on their arm. Primo Levi called the process "the demolition of a man". Sometimes they had a badge attached to tell what "type" they were. The purple triangle denoted a Jehovah's Witness.
The stripped uniforms have often been referred to as "pyjamas" - descriptive and ironic.
Photo: United States Holocaust Museum, n00063.
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The striped uniform
The striped uniform was issued to inmates of both concentration and death camps - men, women and children. The prisoners often stuffed old rags and paper underneath to keep warm in the freezing winters. Listen to a witness talking about the "pyjamas" in this recording from the British Library.
After their release while many threw away their uniforms others kept them. Some people had their photographs taken in the uniforms after the war when they had regained their strength and bodyweight. Aleksander Kulisiewicz wore them to perform songs about the camps for many years after the war.
Photos: UHMM and British Pathe.
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Who are the people in the pictures?
In many Holocaust images we don't know who the people were and sometimes we don't even know where the photographs were taken or when. The photograhs in the slide show are:
:: Studio portrait of David Bajer.UHMM, 45509.
:: Aleksander Kulisiewicz singer.
:: Joseph Schleifstein.
:: Aleksander Kulisiewicz, dressed in a concentration camp uniform, performs the "Choral, from the Depths of Hell" at the Theater Communale in Bologna, Italy. UHMM,45828
:: Woman at Woebbelin concentration camp. UHMM 09217
:: Child survivors of Auschwitz
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Acts of witness
When the camps were opened many former inmates threw away their prison uniforms never to wear them again; but some kept them and wore them at commemoration services as a witness to remind themselves and others of what had occurred - an act of defiance; a demonstration of survival; and a celebration of life after the Holocaust.
This still is from the Archive; Film ID 1410.10 which recorded an open-air religious service at Loudres in France for ex-prisoners of Nazi concenttration camps. It was made in 1946. Another example is shown in the 1967 news film made in Terezín prison - Film ID 3005.21.
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Survivors who met Pope Benedict when he visited the museum and the Auschwitz-Birkineau site on 28th May 2006 wore blue and white shawls, and some wore blue and white caps, like the camp uniforms, in memory of the Shoah. See Pope visits Auschwitz story.
Photo: AP. Permission to publish requested.
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Robert Desnos: poet of dreams
"But none could embroider his dreams like Desnos!" Quoted in 'Life Among the Surrealists' by Mathew Josephson.
Robert Desnos was a French Surrealist poet who died in Terezín concentration camp in 1945. He was born in 1900 in Paris and after school worked for a pharmacuetical company as a salesman and a catalogue copywriter. Always interested in poetry and writing - his favourite authors included Hugo, Nerval and Rimbaud - he met Andre Bréton and Tristan Tzara and he became a leading member of the Surrealist group in the 1920's.
In 1930 he broke with it's leader André Breton on the publication of the 'Second Surrealist Manifesto' and wrote his own statement the Third Surrealist Manifesto'.
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Desnos earned his living in what we would call "the media" as a writer for advertsing, radio, cinema and the press. "I threw myself passionately into the almost mathematical, yet intuitive, work of adapting words to music, of fabricating sentences, proverbs and mottoes for advertising, the primary exigency (= urgency) of this work being a return to the people's taste in the way of rhyme." In some of his later work rhythms matter more than images, and these productions are the result of a desire to combine poetry and music and poetry and mathematics as in 'Description of a Dream'. (See the audio below)
During the early part of the Second World War he served in the French army until the "fall of France" in 1944 when he was set to work by the Nazis as a journalist in Paris. He became an active member of the French Resistance working on their newspapers. He was arrested by the Gestapo in 1944 and was sent to a succession of concentration camps ending the last being Terezin in Czecholslovakia where he died of typhus in 1945.
The Archive has some mute (silent) footage of occupied Paris duirng the German occupation. The film was probably taken secretly. [Film ID 1956.09] A news film shows Pathe cameraman Gaston Madru in 1942 as he conceals his camera in a bicycle basket and rides through the streets of Nazi-occupied Paris taking film; [Film ID1125.05].
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Desnos was always intrigued and stimulated by language - it's mystery and sound - and took a leading part in the hypnotic experiments, dream and automatic writing of the Surrealists. As a journalist he was renowned for his ability to dictate reports by phone without the need for correction. In 1936 he set himself the task of writing a poem every day for a year. He was always looking for the "marvellous" in everyday life.
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Listen to Robert Desnos
'Description of a Dream'; a poem written in 1938.
This recording is a performance with Desnos speaking the lines of poetry in between pieces of music and sound effects - an early use of samples. It demonstrates his interests in radio and film and his belief that Surrealism "had entered the public domain". Today it might be catalogued as a multimedia work.
Just press the forward arrow...but give it a few seconds to load ...
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Sleepwalkers: word constellation
"...entire constellations bursting against inner walls..." If Only, 1926.
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"...power of imagination..."
"Susan Griffen tells a story about surrealist poet Robert Desnos, who was imprisoned in the Nazi death camps:
One day Desnos and others were taken away from their barracks. The prisoners rode on the back of a flatbed truck; they knew the truck was going to the gas chamber; no one spoke. Soon they arrived and the guards ordered them off the truck. When they began to move toward the gas chamber, suddenly a Desnos jumped out of line and grabbed the hand of the woman in front of him. He was animated and he began to read her palm. The forecast was good: a long life, many grandchildren, abundant joy. A person nearby offered his palm to Desnos. Here, too, Desnos foresaw a long life filled with happiness and success. The other prisoners came to life, eagerly thrusting their palms toward Desnos and, in each case, he foresaw long and joyous lives.
The guards became visibly disoriented. Minutes before they were on a routine mission the outcome of which seemed inevitable, but now they became tentative in their movements. Desnos was so effective in creating a new reality that the guards were unable to go through with the executions. They ordered the prisoners back onto the truck and took them back to the barracks. Desnos never was executed. Through the power of imagination, he saved his own life and the lives of others.
Reference
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The last photo
As a member of the surrealist group Robert Desnos was photographed fequently during his life. What is thought to be the last photo of him shows the poet sitting in the striped prison uniform.
This photograph is taken from a website where no copyright information is provided. If you have any information of the original source or its attribution to Robert Denos please contact info@shapesoftime.net.
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Terezín
Terezín is a town in the Czech Republic - it was Czechoslovakia during the Second World War. It was taken over by the German army and made into a Jewish Ghetto in 1943, and renamed it Theresienstadt. Terezín was an old fortress town with walls surrounding it which became the ghetto. Inside the fortress was a prison which was also used by the Nazis. Thousands died in the cramped conditions from illness. The ghetto is famous for the children's artwork that was created there. People were being taken away from the town to work and extermination camps and other people being brought into the ghetto all the time. Robert Desnos caught typhus and died shortly after the ghetto and prison were relieved by the Russian troops and then the Red Cross.
There are two news films in the Archive showing Terezín. The first made in 1946 (?) with a Czecholslovakia (?) commentary describes the trial of the Nazi prison commander Heinrich Jockl and shows the town in its war time state. The second was made twenty years later in 1967 and shows the the president of Czecholslovakia Alexander Dubcek speaking at the prison.
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About Pete Ellis
Pete Ellis is an artist, sculptor and teacher. He was born in Prestbury, Cheshire. He trained at Manchester, Wolverhampton and at Chelsea School of Art where he was taught by the renowned sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi. Ellis has completed fellowships and residencies in the UK and abroad. He has taught extensively and has a long track record of exhibitions and awards. He is Associate Senior Lecturer in Fine Arts at Leeds Metropolitan University.
Taking commonplace objects and elevating them to high art, Ellis aims to unlock 'the potential anarchy that an object might have'.Vegetables and sausages are cast in bronze, poking fun at the 'noble' status of sculpture. His work is humorous and emotive, challenging our expectations of both the gallery environment and our own everyday surroundings.
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Further investigation
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6555
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Shapes of Time
Copyright - Copyleft
The Holocaust
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