Raphaël SIGAL

Project at the MaCI

January 2025 - June 2025

"With this research project, I aim to establish the conditions for a generational discourse on the memory of the Shoah in the absence of a tangible, coherent or accessible corpus of traces. I use the term “Generation n+2” to designate the generation of survivors' grandchildren, to which I belong, twice removed from the site of trauma, genocide, exile, war and death. Separated from my family history, my situation is exemplary of that of a generation of grandchildren who have grown up unable to make sense of the obscure genealogies that precede them. And I use the term “archive of silence” to describe a set of documents and testimonies so minute, so scattered and so deeply shrouded in secrecy, that they are inaccessible as such. Rather than attempting to augment it through research, I choose to consider silence and oblivion as sites to be actively interrogated in order to access memory. By placing this figure of the “archive of silence” at the center of my work, I wish to show that silence, insofar as it is constituted by the absence of trace, can be systematically interrogated as a trace in itself.

My 5-month stay at MaCI will be devoted to two intertwined projects. On the one hand, I'll be writing an article theorizing the notion of the “archive of silence” for critical theory journals. On the other, I'll be laying the foundations for a documentary about the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, who know almost nothing about their grandparents' history. Finally, I'd like to organize a symposium devoted to French-language critical creation."