Between Disappearances: The Performance of Affective Archiving in Bracha L. Ettinger's Eurydice Series

Abstract

Artist, philosopher, and psychoanalyst Bracha L. Ettinger’s Eurydice painting series is built upon a practice of sustained aesthetic, psychological, and ethical engagement with archival photographs of the Holocaust. First begun in 1992 and now numbering over fifty, the paintings investigate the ways in which intergenerationally transmitted trauma interacts with and is made manifest through the female form. While much of the scholarship on the Eurydice series analyses the paintings formally and aesthetically, often alongside Ettinger’s psychoanalytic theories of what she calls the matrixial gaze, this thesis examines the performative aspects of Ettinger’s process of creation by exploring the ways in which Ettinger’s process of “artworking” allows for an affective reexamination of traditional archival practices by situating the body within and as part of the archive.