The Pact of Silence: Performing the Lacuna in the Solovetsky Archive
Initiated in 2016, this Pact of silence serves as a case study for my current practice-based PhD. It is grounded in a specific artifact held in the GULAG History Museum: a photo album from the 1920s that belonged to an officer of the Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp, located on the Solovetsky archipelago. While the album documents the camp’s administration as well as camps infrastructure from the propagandistic perspective, twenty-two photographs have been torn from its pages. Drawing on Martha Langford’s theory of the photo album as a vehicle for oral tradition—a “score” awaiting performance—I interpret these voids not merely as damage, but as a suspended conversation. If the album is a script for storytelling, how do we read the pages where the image has been silenced? Does the gesture of erasure silence the story, or does it produce a new narrative of loss? How do we read these voids today: as simple absences, or as scars that can testify? The installation consists of two elements. Visually, I re-photographed the empty spots left by the missing images, treating the torn paper textures as crime scenes bearing the traces of violence enacted upon memory. Audially, the work fills these lacunae with a polyphonic sound installation. I conducted interviews with three key figures surrounding the album’s provenance: the family member who sold it to the museum’s collection, the museum archivist who acquired it, and an independent historian who worked in the local historical museum on the Solovetsy islands. Their conflicting accounts regarding why the photos were removed are performed by actors. These voices do not reconstruct the missing images; instead, they circle the void, enacting the “pact of silence” that governed Soviet domestic memory. In the context of the symposium’s theme, the project demonstrates how visual erasure forces a relapse into language. By staging these conflicting oral testimonies against the material void, the project moves beyond the binary of ‘truth vs. censorship,’ proposing instead a methodology of ‘listening to the lacuna’ as a primary strategy for researching state violence.