Defying time and barbarism, their gaze grabs you, enlivened by a luminous circle that seems to come from within. It’s the reflection of the flash, but it gives these close-up faces a form of unity, like a sign of recognition. Everyone seems to say: we were there. The forty-two portraits of Holocaust survivors, made by Luigi Toscano, will remain hanging on the railings of the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris until August 7. On Monday, July 11, about thirty of them were able to travel for the official inauguration of this exhibition organized by the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France (CRIF), and seeing them discover their own image as a family was nothing banal.
At the origin of this project, “Lest we forget. Let’s not forget”, an injunction taken from a poem by Rudyard Kipling from 1897, a question that has plagued the German-Italian artist since the rise of the far right in Germany in the mid-2010s. AfD (Alternative für Deutschland), an anti-immigration, homophobic, anti-Semitic party with neo-Nazi tendencies, shocked this fifty-year-old born in Mainz of Sicilian parents. “I said to myself: ‘And me, what can I do? What might Holocaust survivors think of all this? » Self-taught, the son of a worker and the eldest of seven children, the photographer, director and visual artist wrote this portrait project, which at first no one wanted. “I canvassed so many institutions! I did not have money. They kicked me out saying: “Luigi, we invest in the future, not in the past!” », he explains.
Photo: Marcel and Ida Apeloig and other members of their family in front of the photographs of Luigi Toscano for the CRIF exhibited on the gates of the Luxembourg garden, in Paris, on July 11.