Mikael Levin. Cristina's History

Cristina’s History takes as its starting point the story of four generations of a branch of Mikael Levin’s family, of which Cristina is a descendant. It unfolds from the mid-19th century to our own times, and streches from the town of Zgierg in central Poland to the west-African nation of Guinea-Bissau, by way of Lisbon. These three places, photographed between 2003 and 2005, correspond in each case to a narrative which interweaves the lives of the characters and historical events to which those biographies are linked.

As the trajectory of a Jewish family through modern European history, a journey in which each new hope is met with invariable disappointment, Cristina’s History challenges the idea of continuous progress. This does not, however, mean ceding to nostalgia. Nor is it an affirmation of the notion of an ineradicable identity. What this work does do is attests to the possibility of inventing one’s life based on, but without being dependent of, tradition.

Although the story – or at least the idea of a story – no doubt determined the photographic project, the text and the images in a fact move along parallel lines. It is through the gap that the relationships are established; between the different histories and the images of the present, between the different lives described and the places where they are not, or between the narrative space, most often closed and familial, and the visible space, open and public.
From such simplicity shaped by numerous complexities emerges a poetic work cast as a documentary. It is a profound autobiographical work, though the author never appears.

The space is configured around three projection rooms corresponding to the territories represented. Within each room, each cycle lasts approximately fifteen minutes and comprises some sixty images. A voice-over tells the story. The rooms are non-sequentially ordered.

In the rooms devoted to Zgierz and Guinea-Bissau, two projectors are mounted back to back on a central pivot. The images rotate around the room, like the beams of a lighthouse, stretching and bending to the contours of the walls. In the Lisbon room, three projectors cast their images alternately at fixed locations.

Cristina’s History was co-produced with Le Point du Jour (Cherbourg), where it was presented from March 21st to June 7th, 2009.