Radio Papesse

In 1961 Israel had no television service but the entire nation listened to radio broadcast of the Eichman trial, the survivors' accounts and the horror that the nazi had endured during the war. The night between May the 31st and June 1st 1962 Adolf Eichmann's ashes were dispersed somewhere in the ocean off Jaffa. Fifty years have passed by since then and accidentally, just a few days before the end of May, the US Forces killed Bin Laden in Pakistan and his ashes were scattered into the sea as no nation could be his mausoleum. As no nation became Adolf Eichman's resting place. 

A parallel that it is worth to be tought over in terms of how nations, two nations, arrogated - in different time and political scene - the right to do justice on their own without asking the international community. It is something that is worth to think about but it is not the primary interest that drove the Israeli Berlin based artist Dani Gal in the making of Night and Fog, Nacht und Nebel, the great video he presented in Venice for the IllumiNation exhibition curated by Bice Curiger. 
Night and Fog is a cinematic reenactment of that night when Michael Goldman guarded, accompanied and dispersed Adolf Eichman's ashes into the sea. The film is not a documentary but a psicological portrait of those who were in charge to keep that mission secret.

Dani Gal talks about a few aspects of the production with Angelika Stepken, director of Villa Romana, the artists residence in Florence where Dani spent a few months in 2008. 

You might be interested to:
• An interview with Dani Gal by René Zechlin, first published in the exhibition catalogue Freisteller" in the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, 2009; 
• the reference to Paul Celan - that comes out in connection with the milk can that was used to carry Eichman's ashes - is that of Todesfuge- Death Fuge, his most popular poem about the Holocaust.