Eszter Biró

List Mania (Ernst Van Alphern) first appeared as part of the Holocaust remembrance practice. Then during the pandemic it returned througha new media. As the death toll grew, the loss became incomprehensive, the enormity of the numbers abstracted from the personal losses. People couldn’t come together, consequently the first memorial sights were online. However, even cyber-memorial-space had challenges. BBC’s memorial platform, even if a memorial only flashes up for 10 seconds, takes more than a week to view. Both comprehenion and remembrance seems an impossible taks. To counter-act such a phenomenon, I viewed each memorial post from Remember Me 2020 platform – created by St Paul’s Cathedral – then recorded it on a sheet of paper. To visually demonstrate how the personal
memory dilutes in the collective, I overwrote my own records.

Remember Me records more than 10000 remembrance posts over 10 sheets of 57×77 cm, 320g Khadi Rag Paper.

While these remembrance practices have their challenges, they still better than not having one at all. To demonstrate the difference, I created a series Et.all.. based on the Hungarian practice – a database created by the government that details the age, gender, number of death and cause of death.