Nastassja Nefjodov’s “Why being quiet is so loud” is an immersive multimedia installation including photographs, audio, video, text, poems and archive material. It is a combination of different chapters of her ongoing work on the dynamics of post-conflict and generational trauma. 

She is using fragments from her grandfather’s stories who were fighting against each other in WWII; her German Jewish grandmothers story, who fled Berlin in 1939 and survived the war in Switzerland; her parents love story which unfolded on highly politicized grounds and her own upbringing in a cross-iron-curtain family during the Cold War and her Serbian partner’s story, who happened to have his military service during the Croatian war and came back highly traumatized. 

Navigating through all these stories she is researching: what does stories of loved ones are doing to someone who has not experienced the war herself? And how inherited trauma is impacting families and intimate relationships long after the conflict is over?

By telling European history via her personal family stories, she strips it from political aspects and direct the focus on the emotional layer. She invites people to rethink history from a perspective of what it does to people, not only in the moment, but for generations, as a second part of the story. She wants to contribute to the normalization of talking about trauma and 
turning towards healing. By sharing personal stories to cope with and resolve her and her family’s pain she not only wants to help people access their own stories but encourage them to also tell theirs. She sees this as a way out of the spiral of violence and passing the pain, fostering connection in a world often marked by silence.

Co-curated with Claudia Partac @claudia_partac  

nefjodov.nl • @nnefjodov

Mon – Sat 11 – 19h