At the end of 1947, Mor Elnekave’s grandmother left her whole world behind and boarded a refugee ship to Israel, taking with her his grandfather, her mother, a suitcase, and a small camera that was hidden before being sent to Auschwitz. Like many before her and after her, Elnekave’s grandmother was captured by the British forces and sent to a detention camp in Cyprus. For two years she was detained in the camp, and although she also spent several winters there, “Summer Camp” was its name. The camp was adjacent to the beach, surrounded by fences and guards. Elnekave’s grandmother smuggled chemicals into the camp and built a small darkroom inside her tent, secretly documenting life as it unfolded. Over the years, the photographs were exhibited and published. They became widely acclaimed and were considered of historical importance, however, Elnekave still felt that something was missing. He always thought about the name “Summer Camp”, particularly its connotation compared to their reality.
For years he looked at the pictures and imagined these people, and his grandparents, at a big summer camp. With the help of artificial intelligence (AI), Elnekave could create such a world. Not a new, engineered image over which he had no control, but using the existing images, and scans of the original scratched negatives developed by his grandmother in her tent, and began to perceive this new technology as a sophisticated assistant. Through various experiments, corrections, and combinations of texts and images, a new visual memory of his reimagined world emerged – Summer Camp took shape. His images offer seaside serenity, this time without fences and guards, and the fear of arrest. Elnekave wanted these Holocaust survivors, along with his grandparents, to have some fun at the beach. While his grandmother turned her tent into a dark room in the heart of a detention camp nearly 80 years ago, today, he transformed her tent into a camping experience by the sea. Elnekave’s grandmother practiced escapism through photography in the 1940s, and here, he offers her a new type of parallel reality in an attempt to to correct and instill normality, even if as a mere implanted memory.
