12-18/Art/Frenchspeaker By Jessica Cheung La douleur passé, la beauté reste. The pain passes, but the beauty remains.

French artist Linda Ellia came to speak to an Advanced Placement French class and a number of French 5 Honor students. To introduce an art activity to the class, Ellia began by explaining an earlier rendition of the project, an artistic response to history. In 2004, she had launched a collective art project called Norte Combat (Our Combat), in which she distributed each of the 600 pages of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf to other artists, as well as the general public. “One evening I had the idea of inviting people from all conditions and walks of life to participate in producing a collective work,” Ellia said on her Web site (www.notrecombat.net). “These 600 contributors would represent the deaths of over six million deportees.”

Each of the distributed pages were then returned to Ellia with reflective reworks of the page, such as stitching, erasing, tearing, pasting, hiding, and inserting, all to be compiled as Norte Combat. “Every page returned to me provokes a profound emotion,” Ellia said. “Together we will experience a new reading of the pages we have rewritten.”

The collective art project is open to anybody willing to participate, including the school’s French students. “We got to do our own project where we took pages of Mein Kampf and drew on them,” AP French student senior Johanna Kanes said. “It was a (way of) release and a way to take back the power from the words he had written.”

This first-hand experience gave students an opportunity to learn about both art and history. “It was an asset to me as a student because her visit provided us with an excellent forum to discuss one of the more unsavory aspects of both French and American culture,” AP French student senior Charlotte Whitmore said, referring to discrimination. “I was very impressed by her creativity.”

French teacher Annie Puretz said she has hopes to incorporate a unit on racism in her classes. “It was the perfect opportunity to discuss cross-cultural differences and similarities, which come down to racism,” she said. “I wanted to introduce a contemporary artist who was involved in art that was universal and natural.”

Some students found that this project brought light to a sensitive topic. “It’s a project that many in France know about, so it was great for us to see a special piece of artwork from France — one that also has historical significance,” AP French student senior Justine Fox said. “Now that we are in AP French, we are able to comprehend complex things such as Linda’s project. The Holocaust and Hitler’s regime are difficult things to discuss because they are very touchy subjects, but Linda’s project put them in a very interesting and touching way,” Fox said.