Tree of Testimony

Potion created Tree of Testimony, a permanent video sculpture connecting 51,000 testimonies of Holocaust survivors and witnesses from the USC Shoah Foundation Institute Archives, across 70 individual screens.

As a continuation of Potion’s relationship with the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, Potion collaborated with the Museum to create a powerful means of experiencing the vast Shoah Foundation archive.

The size of the archive is unparalleled: it would take an entire year for all the interviews to play on all screens, and it would take twelve years for a single person to watch all videos nonstop. These numbers, and the scale of the installation, are testament to the overwhelming vastness of the Holocaust itself. But rather than overwhelm our visitors in a sea of concurrent voices, Potion realized the need to provide visitors with individual entry points into the stories. In order to do so, we drew heavily on the connections between voice, words and language, using annotations provided by the Foundation, to individualize each testimony. Language is used to connect interviewees across similar themes and topics, thereby reinforcing the overarching conversation and ensuring that no one voice takes precedence.

Visitors to Tree of Testimony can key into any story through an iPod Touch, or follow the narrative simply through the evocative annotations – wartime photographs, camp forced labor, tight decisions.