Growing up as part of an ethnicity that has had its fare share of tragic events in the past, the Shoah hardly ever appeared in Bulgarian history books. By the time I found out about the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, I had already seen it in numerous tourist catalogs and photos, but still had no clue what it stood for.
To discover that the place which supposedly commemorates the deaths of the six million brutally murdered Jews has been valorized into one of Berlin’s signature selfie hotspots, with thousands of tourists snapping pics daily, seemed absolutely unacceptable to me. And the latest project of Israeli satirist Shahak Shapira takes aim precisely at this utterly superfluous vanity practice.
Equally witty and provocative, Shapira’s Yolocaust explores the disturbing commemorative culture behind one of the vilest deeds in human history by juxtaposing selfies from the Berlin Holocaust Memorial with archived footage from Nazi extermination camps.
Most of the images are sourced from popular social media and dating services like Facebook, Instagram, Tinder and Grinder.
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The outcome is ultimately a starkly contrasted composition that exposes the indignity this sort of superficial selfie-taking and location-tagging reinforces. Here’s how that looks:
Head to this page to see more of Shapira’s photo compositions and find out more about the motivation behind Yolocaust.
And in case you see yourself or one of your friends in the Yolocaust collection of selfie-snapping dumbasses, you can email Shapira at undouche.me@yolocaust.de should you want the photos removed from the website.
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