June 22nd, 2025, 1:00 pm - 2:15 pm
The recording of this class is at https://youtu.be/5rxkQvMuuZA.
The Holocaust was one of humanity’s most traumatic experiences, and this traumatic event has a connection to the environmental problems facing us today. In fact, pollution, climate change, and mining abuses (extractivism) are closely related to hatred, racism, antisemitism and other social issues.
Art is a powerful means to transmit the ideas and concerns that connect the Holocaust and the degradation of the natural world. The Nazis used art to express their pseudo-scientific antisemitism. Their victims, mostly Jews, were inspired by nature even in the worst conditions, to create art, as an act of resistance.
In the post-Holocaust era, artists recognize the importance of reconnecting with nature to begin healing from trauma. In contemporary art, many parallels exist between the memory of the Holocaust and the urge to act before a similar or worse catastrophe occurs: nature as we know it disappearing, and we human beings with it. Images of devastation caused by wars – houses in rubble, gas chambers in Auschwitz, forests burning, and forests destroyed by Agent Orange – remind us of human destruction of our environment and of human cruelty to fellow humans.
A clear example of the link between Holocaust and nature in art can be found in the story of two Jewish women: Trude Sojka, a Holocaust survivor and well-known Ecuadorian artist, for whom nature in her paintings and sculpture was vital in healing her inner wounds, and her granddaughter, Gabriela (Gaby) Steinitz, a contemporary visual artist for whom nature is also an inspiration for her art. In her presentation, Gaby will use her own artwork in illustrating how the Holocaust, Art and Nature are related and the importance for us, today, of recognizing their relationships, and finding inspiration in mother nature in the context of an ongoing Holocaust.
Gabriela (Gaby) Steinitz is an artist and museologist (expert in museums), co-director of the Trude Sojka House Museum in Quito, Ecuador, together with her mother, Anita Steinitz. Gabriela was born in Quito in 1995, and has both French and Ecuadorian nationalities. She is the granddaughter of the Czech-Ecuadorian artist and Holocaust survivor Trude Sojka.
Gabriela travelled to France and the Czech Republic to study Visual Arts (2013) and once in Europe, started searching for her ancestry and the impacts of the Holocaust on her family. She returned to Ecuador in 2018, where she currently lives and works and where she earned a Master’s degree in Museology. She minored in Human Rights and Art, Holocaust Education, and Art and Ecology, and has also recently completed a Permaculture Design course.
Since 2022, she has been a member of the Ecuadorian Zero Waste Alliance, and her environmental activism (or “artivism”) is linked to her work at the Trude Sojka House Museum which is now an example of a sustainable urban house museum for its gardens, orchard, waste management, rainwater retention and circular economy practices.
Gabriela’s art has been exhibited in France, the Czech Republic and Ecuador. Her current exhibition called “No One’s Rose” can be seen at the Trude Sojka House Museum.
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