Rosalind Brodsky's ElectronicTime Travelling Costume to rescue her Grandparents from the Holocaust

In 2005 Brodsky made several trips to WWII trying to find and save her Grandparents from the Germans and the Russians but to no avail.
Since then she has worn the costume as a memorial to them on several other occasions, notably on her visits to Sigmund Freud and to the set of The Wizard of Oz.

 

Brodsky voiceover from cd rom:

"My grandparents used to live in a small village near Tarnopol in Poland. In 1939 the Russians took it over and it became part of Ukraine. After the war began my father who was living in Paris went back to try and find them but they’d already been taken away. Nobody knows exactly what happened to them. I made this costume in 2005 to go back to the Holocaust to try and find them. I made many failed attempts, sometimes I ended up on filmsets, sometimes I ended up in deserted villages, I visited several concentration camps but I couldn’t find them anywhere. All I had to go on was an old photograph of my grandmother which my father had had colourised in the 1970s. My grandmother’s name was Rosalind Blum.

For some reason I decided to wear this costume when I started visiting Freud for my psychoanalysis, probably because it seems to bring out my paranoia and it makes me more confessional but also rather defensive too. On an early visit to Freud when he was still practising hypnosis I told him that I was from a small village in Eastern Poland called Pinsk. He said that was why I was so crazy, they were all far too introspective there and most of them had an obsessional neurosis.

The other times I wear this costume are when I visit the sets of certain science fiction films for my research at the Institute. People think I’m probably one of the cast so it makes it easy to have a look around."