What is a Type Case?
I collected Tunisian soil around the American Cemetery in Carthage, Tunisia. I put it in small bottles usually used to sell kohl, an ancient cosmetic derived from gray stone or organic resources. Later, I arranged the four hundred bottles in four type-cases, according to the order of graves at the memorial site in Tunis. Each bottle of earth corresponds to a number engraved on the bottom of each case. These numbers are the social insurance numbers of the soldiers – service numbers did not exist back then – and civilians who died during the Tunisian campaign in World War II.
During the shift from manual mechanic processes to electronically controlled printing, the type-cases, formerly used to keep the lead types organized, found a new purpose as organizers of souvenirs. It emerged as a typical household decoration, particularly popular in Germany, where they helped as an educational device for parents to keep the children’s desks tidy. It gave the word “Setzkasten” (German for type case) a new meaning far away from the former context of the printing industry. Young collectors could train their conservation skills and organize mini-memorials in their sleeping rooms. The instinct to collect is awake in the childhood years. However, many friends, including Timo, who I asked about, also remembered it as a complex obstacle, for they had to take out each figure to clean the many cases from the dust. Maintenance often broke the carefully curated order of the tiny objects and unavoidably led to careless behavior cases. It was just a matter of time before the once-found order of things got out of the minds of the young collectors, and while becoming of age, the type-cases loaded with embodied childhood memories got replaced by posters of bands and sports heroes. They had to make space for new memories to come.
– Nadia Kaabi-Linke
The Tunisia Campaign?
The Tunisian campaign lasted from the Summer of 1942 until the Winter of 1943. As a result, 2,833 US Americans never left Tunisian soil; another 3,724 people remain missing to this day.
Until 1942, Tunisia was a colony controlled by the French regime. Although no one ever asked the Tunisian people about their opinion on what was happening on the European continent, their homeland became un-deliberately the host of a war between the Axis powers and the Western Allies. After all, WWII and the experiences of the Tunisian Campaign (which was ended by the intervention of American troops) led to more Tunisian resistance against the French colonial power and infused a stronger coherence of the independence movement.
– Timo Kaabi-Linke
In Memory
The cabinets with bottles of cemetery soil translate the strict arrangement of the graves into an image. However, they also elicit associations with the display cases filled with souvenirs in bourgeois apartments or the medicine cabinets in old pharmacies. The rigid mathematical division is an expression of the European heritage of rationalism, the bourgeois principle of individuality and exchange, and the equal right to equal exchange.
However, the work also points to the dialectic of this principle: some nations are ‘more equal’ than others. They manage to enforce the establishment of a separate territory for their dead, in a foreign country, where they have waged war — a complement to the foreign military bases.
Who lies buried here, fallen for his fatherland, lies off the beaten track. Only a few of the bereaved will have undertaken the long journey to mourn by the grave of the dead. Not all deaths are equal.
Some who died will be mourned after all; others are remembered without names, replaced by a service (or social insurance) number. A short time after the individual dead soldier becomes worthy of a monument in modernity, new forms of war are shaped. The individual gets replaced in an anonymous mass of death, and forms of remembrance adjust to this.
– Falko Schmieder
