Unknown, Postcard, Marseille, Sortie du Vieux Port et le Pont Transbordeur, ca. 1920
Anna Sophia Messner is a postdoctoral researcher in MEDMACH. From 2022-2023 she was a scientific staff member at the Chair for Transcultural Studies/Institute for Art History at Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf and from 2012-2015 as well as from 2019-2022 at the Institute für Art History at Ludwig-Maximlians-Universität München. From 2015–2018 she was a doctoral research fellow in the Max-Planck-Research Group “Objects in the Contact Zone – The Cross-Cultural Lives of Things” at Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – MPI. Her research focuses on Jewish art, historiography and culture with a special focus on migration and exile, visual culture of Israel and Palestine, transcultural art history as well as the history and theory of photography.
In her research projects Anna Sophia Messner focuses on the visual history of the Pont Transbordeur in the port city of Marseille and on transnational Jewish visual histories of the Mediterranean after 1800.
The Pont Transbordeur was built in 1905 in the old port district of the French city of Marseille and became the modern landmark of the city, an emblem of modernity. From the moment it was built, it became a popular motif for artists and photographers, who shaped it‘s visual history from a variety of perspectives. These artistic and experimental tendencies came to an abrupt end with the occupation of German troops. In early 1943 the old port district was destroyed, the Jewish inhabitants were deported and the Pont Transbordeur was blown up in 1944, as can be seen from the photographic images of the Wehrmacht’s photo campaigns. Against this background, this subproject aims to create an image archive in order to write the visual history of the Pont Transbordeur, an architectural machine of movement and acceleration, which became the emblem of modernity of the mediterranean port city of Marseille.
The second case study seeks to write transnational visual histories of the Mediterranean after 1800, by examining archives, sites and infrastructures of mobility and immobility which are closely linked to Jewish spaces of experience, such as migratory movements, transcultural processes and histories of interconnections, networks and exchange. Thereby, the research project focuses particularly on port cities in which the Jewish population played an important role in maritime culture and economy such as Trieste, Thessaloniki, Tangier, Algiers or Alexandria. In this context, the research project seeks to uncover the various layers of the according image archives on infrastructures of mobility and immobiltiy in these port cities, in order to write visual transnational Jewish histories in the mediterranean region after 1800
Contact: Anna.Messner@hhu.de