We Refuse To Be Scapegoats

We Refuse to be Scapegoats is a triptych of moving image works by Pam Skelton. The triptych was prompted by Skelton’s 1996 research into Polish memory on the site of the former Warsaw Ghetto and the interconnected histories that merge, uniting the tragedies of the Jewish Holocaust 1939-1945 and the Palestinian Nakba (Catastrophe) 1948, retracing elements of the collective past in the present presence of Israel Palestine.

The artist echoes Edward Said’s appeal to think of our histories together, despite the difficulties. What has been learnt from the discovery of the camps at the end of the Second World War? The French writer Marguerite Duras warned that ‘We are of the race of those who were burnt in the crematoriums and gas chambers of Majdanek, and we are also of the same race as the Nazis


Under the same title, We Refuse to be Scapegoats was premiered 24 June – 17 July 2021 at P21 Gallery, London as part of Pam Skelton’s first solo exhibition in a decade curated by Iliyana Nedkova. The exhibition is accompanied by an open and free resource of related texts and works available to watch, download, listen and read here.


We Refuse to be Scapegoats

A conversation between Caterina Albano and Pam Skelton

Caterina: We Refuse to be Scapegoats is a personal project that stems from years of research on your family history and more broadly on the histories of the Holocaust and Nakba. I wonder if this is a good starting point for us to begin our conversation on this body of work.

Pam: I guess so, Caterina. It is true to say that We Refuse to be Scapegoats is my latest project that connects to my practice of excavating disturbing histories in the aftermath of the Holocaust. 

My great grand parents and grandparents were part of the Jewish diaspora that arrived in the UK together with tens of thousands of other east European Yiddish-speaking Jews fleeing the pogroms in the Russian Empire. This took place mainly in the last two decades of the 19th century until the implementation of the Aliens Act of 1905 which imposed restrictions on migrants entering the country.  They settled in Leeds and Hull.  I didn’t get very far with family history, but I know from the UK Census that they lived in small villages and towns in Lithuania, Byelorussia, Ukraine and Poland in areas that were known as the Pale of Settlement. This was the case for the majority of poor Jews in the Russian Empire who were forced to live in the marginal territories of the Russian Empire, banished from living in the major cities and having restricted opportunities and education.

In 1996 I was in Warsaw to research a work on Polish memory of the Warsaw Ghetto, but I had to shelve the project because it offended both my Jewish and Polish collaborators in Warsaw. Why? Because Polish memory of the Holocaust was and still is a taboo subject. I wanted to know more about what the current residents of the former Warsaw ghetto knew about its history and felt about living there.  The project was never finished, it turned out to be too controversial for both the gallery who was hosting me and the Jewish Historical Institute that was helping me with the research. At the time I found this response quite surprising: it was an encounter with memories whose contentiousness was new to me. However, even though the project was unfinished I came away with some very rich material that turned out to be a catalyst that drove me to attempt We Refuse to be Scapegoats twenty years later.

I then realised that not only that the Jews were scapegoats, but the Poles were too. Auschwitz became a synonym for the Holocaust and its host country is blamed for the Holocaust which I have no doubt fuels anti-Semitism in Poland, while Germany had the resources, support and assistance of the West and was rehabilitated, forgiven. The Palestinians now suffer the consequences of occupation and expulsion, and it is they who struggle now and refuse to be scapegoats.

In this context I often think of the German Jewish writer and critic Walter Benjamin whose work profoundly touches upon the concept of a never ending ‘state of emergency’ that seems to exemplify modern and contemporary existence for him. In Angel of History written shortly before his suicide in 1941 while fleeing Nazi occupied France, Benjamin describes the Angel of History (based on a painting with the same title by German artist Paul Klee) as powerless in stopping the continuum of the never-ending cycle of violence.

Caterina: The reference to Benjamin’s Angel of History is very interesting: We Refuse to be Scapegoats is a video installation that reconnects the Holocaust and the Nakba by bringing together elements of both histories and by addressing the individual lived experience of states of permanent crisis across times and places. How was it possible to make a work that spanned these conflicted histories?

Pam: When I began the research in Warsaw in 1996 I had no idea that twenty years later it would lead me to We Refuse to be Scapegoats. I also had no idea that my project on Polish memory would reveal to me the deep rift which existed between Israel and Palestine. Edward Said wrote, that ‘these are paradoxes that we need to address and that is why it is important that ‘we must think of our histories together, however difficult that may be.  

Working across these histories has been a huge challenge and many doubts remain.  I had to ditch a lot of pre-conceived impressions in a process of identifying, discarding and reframing the material I was using until I eventually stopped self-censoring. After a long and painful process, I learnt that I had to keep remembering to allow the material I was working with to find its own direction. This is to say linking the tragic and poetic in my own way, spanning the past and present. I had to learn how to be braver. I had to feel confident enough to attempt to reunite these two tragic histories, namely, the Jewish Holocaust 1939-1945 and the Nakba (the Palestinian Catastrophe) in 1948.

Caterina: Thinking about histories is ever more important today when we have to acknowledge how we have been shielding ourselves from the responsibility that fascism, colonialism in all its forms, segregation and inequalities present us and how we have been blind to the legacies of such histories. We could say that we have not worked them through. The title of your work seems to me to be an invitation to work through the traumatic legacies of the past, and to engage with the resistance that can be found even in vulnerability. To add another quote – which seems appropriate – the Korean writer, Han Kang, reflecting on the students’ uprising in Gwangju in 1980, which was violently suppressed, observes, ‘I’d been mistaken when I’d thought of them as victims. They stayed behind precisely to avoid such a fate’. Here, like in your work, the emphasis is on the individual, on the lived experience of states of permanent crisis and how they affect the individual. For me, this is what memory brings to history: the emotional burden of events and their emotional legacy.

Pam: During a demonstration in London, I was very moved when I heard the Palestinian youth activist Ahed Tamimi defiantly proclaim that she refused to be a victim, she reached a point when she said she was no longer scared to speak out. The fact is that we still live in the era of camps, detention centers and ghettos. What Louis MacNeice wrote in his 1945 anti-war poem, Prayer Before Birth that ‘tall walls wall us’, remains true today. This is why I used this powerful poem in We Refuse to be Scapegoats; and this is also why I bring the voices and images of strong female role models into the project… to inspire us. MacNeice’s poem conveys the idea that the struggle against inequality must still haunt us lest we forget to remember the misuse of power and the cost in human lives and sufferings. In Israel Palestine and in the numerous other zones of conflict where human rights abuses take place, the past is no longer the past since the perpetual flow of crisis is destined to be repeated through similar forms and discriminations. We have to remember that Europe wanted to be free of Jews and that is what prompted the ongoing crisis and inequalities that Palestinians continue to suffer in Israel Palestine. What was inflicted on European Jews has had a direct consequence on Palestinian lives since 1948, as Israeli writer and journalist Amira Hass noted, and has resulted in this catastrophe for Palestinians ‘really losing their homes’.

Caterina: Memory and remembering play an important role in your work in general and, more specifically, in this body of work that overtly relates to Michael Rothberg’s notion of multidirectional memories.

Pam: Early on in this project I discovered Michael Rothberg’s work. It was timely and very helpful because it provided me with the beginnings of a theoretical framework and a language for articulating and understanding the contexts within which I was working. Rothberg was indebted to Paul Gilroy’s landmark text, The Black Atlantic (1993), whose multidirectional call has influenced my thinking together with an abundance of new literature on the subject of Israel Palestine. But at the end of the day, theory isn’t going to make the work for you if you are an artist. I have to acknowledge that being trapped between various disciplines and anxieties can make it difficult to find your own voice. If particular subjects are off bounds and, as in this case, denied language, one has to find ways to communicate through navigating the impasse or give up. In this sense it’s like being frozen by the bright lights and movement becomes impossible. But, at the same time, these lights can guide us. It makes us realise that the point where speech DOES become possible is a revolutionary moment, a movement much bigger than any one individual, although there always has to be someone to bring it to our attention.

Caterina: I am curious about the people who feature in your work, some of them – like Ewa – are silent presences, others tell us their experiences: who are they? And how did you come across their stories and developed the juxtaposition of their presences and experiences?

Pam: The people and places that inhabit this work are drawn from two sources – my own video collection consisting of rushes from my trips in Eastern Europe in the 1990s and online sources I have collected during the development of this project.

Ewa and Magdalena are the two Polish women who feature in the video Tall Walls Wall Me (2021), which is one of the five moving image works included in the exhibition. They both helped me when I was in Poland in the 1990s to understand more about the Nazi occupation of Poland and how that had affected their lives.

We Refuse to be Scapegoats (2021) is the signature work in the exhibition which takes the form of a dialogue across generations and nationalities of inspiring women, feminists, political commentators, and youth activists. The use of juxtaposition grew out of ways to explore some of the commonalities and differences that might exist between past and present struggles for liberty, freedom and justice such as what might be learned, who may inspire recognition and confidence and why. Learning as I went along, I chose to include references to Irish, German, American Israeli, and Palestinian figures, including Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, Hannah Arendt, Angela Davis, Amira Hass, Gil Hillel, Linda Sarsour and Rosa Sacharin. Their struggles inspired me and the questions that they raise give us hope for the future.  

Caterina: The intersecting narratives in We Refuse to be Scapegoats establish a web of connections and associations. In my own writing I examine the importance of cinematic practices such as montage for the development of contemporary models of remembering and for questioning the emotional charge that memory brings to an understanding to the past and how this enables us to reflect on the present. I wonder if you’d like to explain your approach to the archival material that you have used and the formal choices that inform this work.

Pam: I’ve used archive material in much of my work but until We Refuse to be Scapegoats it was used primarily as research. Conspiracy Dwellings (2008) used material sourced from the East German Stasi Archives to locate and reveal the location of the buildings where the Stasi, the secret police met with their informants. Central to this discovery was the home, because the majority of the secret meeting places were located in people’s homes. Archive material was essential to the production of that project although the actual Stasi files that informed the work didn’t appear in it. In We Refuse to be Scapegoats the process is the reverse of that. In formal terms the work is a montage that is made up of material from different sources, that originated in different places and different moments in time. They have been reconstructed and positioned to form a narrative continuity that challenges the domination, power and violence that exist everywhere in our society.

Caterina: Sound is a powerful component in We Refuse to be Scapegoats – how did you choose it and layered it on the images?

Pam: Initially, the way the sound developed was by using recordings of musical samples sent to me by an old friend – musician and composer Wayne Brown. In fact, Wayne composed Memory Rooms, the soundscape that accompanied my solo exhibition Groundplans (1989) at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham. Working with Wayne on We Refuse to be Scapegoats has made a huge difference. The sound is much more layered now and more specifically integrated within the multiple voices that inhabit the videos. He has created dramatic interludes that I think resonate throughout the project. Wayne’s soundscape emphasises the operatic relationship between voice and arranged music. It ultimately unites the words and ideas of those who have contributed so profoundly to peace and human rights struggles.


Dr Caterina Albano is a Reader in Visual Culture and Science at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. She is the author of Memory, Forgetting and the Moving Image (Palgrave MacMillan, 2016) and Fear and Art in the Contemporary World (Reaktion Books, 2012), of journal articles and essays on emotion and affect (fear and anxiety), on the politics of memory and contemporary art, and curating.


During a demonstration in London in 2019, I heard the Palestinian youth activist Ahed Tamimi defiantly proclaim that she refused to be a victim, that she had reached the point of no longer being scared to speak out. Fear is the weapon that silences us. The fact is that we still live in an era of camps, detention centres and ghettos echoing what Louis MacNeice declared in his 1944 anti-war poem Prayer Before Birth ‘tall walls wall us’. These are only some of the powerful words and voices of activists and artists alike I have included in my new moving image works We Refuse to be Scapegoats.

Pam Skelton, 2021

We Refuse to be Scapegoats encapsulates Skelton’s conviction that the struggle for equality must still haunt us lest we forget to remember the misuse of power and the cost in human lives and sufferings. In the occupied Palestine territories, as well as in the numerous other zones of conflict where human rights abuse takes place, the past is no longer the past since it functions within the perpetual flow of multiple current crises.

Iliyana Nedkova, 2020

I am not yet born, console me. I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me, with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me, on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me…

Louis McNeice, 1944

I very much doubt that Israel would have existed or the way it existed if not for the Holocaust.

Amira Hass, 2015

We must think of our histories together, however difficult that may be, in order for there to be a common future. And that future must include Arabs and Jews, free of any exclusionary, denial-based schemes for shutting out one side by the other, either theoretically or politically. This is the real challenge. The rest is much easier. 

Edward Said, 2007