The People's Paving Stones: The Material Politics of International Human Rights in the Baldosas por la Memoria of Buenos Aires - International Political Sociology (original) (raw)
Related papers
Performative Materials and Activist Commemoration.
Public Art Journal CAP Cadernos de Arte Pública, 2020
Talk given at Fragmentos, Bogotá, September 2020. Monument debates in the second decade of the twenty-first century, turning almost entirely on questions of who is represented and by whom, might benefit from considering questions of how and with what material resources first raised in the context of post-WWII commemoration of the Holocaust and other traumatic events. The involvement of audiences in the memorial’s physical substance, entering its spaces and otherwise performing acts of commemoration rather than just looking upon public art meant to broadcast an ideal official history, has been central to the most durable memorials of the last half century, and is given a particularly radical turn by artist interested in justice and restitution. In Colombia, Doris Salcedo has taken the very fabrication of a memorial space—made from surrendered FARC firearms by women who had suffered in the war in cathartic acts of hammering sheet metal—as a performative process making commemoration physical. The same phenomena can be observed spontaneously in acts of public imagination directed at more conventional memorial objects, such as the Korean Statue for Peace, whose bronze girl commemorates the victims of sexual exploitation during WWII is clothed by anonymous contemporary Koreans. The task for theorists of monumentality today, as much as for monument-makers, is to understand how an ethics of care can meet and interact forcefully with a politics of taking responsibility.
Damnatio Memoriae Inscribed: The Materiality of Cultural Repression
, in The Materiality of Text - Placement, Perception, and Presence of Inscribed Texts in Classical Antiquity, eds. Ivana Petrovic, Andrey Petrovic, Edmund Thomas, Brill, Leiden 2018., 2018
This article targets erased Roman inscriptions in terms of materiality. It argues that the physical material and form of inscriptions played a crucial part in the phenomenon commonly termed damnatio memoriae. Materiality is further applied as a theoretical concept. Hence, the paper discusses changed, attacked, and erased inscriptions as agents that transmitted novel messages of the past and present to their viewers. It argues that these messages often differed from the original purpose of the erasures.
En este artículo planteo, dentro del marco de los Estudios de la Memoria, una deconstrucción de las nociones de memoria y exilio para entender cómo y por qué sus usos hegemónicos (académicos, culturales, políticos, sociales) están al servicio de una concepción nostálgica y sentimental del pasado. Con atención a dos casos de estudio (la película de 1962 En el balcón vacío y ciertas prácticas culturales en el nuevo milenio), propongo un análisis no melancólico de los regímenes económicos, discursivos y emocionales que informan la memoria de la Guerra Civil y el franquismo. Abstract This paper aims to deconstruct, within a Memory Studies framework, the notions of memory and exile in order to understand how and why its hegemonic uses (academic, cultural, political, social) are to the service of a nostalgic and sentimental conception of the past. Focusing on two case studies (the 1962 film En el balcón vacío and certain cultural practices in the new millennium), I propose a non-melancholic analysis of the economic, discursive and emotional regimes informing the memory of Civil War and Francoism.
Material Remains: Doris Salcedo
Oxford Literary Review, 2017
When I started thinking about Doris Salcedo, I had been mucking about in the swamp surrounding memory politics and thinking specifically about the pressures induced by Adorno’s injunctions on art-after-Auschwitz. The challenges have been well-rehearsed: how to commemorate an event which both demands and refuses commemoration; where all available cultural forms threaten to trivialize, sentimentalize, mystify, embellish, instrumentalize, or otherwise betray the memory of the dead; and where every attempt to acknowledge injury seems only to compound it. The perplexity has preoccupied the makers of Holocaust memorials for decades now, and has led to the proliferation of anti-monuments, counter-monuments, “nonuments” that continue to spring up in cities throughout Europe and beyond – self-berating, self-effacing, self-undoing. The stakes mount exponentially with every new intervention. It’s not just that fatigue can set in; that the project sooner or later risks becoming an exercise in ethical and intellectual one-upmanship; that taciturnity can become a prompt for ever more virtuosic displays of reticence; or that the ban on representation, and specifically on the figuration of trauma, can lead to a mysticism of the ineffable and the sacralization of atrocity as awe-inspiring (or simply inspiring) taboo. It’s also that discretion can compound the cruelties of official oblivion. Violence likes to occult itself –the apparatus of terror requires this obfuscation-- and one of the most systematic mechanisms of “disappearance” is that the traces of disappearance are made to disappear.
This article examines the political strategies of independent Spanish documentaries of the 2000s and 2010s in the context of debates about historical memory. The hypothesis of this research is that independent documentaries can operate as vehicles for practices and discourses that are free from the institutional domestication normally affecting film and television productions dealing with memory. It is thus argued that documentary film practices distanced from official political interests can challenge some of the common assumptions in discussions of historical memory and offer a bottom-up perspective, in parallel with a process that brings a grassroots element into public discussions of memory. First of all, the article examines some of the most prominent theoretical positions on memory. We then analyse the films Soldados Anónimos/Soldats Anònims (Pere Vilà and Isaki Lacuesta, 2009), Los materiales (Los Hijos, 2010) and Dime quién era Sanchicorrota (Jorge Tur, 2013) as examples that illustrate these ideas. Based on a study of these films, we question the use of testimony and the indexical value of the document as the foundations of the discourse of the film documentary, and propose a distancing from these practices as a way of avoiding the sentimental use of memory evident in official political positons on the Spanish Civil War.
Memory Studies, 2023
OPEN ACCESS: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17506980221150900 This article introduces the concept of the instituting force of activist archives. It does so by analyzing the epistemological and ontological implications of describing and arranging archival materials, and narrativizing them in curatorial work, in the case of the Archivo de la Memoria Trans de Argentina—Trans Memory Archive of Argentina. On the one hand, the archival arrangement provides trans people with a frame of recognition for trans lives and transforms individual memories into collectable and usable cultural memories for activism. On the other hand, the appropriation of the language of the family in curatorial works incorporates trans memories into the framework of Argentinian post-dictatorship transition. This allows activists to gain access to, and adapt, an entire repertoire for trans causes and activist kinship. The article supports the analytical work and the presented theoretical hypothesis by creating a dialogue between cultural memory studies and critical archival studies, for the exploration of memory activism.