Panel 13: Making Memorial Objects: Time, Trauma and Memory in the Aesthetic
Archive
Chair: Sara Matthews
Dina Georgis (Women and Gender Studies Insitute, Toronto), “The Personal
Archive: Delivering the Human in War”
Public memory practices are, as many researches have argued (Simon, Rosenberg,
Edkins), not innocent. They participate in collective mythologies and tell us how to
remember the past. Public memories are often invested in the nations and communities in
which they arise. Especially where war is concerned, these practices play into the
nationalist imaginary and in turn cement collective memories by foreclosing the
multiplicity of experiences in history. While Derrida’s Archive Fever argues that all the
external signs of public records are constituted from the traces of memory that leave their
stamp on the outside, this paper addresses the limits and pitfalls of collective memory by
turning to aesthetic production for its capacity to offer an affective encounter with the
traumatic legacies of war. Indeed, I shall argue that aesthetic cultural production
privileges the singularity of human memory and experience in excess of prevailing
discourses of war. By working with artist Rabih Mroué’s “Make Me Stop Smoking,” a
one man multi-media presentation showcasing his personal library of the Lebanese civil
war, this paper considers how the aesthetic archive of loss allows us to see the human
side of political conflict, where responses to war are not predictable or reducible to
typical caricatures of heroism, martyrdom or victimization. Conceptualized as a “museum
without walls,” Mroué presents his audience with his fragments of war, collected over the
years without, we are told, any purpose in mind. They are random objects and memories
that speak more to his affective relationship than to the certainty of his experience.
Contradiction, confusion, and pain are what organize his presentation. Indeed, what
Mroué delivers to his audience is “the human” in history. What we see is a man who
suffers and is torn by a realization of his own complicity in war.
Katherine McKittrick (Gender Studies, Queen’s), “Racial Archives, Calculating
Blackness”
This paper will explore the archival documentation of black bodies, looking specifically
to what Simone Browne (2009) describes as ‘arithmetics of the skin,’ in order consider
the political possibilities creatively mathematical narratives advance. The argument will
first show the ways in which black subjects are documented, described, and photographed
in the archives of transatlantic slavery as ubiquitous pained bodies, visually dehumanized
by the shadow of the whip (Hodge, 1974; Hartmann, 2008). The discussion will then
consider the ways in which calculus, generously understood here as the study and
measure of mathematical change, can inform the study of racial archives. Coupling
institutionally intelligible archival race-pain, with the contemporary mathematical whipshadows invoked by hip-hop musician Nas, the argument proposes that ‘looking back,’
through a collaborative political-calculus lens, invites us to consider renewed conceptions
of black corporeal history.
Angela Failler (Sociology, Winnipeg) & Eisha Marjara (writer/director, Montreal),
“Family Picnic: Personal Archive, Public Memory”
This presentation is based on a photo essay that co-presenters Marjara and Failler are
working on together as part of a larger collaborative research project called Building
Communities of Memory: Remembrance Practice after the 1985 Air India Bombings that
seeks to understand the relationship between practices of remembrance and public
memory. The phrase “family picnic” refers both to a personal photograph that Marjara
has in her possession from childhood, which includes her mother and sister who were
killed in the Air India bombings, and to the Vancouver “picnickers” who ate lunch on the
shores of the Vancouver harbour in 1914 as they watched the turning away of the
Komagata Maru. We argue that the national indifference subsequently shown towards
Indo Canadians surrounding the Air India bombings – a terrorist attack that killed 280
Canadians, the majority of whom were of South Asian background – has historical
precedence in the Komagata Maru incident during which Canadian officials forcefully
refused a ship load of mostly Sikh men from India wishing to settle in Canada (many of
whom consequently died) by invoking an obscure immigration policy that clearly
demarcated them as illegal interlopers. The juxtaposition of the Komagata Maru
“picnickers” and Marjara’s imagery – which also includes newly constructed photo
images of her mother and sister’s personal effects recovered from their deceased bodies
at the accident site and returned to Marjara in evidentiary plastic bags – thus becomes the
basis for a critical discussion and demonstration of how “the personal is political” is
evoked in/through the work of making memorial objects from these archival materials.
Sara Matthews (Global Studies, Wilfrid Laurier), “The Archive of the Hero: A Memoir
of Military Induction”
From 1989 to 1992, Toronto based artist Scott Waters served as an infantryman in the
Third Battalion of Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry. Waters’ recent illustrated
memoir The Hero Book, is an aesthetic archive - a collection of prose, painted images
and photographs - that document the everyday lives of soldiers through the rites and
rituals of military induction. However, for all the promise of their training, Waters and
his fellow soldiers never went to war. In my engagement with Water’s work, I draw from
psychoanalytic models of aesthetic experience (Gosso, Segal) and argue that aesthetic
practices provide a model for making significance from past experience when
remembrance repeats the qualities of trauma: where there is uncertainty and
understanding is deferred, artistic mechanisms hold this tension while symbolizing its
emotional difficulties. Artistic practice, I suggest, offers a way to archive affect laden
experience without the need to resolve the tension between knowing and not knowing.
The contingency of experience becomes a model of creative expression and, I argue, one
aspect of ethical thought.