This cluster of four sessions explores landscapes as archives of post-/colonial violence, toxicity/pollution, history, and memory and looks at counter measures to unearth alternative memories through aesthetic representations and local engagement. Acts of engagement such as reclamation, mourning, and hope express and reiterate layered attachments. As an archive, the landscape stores what has disappeared. It also holds the possibility of unearthing and mobilizing its traces to articulate demands for the future. Our cluster brings together scholars, artists, and activists working on locations of (deadly) transit, grief and mourning, and the transformation of these locations into landscapes of hope, justice and future aspirations. Focusing on landscape as an archive not only entails studying it as a site of human history, memory and grief, but also considering the specific environmental conditions of a given terrain and its layered connections to different spaces in time. Altered by human inhabitation, intervention, and imagination, landscapes become archives of individual and collective pasts. Environmental traces, such as ruins, soils, sedimentations, pollution, degradation, and flora, provide rich resources for those engaged with landscapes of transit from a variety of experiences in order to generate memorial topographies. Through case studies, our cluster contributes to the critical examination of landscapes as intentional products or camouflages for specific memories and memory practices. We explore landscapes as instrumental to/of power that shape (or counter) historical discourses and ideologies.
Nina ter Laan, “Roots That are Waiting” Transgenerational and Transnational Reconfigurations of Loss Through Soil in Planting and Art in the Rif, Morocco This paper explores forsaken landscapes in the Rif (northern Morocco) and their materialities in the (re)mediation of memory of a distinct Riffian identity and its history among Amazigh activists in Morocco and in Europe. I focus on practices and imaginaries of soil through artistic practices and planting initiatives, that symbolize and contribute to the reclaiming of a past of violent loss and its recasting in hopeful imaginaries for the future, as well as redefining what it means to be Riffian for different actors. I demonstrate that caring for the historically neglected and violated land and reimagining it in artforms is not only a way to address historical grievances due to colonial and postcolonial repression and land degradation, but also to re signify the landscape. Through their engagement with the land, Amazigh activists naturalize a genealogical continuity between their ancestors and descendants, while at the same time transmitting experiences of loss into the present, reworking the land into a fertile foundation for future generations. I focus on local and European diaspora based initiatives involving the planting of trees, shrubs, and herbs, as well as artistic endeavors, such as painting and music, that aim to restore the Rif. My interlocutors perceive the land and soil as active agents, that store traces, roots, and memories, summoning those who belong to it. This belief in the soil’s power to renew itself, its inhabitants, and their descendants, extends to post migrant generations in Europe. My interlocutors’ engagement with soil through plowing, watering, planting, walking, singing, and painting is more than an act of nurturing or imagining its future productivity. It is a response to their voiced sense of “roots that are waiting,” longing for reconnection and replenishment. Central is the tension between loss, oppression, and isolation on the one hand, and care, reconnection, and self determination with the land on the other, which different generations from the Rif in Morocco and its post migrant diaspora in Europe navigate in various ways.
Forest, Forum, Forensis
Nicky Rousseau
Tracing the etymology of forest as ‘outside’ (Latin: foris) or as ‘forum’ (Medieval Latin: forestis, itself from Latin: forum), one may arrive, via different routes, at Forensic Architecture’s reinscription of the forensic as forensis (pertaining to the forum). Working with the dis/continuous histories of the Mkambati Forest in rural Pondoland, South Africa - annexed land, a leprosy reserve, a secret place of torture and incarceration by apartheid security police and currently a nature reserve and tourist attraction – this paper asks whether beginning, not with the forum, but with the forest (grassland, riverine, coastal) as an aesthetic (ie. sensate) archive would offer a different kind of counter-history, memory and memorial making.
Erella Grassiani, Forests of the Present-Past: the Judaization of the Negev/Naqab
The Yatir forest in the Negev desert, or the Naqab in Arabic is vast. It is the home of some 4 million trees, all planted in the 1960s by the Jewish National Fund or KKl-JNF. This organization was founded at the beginning of the 20th century to buy land in Palestine for the creation of the Jewish State. Since 1948 it has planted and taken care of all of Israel’s forests. The Yatir forest, KKL-JNF claims is pushing back on desertification, preventing flooding, and in general stars in the organization’s claim to fight climate change. While such ecological claims have been disputed by ecologists, there is also a much more political side to the planting of this forest and its continuing existence. In this paper, I will analyze the planting of this forest and others like it as acts of creating a present-past in the desert landscape. The past that is being re-created as it were in Israel is an ancient, biblical one. In this biblical past, the Jews are given the land of Israel by God to live on and to build their lives upon. With the rise of political Zionism and its wish for a Jewish homeland, a larger Jewish presence on the land became a renewed reality, a present. Today we can see the forests planted by KKL-JNF as part of the creation of this present-past in the barren landscapes of the desert. In line with a clear political drive to Judaize the land through the creation of new Jewish settlements, the planting of forests is not only aiding these efforts from a practical point of view, but it is also creating a Jewish presence through the very trees that are planted. By, for example, looking at the kinds of trees that are planted and the stories of their planting, such as the planting by diplomats to celebrate Israel’s 75th birthday in 2023, I will trace this creation of the forest of present-past.
Carla Tiefenbacher, Post/colonial Necromobilities Between Morocco and Spain. This paper explores multidirectional contemporary practices of reburial and repatriation of deceased family members among former Spanish colonialists of Northern Morocco. I ask how postcolonial necromobilities between Spain and Morocco figure into past and present border regimes along the Spanish Moroccan shore, and how memory practices surrounding grief, mourning and longing express the complexities of colonial duress. As a zone of transit, circulation, and as a force of nature, the Mediterranean Sea also carries notions of a landscape of death. Recent scholarship of Mediterranean deaths linked to an increasingly securitized EU/non EU border zone has shaped the perception of its shores as seametery (Abderrazak 2018) and as a forensic archive (Dziuban 2023). These landscapes of grief, I argue, are historically layered with more recent deaths as well as visible and invisible memorials to colonial warfare, to adventures, challenges and famines. In the Spanish Moroccan borderlands I work on, this landscaping includes land based cemeteries in the ex colony and graveyards on off shore military restricted areas, neglected sites of war time massacres, rumors and memories of city infrastructure that was built or repurposed as sites of state violence. They also include family archives curated to preserve nostalgia for a lost past perceived as more peaceful than the current day, and a sense of longing and be longing. The repatriation of loved ones to and from the lost colonial hometown has required actors to creatively deal with Spanish and Moroccan bureaucracies and has enabled them to exercise control over the location and visibility of their dead relatives. Colonial nostalgia and current border regimes intersect in planning and executing reburials, in collective forms of mourning visible deceased relatives, and in conflicts over how and if to remember those whose location of death and burial remains hidden and may implicate injustices committed by more than one post/colonial state. How do practices of reburial articulate relations of kinship in and with their chosen landscapes? How do these repatriations stake claims for re-rooting and political hegemony?
