This cluster of 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. The cluster consists of thematically interlinked sessions. In the first session “Mapping the landscape”, we ask how various actors (human and more-than-human) relate to landscapes as spatial records of individual and collective pasts. The second session, looks at modes of “Intervening in the Landscape” that inscribe, carve, build, dig, erode, swallow, sanctify, or neglect specific landscapes in order to remember or forget. The third session “Ritualizing the Landscape” focuses on spiritual and ritual modes of engagement with land, skies, and waters as archive. The fourth session “Representing the Landscape” includes a short film screening and discussion of Mona Benyamin’s “Moonscape” and presentation by the artist, Mpho Moshe Matheolane of artistic practices to highlight the role of production and intervention through multiple media. By tracing practices of mourning, attachment, and reclamation associated with landscapes as archives, we challenge institutionalized notions of archives as repositories of authorized and curated histories.
Luciana Serrano, Collective Memory Practices in Argentina Cooperativa Espacial.
This conference presentation focuses on case studies of collective memory practices in Argentina and explores the intricate interplay between identity and memory to examine how collective memory-building processes reshape the places people inhabit to cultivate a renewed sense of belonging. This talk underscores that memory practices are diverse and locally specific and engage in a dynamic dialogue with a range of material and immaterial supports. Within this panel, particular attention will be given to the physical environment, a crucial locus of collective memory that offers profound insights into the nuanced connections between individuals and their surroundings. Building upon these illustrative cases, the presentation will also discuss a methodological approach grounded in participatory research processes, community art initiatives, and collaboration with activist projects. This approach aims to highlight the ever-evolving collective practices of memory-making ("hacer memoria") in Argentina and their profound impact on the surrounding environment. Collaboration with those who inhabit, traverse, design, or seek to alter a landscape unveils layers of memory associated with it, including not only those engaged in constructive pursuits but also those involved in destructive or forgetting processes. By intertwining academic inquiry with lived experiences, creative expressions, and activist endeavors, the presentation seeks to explore the potential for a holistic and nuanced understanding of how memory is embedded, contested, and negotiated within contemporary landscapes. Furthermore, it delves into the role of academia in investigating and contributing to this understanding.
Martin Zillinger
Memories in the Wild. Mourning and the ritual mediation of absence in the Moroccan Gharb.
This paper is concerned with rituals of trance as they have been cultivated by religious confraternities in the Gharb, the lowland plains in North-Western Morocco. In elaborated trance choreographies the ‘Isawa of the Gharb turn the landscapes of the plains into spaces of transition - between the living and the dead, humans and spirits, memory and forgetting. The rituals invoke spirits and other external powers in the body movements of the entranced and relate the visible to the invisible realm. Long sequences of mourning make the dead and persons lost to migration, violence and social cleavages present. While collective mediumship stages various forms of alienation and forgetting, it also functions as an archive of memory that conveys a sense of belonging in landscapes of domination and violence. In my presentation I am interested in the ways in which memory and forgetting are distributed - stored, invoked and accomplished in collective practices of trance that elude any individual accessibility.
Luis Campos, City Landscapes, State Terrorism and Popular Subjugation: On Cartographic Narratives and Affective Memories. Mass raids, conducted by the Chilean dictatorship (1973 1990), constituted repressive territorial operations aimed at controlling and punishing the impoverished urban sectors in major cities. Deliberately designating specific territories as concentration spaces and their inhabitants as focal points of danger, these operations employed tactics such as siege, intimidation, isolation, retention, detention, and the infliction of harm on numerous families within their intimate and communal spaces. Their objective was to generate docile populations and dismantle territorial resistance, fostering fear and suspicion among neighbors who had collectively shaped their space in the city. We contend that these raids were selective, multi scalar, and recursive interventions, serving not only to govern populations but, more expansively, to control territories. This presentation focuses on the mass raids in dictatorial Chile, offering a conceptual and methodological discussion that addresses state violence not solely as physical harm but also as a form of territorial damage intended to subjugate dissident ways of living, leading to the emergence of alternative memories and histories. In the field of memory studies, territory is often viewed as either a thanatological scenario or a space for memorialization and commemoration of victims. By conceptualizing the city as a landscape of spatial records, we employed cartography both as a technique for eliciting memories and as a strategy for representing results. We argue that social cartography, as a strategy for unearthing memories through local engagement, provides spatial legibility to lived experiences. Visual, sonic, and gestural inscriptions unveil the affective atmosphere of a territory subjected to chronic massive violence, facilitating the recognition of social, spatial, and material resources, along with repertoires of action derived from local ways of life adapted to deploy modes of resistance. The creation of cartographic representations of mass raids, as a means of communicating results in the social sciences, incorporates an aesthetic dimension to facilitate intergenerational dialogues on alternative memories, including understanding state violence as a form of city governance and victimhood as a condition of the political struggle at stake, rather than an identity.
Maryam Adjam
The Tale of the Stones. Memoryscapes of the Missing
Reflecting on the ways that absence is evoked in place through the act of remembrance, this paper outlines the convergence between the landscape as an archive of embodied memory practices and the landscape subject to memory regimes in the context of on-going state sanctioned violence. Focusing on unmarked graveyards for the missing, political dissidents, and victims of state sanctioned violence in Iran during the 1980s, the analysis investigates the notion of absence in relation to the memories of the missing and the spaces it evokes in sites associated with the missing.
Four decades after the events no mourning ceremonies, marking of the graves or other acts of remembrance of those missing are allowed. Despite the ban, the unmarked graveyards of the missing are still visited by those searching for them. Memories tracing the missing have marked these places, leaving material traces and re-enacting the memory of the missing in the place. Being a battlefield of traces left and erased, traces speaking and mute, these sites both encapsulate different and overlapping historical representations of the past, the memory politics articulated through these representations, as well as evoking a space of embodied memories that bring the missing to the fore as present absence. Tales of absences are rarely plain stories, outspoken and clear in content, but rather emerge as traces of ambivalence, speaking in and through the gaps and in-betweens, rendering a landscape of vibrant materials, enacting the memory of the missing as an experience of being missed, an experience of an entirety lacking (Bennett 2010). Using bricolage as method to open uncertainty as an affective dimension of the place, this analysis focuses on how absence is sensed and evoked through the temporary constellations memories assemble in the place and how the act of remembrance embodies a history of absences.
20240719T093020240719T1100America/LimaLandscapes as Archives of (Deadly) Transit: Session III: Ritualizing of LandscapesA309, Building AMSA Conference Lima 2024conference@memorystudiesassociation.org
