Women Mobilizing Memory workshop: “‘Coming to Terms’ with Gendered Memories of Genocide, War, and Political Repression,” featuring Leyla Neyzi, Susan Meiselas, and Silvina der Meguerditchian. Istanbul, Turkey, September 2014.
Columbia Global Centers Showcases Women Mobilizing Memory
"Led by Professors Marianne Hirsh, Jean Howard, Diana Taylor and Ayşe Gül Altınay, the Mobilizing Memory for Action workshop engaged scholars, artists and activists from Chile, the United States and Turkey in public events, an art exhibition, a gender-memory walking tour and theater performances. "
Read more about the September 2014 Women Mobilizing Memory Istanbul workshop in this month's Columbia Global Centers E-Newsletter.
DAY FIVE REPORT: "Women Mobilizing Memory" Workshop in Istanbul, Turkey
During the penultimate day of the week-long Women Mobilizing Memory workshop, a number of new research questions and concerns emerged, including the following: As women (and sometimes men) mobilizing memory, how do we deploy feminist scholarship, and what does feminism mean to each of us across our diverse cultural, linguistic, and educational contexts?
The working group panels for the day explored this question from a number of different angles. In a talk titled, “Coups d’État: Dialogues at the Intersection of Memory and Life Story in Chile and Turkey,” Marcial Godoy and Zeynep Gambetti staged their feminist methodology in the form of a collaborative dialogue. Their conversation reflected on the ways in which their separate trajectories as activist-scholars growing up in eras of gross political oppression have converged in a transnational, professional friendship built on solidarity.
The need for concrete collaboration between scholars as an explicitly feminist methodology has come up in discussions time and again. Andrea Crow and Alyssa Greene took a different approach to contending with the issue of collaboration in their own conversation on “Working Definitions: Activist Scholarship in a Transnational University.” Their dialogue asked us not only to strive to define our critical terms in order to improve our communication as feminist colleagues, but also to remain aware of our role in the university system at large, especially as university structures become more global and corporatized.
In many ways, the following panel on “Reversing Silences/Telling Forgotten Stories” made manifest many concrete, feminist issues in Turkey that had been in the background of many of the group's explorations of Turkish politics earlier in the conference. Bürge Abiral gave a talk about sexual violence in women’s narratives of incarceration during Turkey’s military junta from 1980-1983. She provided important context for the difference regarding the "speakability" of sexual violence in Turkey, where rape was, until recently, defined as a crime against public morality and order, not against women’s bodily autonomy and human rights.
Dilara Çalışkan continued thinking about sexual violence specifically in transwomen’s communities and queer kinship structures in Istanbul, asking a provocative question based on Professor Hirsch’s scholarship: “Can we speak of queer postmemory?” She analyzed the ways in which trans mothers and daughters not only queer intergenerational transmission in their families of choice, but also hand down unfathomable memories of torture and forced displacement.
In the final talk of the day, Soledad Falabella shared her activist work on archiving and making accessible poetry from Mapuche women, an indigenous group that faces tremendous hostility on a daily basis in Chile. Falabella described the positionality of Mapuche women as “unbearable beings” for the state, always in conflict with the extent to which “the whole societal imaginary is trying to erase you,” and yet, in simply surviving, you become a concrete “standard of testimony” for the political problem more broadly.
Before separating into smaller breakout groups for the last time, the group participated in an impromptu discussion about positionalities as feminist scholars pursuing questions of social difference. Diana Taylor started the discussion by asking, “If we’re talking about gender, does our work automatically focus on women? Or are we using a feminist analysis to look at whatever we’re looking at?” A number of cross-cultural insights on feminism rose to the surface, including recognition of the potential that feminism has to provide an ethical lens for thinking about oppression, vulnerability, and a critique of power that does not lose sight of local contexts.
The final event of the day returned to the Black Box Theatre, where Maria Jose Contreras put on a one-woman piece of experimental performance art titled Prosthesis. Contreras' performance embodied a tension that had been remarked upon throughout the day: the ethical imperative that the personal remain political in our work as feminists. Her performance juxtaposed televised images of incendiary political moments from her childhood in Chile with x-rays of her debilitated father’s internal organs and a working breast-pump, making a visually stunning commentary on the ways in which her milk as a new mother also carries with it residues of Chile’s past.
Day five report contributed by: Nicole Gervasio
Nicole Gervasio is a Ph.D. student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.
DAY FOUR REPORT: "Women Mobilizing Memory" Workshop in Istanbul, Turkey
The fourth day of Women Mobilizing Memory featured a roundtable discussion moderated by Ayşe Gül Altınay on documentary films about state violence and Kurdish memory. The directors of the films Bûka Baranê (2013, dir Dilek Gökçin) and Dersim’s Lost Girls (2010, dir. Nezahat Gündoğan) also joined the discussion. Bûka Baranê focuses on the experiences of people who were students at an elementary school in Hakkari to explore the different forms of state violence and the Kurdish guerilla movement in the 1990s. In light of their memories of violence during the period of emergency rule, the film reflects on how children longed for peace.
Based on interviews with elderly women who experienced the Dersim genocide, Dersim’s Lost Girls explores how children and women have been affected by ethnic violence and assimilationist policies that targeted the Kurdish population in Dersim in the late 1930s. The discussion was followed by the roundtable Gendered Memories of War and Genocide in Turkey, moderated by Meltem Ahıska. Zeynep Türkyılmaz presented her research on the genocide in Dersim, its gendered aspects, and the tensions between memory and the archive as they relate to people's memories of the genocide. Ayşe Gül Altınay explored Nebahat Akkoç's organization KAMER to discuss post-nationalist feminist memory work within the broader context of Turkish politics. Hülya Adak’s presentation explored a variety of examples in late Ottoman and Turkish history to discuss how the position of “the mourning mother” has been utilized by authors and activists for different and at times conflicting political projects, especially with regard to the Armenian-Turkish relations and the memory of the genocide. Pınar Ensari discussed her research on young Kurdish women, their memories of state violence in the Southeast of Turkey in the 1990s, and their engagement with activism and politics in Turkey, with a specific focus on the Gezi Resistance and its aftermath.
After the roundtable, we joined the Gender-Memory Walking Tour co-organized by the Sabancı University Gender and Women's Studies Forum and the Karakutu/Black Box group. That evening, we attended Disco Number 5, a solo performance by Mirza Metin in Kurdish and directed by Berfin Zenderlioğlu. The performance focused on torture at the Diyarbakır prison during the military regime in the aftermath of the coup d’état of 1980. Reflecting the transdisciplinary nature of the program, the events throughout the day demonstrated the different forms of memory work.
Day four report contributed by: Rustem Ertug Altinay
Rustem Ertug Altinay is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University and a Turkish Cultural Foundation fellow.
DAY THREE REPORT: "Women Mobilizing Memory" Workshop in Istanbul, Turkey
The third day of Women Mobilizing Memory was dedicated to three public roundtables with simultaneous translations at Depo: "Creating Alternative Archives," "Art, Performance and Memory." and "Gender, Memory, Activism."
In the first roundtable on “Creating Alternative Archives,” Leyla Neyzi introduced her recent project on Kurdish and Turkish youth living in Turkey and Germany with visual examples from the project's website. Neyzi especially focused on intergenerational memory, post-memory, and Kurdish and Turkish youth's different conceptions of time and history. Özlem Kaya began her talk by introducing the Truth Justice Memory Center, which is an independent human rights organization that is based in İstanbul. Kaya explained how the Center contributes to uncovering grave human rights violations at times of conflict and in strengthening the collective memory about those violations. Currently, the Center is trying to create an alternative archive through video testimonies about enforced disappearances in Turkey. Susan Meiselas discussed her web-based project akaKurdistan, which she founded in 1998. She explored the possibilities of creating visual histories and building memories with people who have no national archive. She focused on how multiple perspectives and hidden archives came together in the production of this collective archive of Kurdish memory. Silvina der Meguerditchian noted how her artistic works deal with issues related to the burden of national identity, memory, the role of minorities in the society and the potential of a space “in between.” The roundtable was followed by a screening of Silvina’s new film “Nereye/Where to,” which follows the traces of İstanbul’s lost minority communities in Fener and Balat, revealing the complexities of recovering memory.
In the second roundtable, titled “Art, Performance and Memory,” Andreas Huyssen discussed the recent changes in museum culture, pointing to a "metamorphosis of the museum." Huyssen explored how the museum has been transformed from a site of memory as an “exhibitionary complex” to a mass medium as an “experiential complex.” Alissa Solomon drew attention to the current wave of museum building across the world as one of the emerging global tropes of memorialization. She asked various challenging questions and explored the answers through one type of global trope: the shoe. By looking at piles of shoes, seen in memorials and protests among other places, Solomon asked whether we can represent the scale of mass atrocities without blurring over individual differences. Carol Becker talked about Kara Walker’s new site-specific sculptural installation at the now defunct Domino Sugar Factory. Becker argued that the sculpture echoes the memory of slavery by focusing on how Black women were exploited in the history of the sugar industry that dominated the Caribbean and the American South for a century. Becker explored how reactions to this sculpture are indicative of the growing insensitivity of the United States to the subject of race and racism. Diana Taylor noted Regina Galindo’s piece Earth, which depicts the trial of ex-dictator Rios Montt. Taylor discussed the political efficacy of testimony in Galindo’s performance art on genocide. In her talk, Maria José Contreras focused on forgetfulness and its relation to memory in the performative dimension. Contreras asked whether we can think of forgetfulness for embodied memories. Furthermore, she traced the capacity of prosthesis in performance art to recuperate memories and evade forgetfulness.
The third and the final roundtable, “Gender, Memory, Activism” started with Marita Sturken who explored how architectures of memory, architectures of torture and architectures of conflict are shadowed by a culture of comfort and sentiment. Sturken asked whether we can think of modern architecture as an infrastructure for framing space and memory. In her talk, Marianne Hirsch discussed the works of several artists who activate small, fragmentary archives and allow them to travel and migrate, creating networks of connectivity that challenge the monumentalization of memory and resist national paradigms that erase difference. Nükhet Sirman noted the Women's Initiative for Peace, which is a group of approximately 500 women, all dedicated to forging a peace between the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK) and the Turkish State. Sirman explained how they, as a group, appointed themselves to bear witness to the atrocities that were committed against Kurds in the 1990s, especially the gendered crimes. Meltem Ahıska drew attention to how Saturday Mothers of Turkey made the enforced disappearances visible by a counter-movement. Ahiska argued that this counter-movement has played a significant role not only in creating a new space for politics, but also by enacting political memory. Saturday Mothers has infused spaces with memory since 1995 through their silent sit-ins. Nancy Kricorian concluded the panel by remembering Armenian history on a pilgrimage through her grandfather’s hometown in Turkey.
Day three report contributed by: Pinar Ensari
Pinar Ensari is an alumna of Sabanci University's Department of Cultural Studies.
DAY TWO REPORT: "Women Mobilizing Memory" Workshop in Istanbul, Turkey
Media, Memory, Political Efficacy
On Day Two of theWomen Mobilizing Memory workshop, Jean Howard introduced the following keywords for discussion: gender; embodiment; accompaniment (or “walking with”); politics; repair; mobilizing; hope; optimism; and play, or the recovery of joy. Ayşe Gül Altınay added feminism as a keyword and Milena Grass also expanded on Jean’s notion of accompaniment by stressing the idea of connection rather than comparison. Andrea Crow focused on the concept of connection as an important component of our work, pointing to our collective presence as evidence of the value of direct encounter.
Twin panels were also convened on Media, Memory, and Political Efficacy. The panels explored a variety of themes, including: the personal archive; trauma and scholarship; the performative; and expanding notions of absence and representation. Taking as his point of departure photographs of his family and community, Leo Spitzer raised the possibility of a critical nostalgia among refugees. Milena Grass’ paper on Macarena Aguiló’s documentary work analyzed the legacy of Chilean leftist exiles and their descendants. Sibel Irzık’s paper picked up on the difficulties of sharing in trauma in the Turkish context of post-coup coup d’état novels, and the metafictional strategies that writers use to show language as a site of struggle against authority. In her work on the emergent aesthetics of disappearance, Nicole Gervasio proposed an expanded use of the term “forced disappearance” to include experiences such as political detention.
The second panel’s papers included a wider range of texts and explored a variety of affective possibilities. Embodiment as a critical term ran through the work all three panelists. Jean Howard discussed temporality and "slow violence" in the context of Carol Churchill’s theater, bringing together themes about the personal and the environmental as well as labor and bodily vulnerability. Henry Castillo’s work on the lumbalú, a customary dance of death in Colombia, was also discussed in the context of the gendered performance of lamentation, mourning, and sexuality. Rüstem Ertuğ Altınay added to the discussion by theorizing the intersections of the nationalist/political with the sexual.
Day 2 Report contributed by: Alyssa Greene
Alyssa Greene is a graduate student in the Department of Germanic Languages at Columbia University.
DAY ONE REPORT: "Women Mobilizing Memory" Workshop in Istanbul, Turkey
Jean Howard, Ayşe Gül Altınay, Milena Grass, and Andrea Crow participated in the opening panel of Women Mobilizing Memory, a working group that explores women's acts of witness and the gendered forms and consequences of political repression and persecution.
Women Mobilizing Memory is one of four working groups that, together, make up the "Women Creating Change" initiative of CSSD. The first-day conversation of the working group revolved around a range of themes, including: the academic/practitioner divide; the political efficacy of academic, artistic, and activist productions; the relationship between memory, history, and archives; the ethical repercussions of witnessing; as well as the intricate link between the personal and the political.
The working group visited the Depo Gallery to attend Ayşe Gül Altınay's and Işın Önol's “Mobilizing Memory: Women Witnessing” exhibit. After the curators were introduced, Banu Karaca discussed the politics of memory as reflected in Turkey's contemporary art and Işın Önol related the exhibit to the country's recent history. Artists who took part in the exhibit included: Silvina Der-Meguerditchian, Susan Meiselas, Nar Photos (Serra Akcan, Fatma Çelik, Gülşin Ketenci, Aylin Kızıl, Serpil Polat), Truth Justice Memory Center (represented by Özlem Kaya), Aylin Tekiner, Emine Gözde Sevim, Lorie Novak, and Gülçin Aksoy.
Day 1 Report contributed by: Bürge Abiral and Dilara Çalışkan
Bürge Abiral is a Masters student in Cultural Studies at Sabancı University. Dilara Çalışkan received her M.A. in Cultural Studies at Sabanci University in 2014.
"Mobilizing Memory: Women Witnessing" EXHIBITION CATALOGUE
Opening Reception: September 5, Friday, 18:30
Venue: DEPO Istanbul (Lüleci Hendek Cad. 12, Tophane - Istanbul)
Artists: Gülçin Aksoy, Hera Büyüktaşçıyan, Silvina Der-Meguerditchian, Hakikat Adalet Hafıza Merkezi (Truth Justice Memory Center), Gülsün Karamustafa, Susan Meiselas, Nar Photos (Serra Akcan, Fatma Çelik, Gülşin Ketenci, Aylin Kızıl, Serpil Polat), Lorie Novak, Emine Gözde Sevim, Aylin Tekiner
View exhibit catalog here (PDF)
Curated by: Ayşe Gül Altınay, Işın Önol
What is the role of witnessing in practices of resistance: resistance to enforced silence and forgetting, to state power, and to inaction? What role do the arts play in combatting the erasure of past violence from current memory and in creating new visions and new histories for future generations? In particular, what unique strategies have women devised to reveal and redress the violence directed at woman and at other disempowered social groups?
The feminist art work displayed in this exhibit imagines memory as part of a larger politics of resistance. It mobilizes memories of past and present violence precisely to create the conditions and the motivations for social change. Bringing together women artists many of whom are themselves direct witnesses to oppression and terror, the exhibit also reveals moments of resilience, resistance, and creative survival. The artists gathered here use memory in innovative ways. They foreground unofficial acts of witness and forms of commemoration--embodied practices, performances, photography, testimony, street actions—that provide alternative histories and different political imaginaries than do official archives, memorials, museums, and state commemorations. They make visible not only violent crimes and their gendered dimensions, but also the intimate texture of lives and communities that have survived or are fighting to survive immense destruction. In honoring those lives and bringing them out of oblivion, the artists also reclaim women’s practices—dance, song, embroidery, for example—and show their political resonances. As a group, these artists resist monumentality in favor of intimacy, featuring individual stories of the quotidian. They use official archives to document and contextualize those lives, but they also create new archives and alternative interpretations, reframing how we understand the past and pointing to what has been excluded from authoritative histories. They thus imagine alternative social and political trajectories and more open and progressive futures.
This exhibit occurs in the context of a five-day workshop on “Mobilizing Memory for Action” that brings together an international group of scholars, artists, and activists to analyze the activist work memory practices can enable. The art works comprising this exhibit and the broadly comparative panels and roundtables on September 17 invite us to ask how our acts of witness can motivate social change. What do images and accounts of past and present violence demand of spectators, listeners, and readers? How can we modulate proximity with distance, empathy with solidarity? Indeed feminist practices of witness have fostered solidarity that demands not only collaboration and commitment, but also a respect for what is historically specific to particular acts of violence and oppression. In bringing diverse events of state violence—the Holocaust, the dictatorships in Latin American, American slavery—to the Armenian genocide, the persecution of Kurdish and Palestinian communities, and the oppressive acts of authoritarian power featured in this exhibit, the “Women Mobilizing Memory” workshop invites participants both to see where connections lie and also to recognize what cannot be generalized or translated across linguistic, national, or religious borders. In resisting silence, forgetting and erasure, progressive acts of memory also resist easy understanding, appropriation and straightforward comparison.
The collaborations among the participants in the working group, and between the artists and their subjects, aim to create a space of solidarity and connection. We invite you to enter into this larger collaborative project of responding to the memories recorded here, and to join us in the work of shaping memories for more hopeful futures.
Co-hosted by Columbia Global Centers | Turkey, DEPO Istanbul and Sabancı University Gender and Women's Studies Forum, the exhibition and parallel activities have been supported by the the Center for the Study of Social Difference, Blinken European Institute, Sabancı University, Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, the Truth Justice Memory Center and Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Turkey Office.
For more information about the project please visit: http://socialdifference.columbia.edu/projects/women-mobilizing-memory
PUBLIC ROUNDTABLES: “Coming to Terms” with Gendered Memories of Genocide, War, and Political Repression," Istanbul, Turkey
Public Roundtables with Turkish simultaneous translations
September 17, 2014, 1:00-7:00pm
DEPO Gallery, ISTANBUL, TURKEY
Roundtable topics and speakers:
Creating Alternative Archives, with Leyla Neyzi, Özlem Kaya, Susan Meiselas, Silvina der Meguerditchian, and Şemsa Özar
Art, Performance and Memory, with Andreas Huyssen, Alisa Solomon, Carol Becker, Diana Taylor, Maria José Contreras, and Ayşe Öncü
Gender, Memory, Activism, with Marita Sturken, Marianne Hirsch, Nükhet Sirman, Meltem Ahıska, Nancy Kricorian, and Yeşim Arat
Schedule
1:00pm-2:30pm - Creating Alternative Archives
Moderator: Şemsa Özar (Boğaziçi University and Diyarbakır Institute for Social and Political Research)
Leyla Neyzi (Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Sabancı University) - “Young people Speak Out: The Contribution of Oral History to Facing the Past, Reconciliation and Democratization in Turkey” Project www.gencleranlatiyor.org
Özlem Kaya (Truth Justice Memory Center, Turkey) Creating an Alternative Archive through Video Testimonies
Susan Meiselas (Photographer, Magnum Photos, USA ) – Kurdistan
Silvina Der Meguerditchian (Artist, Argentina/Germany) – Nereye? / Where to?
3:00pm-4:30pm - Art, Performance and Memory
Moderator: Ayşe Öncü (Sociology, Sabancı University, Turkey)
Andreas Huyssen (German and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, USA) - The Metamorphosis of the Museum: From Exhibitionary to Experiential Complex
Alisa Solomon (School of Journalism, Columbia University, USA) - Shoe Fetish
Carol Becker (School of the Arts, Columbia University, USA) - The Memory of Sugar
Diana Taylor (Performance Studies, Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, NYU, USA) - Is Performing Testimony, Testimony?
Maria José Contreras (School of Theatre, Catholic University, Chile) – The (Im)possible Performance of Forgetfulness
5:00pm-6:30pm - Gender, Memory, Activism
Moderator: Yeşim Arat (Political Science and International Relations, Boğaziçi University, Turkey)
Marita Sturken (Media, Culture, and Communication, NYU, USA) - Architectures of Memory, Architectures of Torture, Architectures of Conflict
Marianne Hirsch (Gender Studies and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, USA) – Mobile Memories
Nükhet Sirman (Sociology, Boğaziçi University, Turkey) – How to Gender Memories of Violence?
Meltem Ahıska (Sociology, Boğaziçi University, Turkey) - Counter-movement, space, and politics: How the Saturday Mothers of Turkey make the enforced disappearances visible
Nancy Kricorian (Author and Activist USA) - Place Names and Objects: Pilgrimage as/or Resistance
About
This series of roundtables occurs in the context of a five-day workshop on “Mobilizing Memory for Action” that brings together an international group of scholars, artists, and activists to analyze the activist work memory practices can enable. The workshop is part of Columbia University’s “Women Creating Change” initiative led by the Center for the Study of Social Difference and organized in collaboration with the Columbia Global Centers. “Mobilizing Memory for Action” began in December 2013 with a workshop at the Columbia Global Centers in Chile and continues in September 2014 with activities in Istanbul hosted by Columbia Global Centers | Turkey, Sabancı University Gender and Women’s Studies Forum and DEPO Istanbul. Support has also been provided by the Blinken European Institute, Sabancı University, Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, the Truth Justice Memory Center and Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Turkey Office. The Istanbul program consists of a workshop with 35 leading scholars, artists and activists from Turkey, the United States, Chile and other contexts; an art exhibition and catalogue; documentary screenings; theater performances and post-performance discussions; and a series of public roundtables.
For more information about the exhibit, please click here.
Women Mobilizing Memory Workshop II
Working group:
Women Mobilizing Memory
Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics Encuentro
Montreal, June 2014
Conveners: Marianne Hirsch, Jean Howard, Diana Taylor
Description:
Bringing together artists, writers, theater practitioners, museologists, social activists, and scholars of memory and memorialization, “Women Mobilizing Memory” focuses on the political stakes and consequences of witnessing and testimony as responses to socially imposed vulnerabilities and historical trauma. The working group will probe how individual and collective testimony and performance can establish new forms of cultural memory and facilitate social repair. Using gender as an analytic lens, this project explicitly explores women's acts of witness and the gendered forms and consequences of political repression and persecution. It asks what strategies of memorialization and re-imagining are most effective in calling attention to past and present wrongs and in creating possibilities of redress through protest and other forms of action and resistance.
Participants:
Pilar Riano, ‘Afro-Colombian Singing as Testimonial Practice.’
Giselle Ruiz, ‘A Poetic Corporeality’
Victoria Fortuna, ‘Dance Based Memory Practice’
Ausonia Bernardes, Memory in Contemporary Dance Practice.
Monika Gagnon, "What is Posthumous Cinema?"
Barbara Sutton, "Women Mobilizing Body Narratives of State Terrorism in Argentina (1976-1983)"
Julie Okotbitek
Milena Grass, “Women who collaborated with the dictatorship”
Raúl Diego Rivera Hernandez, “Performative strategies of Central American Caravan of women searching their missing relatives in Mexico”
Nuria Carton de Grammont —narco trafico
Leticia Robles, “Antigonas”
Carolyn Vera, Guatemalan performance artists
Leyneuf Tines Villarraga, TBA
activistas / desafíos políticos.
Shahrzad Arshadi
Lorie Novak, “Photographic Interference”
Jenny James, "Bricolage Memories: Gender, Refugee Life and Narrative Repair in the fiction of Dionne Brand and Kim Thuy"
Magdalena Olszanowski, ‘Between Mother and Daughter: The belly button as scar of separation’
María José Contreras, ‘Teatro testimonial de mujeres ancianas mapuches’
Methodology:
We spent each of the sessions on a particular topic arising from the participants’ interests. Beforehand we circulated by internet brief background readings for each session and for the group. Each session we had a warm up exercise in order to create a collectivity that could think and be in presence together Then, each participant presented a 6 minute presentation that ended with questions for a 3 minute discussion. Each session concluded with an extended 45 minute discussion.
Some notes about our discussions:
As said in the call, the group discussed about the role women in the circulation, recovery, reshaping and mobilization of memory.
Some of the most important issues that emerged during our work was COLLABORATION. Collaboration was seen in different levels: between women that had suffered violence, but also between women artists and/or activists and/or researchers with women that had survived to violent pasts. Women’s memory practices may enable transnational memory networks, both at a local and global dimension.
We also considered posthumous collaboration, as a way to connect the living and the death. Some of the case studies discussed evidenced how the dead spoke to us through their traces. In a sense, when studying memory of violent pasts, all collaborations are somehow posthumous, they are about what remains and what may survive.
MEMORY was defined as a practice that sometimes allowed the cultural renewal of traditions and sometimes functioned as resistance to narratives of disposability or vulnerability. Memory practices appeared as crucial strategy of resistance for women who have endured continued forms of physical erasure (from genocides to current femicides),
Art and cultural performances recuperate and reshape memories. Memory is not just about bringing stories, is about creating a collective history. In that sense, memory is always intervening in the present creating new forms of identity and collaboration. The mobilization of memory allow different possibilities for an engagement that triggers multiple plural ways of seeing the past, challenging dominant or status quo versions of the past. The artistic work with memory activate and animate archives and by allowing them to travel and migrate, they create networks of connectivity that challenge the monumentalization of memory.
One of the crucial concepts raised was that of POSITIONALITY: were are we respect to past violence or slow ongoing violence of neoliberalism? What kind of memory work advances political engagement and responsibility?
When coping with trauma and horror embedded pasts, memory practices become critical to render visible the violence. Memory practices as studied by the group articulate different forms of visibility and invisibility. Art and cultural memory practices enable/encourage/make possible different forms of efficacy, mobilizing action for the future in different levels.
Efficacy may be considered from different perspectives, as a political efficacy that mobilizes social change, but also as a communicative efficacy that by contagion, empathetic connection and affect circulation create collective identities and networks and may subtly transform materials and perceptions. The group discussed to what extent the circulation of affect alone may cause social change.
Another issue discussed in the group was the distinction between empathy, identification and solidarity (between people and networks). We could realize how in acts of scholarship and artistic creation there are various uses of empathy, distance, identification, alienation, solidarity and witnessing. Each of them portrait different sorts of efficacy
When discussing about efficacy we questioned ethical issues regarding for instance the risk of appropriation of artists of painful memories and again the question of positionality: were are we, what is our political and ethical engagement regarding past or present violence?
The different case studies displayed a range of memory practices in different SCALES. From micropractices and intimate memory actions to larger actions, sometimes even monumental actions. All of these cases advanced different sorts of efficacy.
The type of efficacy of these practices relate to the media considered as different ways to address memory: the human body, images, sounds, voices, writing. Analyzing these various media we could better understand how memory is transmitted across bodies and generations.
The body appeared in several presentations as a living dynamic archive, both in the generation that suffered violence and in the later generations. Bodies serve to mobilize the horror that cannot be said and also allows us to learn about other’s experiences when we were not there. The body always transmit, so the relation between memory and body is complex and dynamic: memory of the body / memory in the body / the body as memory. One of the critical aspects specially when working with testimonies was the continuity of presence that prefigured the importance of being there, present and presenciando collaboratively.
We also discussed the potentiality of images as mobilizing devices. Images are powerful transmitters/creators of memory and this is something that mass media seem to understand well since they banalize images as a political strategies. Other than the images the sound and voice are also power media to mobilize memories. The voice for instance immediately mark the presence of who’s speaking. Literature, theatre, photography, internet all portray different ways to approach to memories.
By the end of the work group we highlighted the importance of hope. The mobilization of memory always seem to have a hope component, the desire to share, to render visible and to share experiences to enable us to respond to past and present slow violence.
Photos from the Women Mobilizing Memory Workshop II at the 2014 Hemispheric Institute Encuentro held in Montreal, June 21–28.
Memory for the Future: Collaborative Witnessing in Post- Dictatorship Chile
In December 2013, a transnational group of scholars, artists, and activists came together at Columbia’s Global Center in Santiago de Chile to reflect on the manifold ways in which cultural memory of the Pinochet dictatorship has been and can be mobilized in the service of different visions for Chile’s social and political future.
This “workshop,” sponsored by Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Social Difference’s “Women Creating Change: Mobilizing Memory” project, incited all members of the group to think not only about the politics and performances of memory in Chile and beyond, but also about their own scholarly practices and methods for engaging with sites of memory and the complex connective histories of which such spaces are a part.
This roundtable discussion brought together five graduate student members of the Women Creating Change group to discuss the impact of site-based, collaborative, feminist, and transnational engagements with the past on their own critical and personal understanding of the social and political work memory enables, as well as their own role as producers of “memory work” within the field of memory studies.
Graduate student roundtable discussion with:
Henry Castillo (NYU)
Andrea Crow (Columbia)
Nicole Gervasio (Columbia)
Leticia Robles-Moreno (NYU)
and moderated by Kate Trebuss (Columbia)