Between Documentality and Imagination: Five Theses on Curating the Violent Past

This article considers the notion that to document or inscribe our lives not only leaves a trace of our creaturely presence, but may also become a form of juris-writing, a writing that concerns and aims at Justice. Employing an expanded notion of Justice that takes it beyond the institutions of law, therefore, it asks about forms of documentality (Ferraris) that put us ‘before memory’ in Derrida’s sense. How is it possible to think curation in relation to a violent past in such a way that neither attempts to deny the lacunae nor surrenders in the face of the difficulties of such attempts? How should we consider the relation between the delimited encounter with an ‘invitation to imagine’ (Didi-Huberman) and processes of institutionalisation that build a society? What about those things that it is not possible to show, including relations of power, that arise analytically? Reflecting on current memory spaces, especially within ex-clandestine centres for detention, torture and extermination (ex-ccdtyes) in Argentina, the article offers five theses in order to consider what is at stake in the encounters staged at these sites

Light Art, Perception, and Sensation

In this article, I focus on how four artists working with light can reveal the different capacities of illumination and darkness in shaping human apprehension of the world. These artists, I contend, foreground the very particular human ways in which the visual system operates in making sense of the world, for their work explores the different ways in which we sense space at various scales, from the body to the landscape. In Kielder Forest, Northumberland, a Skyspace, created by James Turrell isolates the qualities of daylight and focuses attention on the impact of the sky’s light on the landscape. Carlos Cruz-Diez’sChromosaturation highlights the ocular perception and emotional experience of colour, while Olafur Eliasson’s Model for a Timeless Garden highlights the temporality of visual perception as well as the persistence of notions about the sublime to appreciation of landscape. Both works underscore the partialities of specifically human ways of perception. Finally, Tino Seghal’s This Variation investigates the impact of darkness on the perception of space and its potential for fostering conviviality and sociality

Awards, Archives, and Affects: Tropes in the World Press Photo Contest 2009 - 2011

__Abstract__ Photography contests have assumed an increasingly significant public role in the context of the global surge of mass-mediated war reporting. This study focuses on the recurrence of visual tropes in press photographs awarded in the annual contest World Press Photo (WPP) in the years 2009–11. By tropes, we mean conventions (e.g. a mourning woman, a civilian facing soldiers, a distressed witness to an atrocity) that remain unchanged despite their travels across the visual sphere, gaining professional and public recognition and having a strong affective impact. We contend that photography contests such as the WPP influence and organize a process of generic understanding of war, disaster and atrocity that is based on a number of persistent tropes, such as the mourner, the protester or the survivor amidst chaos and ruins. We further show that these tropes are gendered along traditional conceptions of femininity and masculinity, appealing strongly to both judges and wider audiences. The evidence for our claim comes from an analysis of the photographs that won awards, observation of the judging sessions, semi-structured interviews with three jury chairmen, and public commentary on the juries’ choices (blogs, newspapers and websites)

Theatre and time ecology: deceleration in Stifters Dinge

This article explores the production of ‘time ecology’ in two works of postdramatic theatre: Heiner Goebbels’ Stifters Dinge (2007) and Philippe Quesne’s L’Effet de Serge (2007). By focusing on the practice of deceleration, it argues that theatre’s ecological potential resides not so much in its ability to represent the world, but rather in its capacity for producing new types of temporal experience that purposefully seek to break with modernity’s regime of historicity and the accelerated rhythms that it has given rise to. Importantly, my concern with deceleration is not an argument for slowness per se; on the contrary, I am interested in highlighting the presence of multiple and interpenetrating timescales and rhythms. As well as exposing the full extent of theatre’s temporal potential, such a concern with postdramatic ‘chronographies’ offers an implicit critique of dramatic theatre’s extant practices of eco-dramaturgy that, all too often, attempt to construct a linear narrative which is invested in conventional sequential models of temporality (beginning, middle, end)