Dwelling in and Imagining Violent Spaces
Organizer: Pamela Colombo (CCHS-CSIC / University of País Vasco)
Invited Speaker:
Yael Navaro-Yashin (Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge)
Panelist:
Irit Katz Feigis (PhD Candidate at Department of Architecture, University of Cambridge)
Charlotte Heath-Kelly (Postdoctoral Fellow at Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick)
Pamela Colombo (PhD Candidate at Institute of Philosophy, Spanish National Research Council / University of País Vasco)
Panel description:
As researchers, we only have access to the ways in which violent spaces were experienced from the present. It is, therefore, important to rethink critically the work of memory, since remembrance makes some things from the past visible meanwhile hides or transform others. Taking this perspective into account, our general aim is to analyse violent spaces –such as concentration camps, clandestine detention centers, or sites of terrorist attack–in order to address the following dimensions: How do people perceive and locate themselves in these violent spaces? What kinds of references do people use to speak about spaces where violent acts have occurred and been experienced? What happens when the material references of these spaces are intentionally distorted, denied, or erased? In to what extent do the material, representational, and experiential dimensions of space cohere together?
Abstracts:
Prologomena for a Methodology for the Study of the Aftermath of Violence
Yael Navaro-Yashin, yn213@cam.ac.uk
Prologomena for a Methodology for the Study of the Aftermath of Violence
Yael Navaro-Yashin, yn213@cam.ac.uk
Suspended Present, Erased Past: the Distorted Space and Time of the Common Camp
Irit Katz Feigis, ik300@cam.ac.uk
Camps were and still are being used in Israel/Palestine as an instrument of the sovereign power to suspend, control and administer land and population in order to pursue territorial and demographic interests. Some camps were created ‘top-down’ by the government to deal with the waves of Jewish immigrants on the basis of strategic distribution. Another type of camps, constructed by displaced local Palestinian and Bedouin populations, were based on ‘bottom-up’ tactics as an accumulation of makeshift structures formed by agreements and needs. As the geo-political map changed, additional camp types appeared as the Jewish outposts in the occupied territories or the transit camp for African refugees adjacent to the Israeli-Egyptian border. These varied manifestations of the camp are bound with diverse acts of state violence in the form of confinement, forced re-location, house demolition as well as social and physical abandonment. These are only some of the actions related to camps which are included within the state’s territory yet placed outside its normal juridical order. Temporary spaces by definition, the camps comprises two additional forms of violence - the lost control over time of the populations suspended in them, and the almost certain destruction of these spaces which were a crucial part in the lives of their inhabitants. This paper focus on two settlements in the southern Negev desert; Yeruham - created in the early 1950s as a Jewish immigrant absorption camp and eventually turned into a minor development town, and the neighbouring Rachame, an ‘unrecognised village’ which was created in the 1960s as an informal camp by the indigenous Bedouin population following an evacuation by the IDF from their original geographic area. Through the examination of the materiality of these camps, their spatial arrangement and the personal perspectives of their former and current dwellers, the paper examines the affect of spaces of state violence on their inhabitants – those who are still suspended in temporary conditions, and those now settled and whose former camp is already erased and gone.
Thinking Space through Memory: Imagining and Ignoring Violent Places in Bali
Thinking Space through Memory: Imagining and Ignoring Violent Places in Bali
Charlotte Heath-Kelly, c.heath-kelly@warwick.ac.uk
In October 2012, the world’s media descended upon Bali for the tenth anniversary of the Kuta bombing. They came to record the memorial service led by Australia’s political elite (including Prime Minister Gillard) and the pilgrimages made by families to the site of the Sari Club, which was destroyed by a truck bomb with 202 people inside. This paper explores the imaginations of violent space which took place during that period, and the dynamics of violence and memory which were simultaneously ignored by participants, politicians and media.
When commemorating the ‘Bali bombings’, politicians and journalists frequently imagined the site of the ex-Sari Club as a violent space in two distinct, but linked, ways. While it was remembered as a place where tremendous violence had occurred ten years previously, the site was also simultaneously imagined as a place which still experiences contemporary violence through its current use as a car-park (and as a night-time urinal). These discussions of the site were deployed within admonishments of such disrespectful conduct, which sometimes adopted a quasi-colonial tone from the Australians whose relative economic and political standing has enabled the development of Kuta as a tourist Riviera for surfing and nightclubbing. Further political dimensions of memory also included the patronising celebration of Indonesia’s recent progress as a democracy by Australian politicians – backhanded compliments which silenced Australia’s role in supporting, and arming, the repressive thirty year Suharto regime which terrorised the Balinese with the memory of purges carried out in 1965/66. Indeed some of the hotels which hosted journalists and political figures during the tenth anniversary of the Kuta bombing are linked to the forgetting of other violent spaces – their construction directly followed the massacres of communist-affiliated Balinese upon Suharto’s rise to power, and it is claimed that some stand upon mass graves from that era.
But these memories were not spoken during the anniversary period – and have rarely been spoken on an island which was forced to endure silence for so long. This paper explores the juxtaposition of memory and violence on Bali and the political conditions which allow some violence to be spoken of, but which condemn other events to a silence which remains violent. Finally, the paper explores the relationship of exploitative tourism between Australia and Bali as a violent imagination of contemporary space.
Performing the Space of Disappearance: Elliptic, Synesthetic and Elastic Concentrationary Spaces
In October 2012, the world’s media descended upon Bali for the tenth anniversary of the Kuta bombing. They came to record the memorial service led by Australia’s political elite (including Prime Minister Gillard) and the pilgrimages made by families to the site of the Sari Club, which was destroyed by a truck bomb with 202 people inside. This paper explores the imaginations of violent space which took place during that period, and the dynamics of violence and memory which were simultaneously ignored by participants, politicians and media.
When commemorating the ‘Bali bombings’, politicians and journalists frequently imagined the site of the ex-Sari Club as a violent space in two distinct, but linked, ways. While it was remembered as a place where tremendous violence had occurred ten years previously, the site was also simultaneously imagined as a place which still experiences contemporary violence through its current use as a car-park (and as a night-time urinal). These discussions of the site were deployed within admonishments of such disrespectful conduct, which sometimes adopted a quasi-colonial tone from the Australians whose relative economic and political standing has enabled the development of Kuta as a tourist Riviera for surfing and nightclubbing. Further political dimensions of memory also included the patronising celebration of Indonesia’s recent progress as a democracy by Australian politicians – backhanded compliments which silenced Australia’s role in supporting, and arming, the repressive thirty year Suharto regime which terrorised the Balinese with the memory of purges carried out in 1965/66. Indeed some of the hotels which hosted journalists and political figures during the tenth anniversary of the Kuta bombing are linked to the forgetting of other violent spaces – their construction directly followed the massacres of communist-affiliated Balinese upon Suharto’s rise to power, and it is claimed that some stand upon mass graves from that era.
But these memories were not spoken during the anniversary period – and have rarely been spoken on an island which was forced to endure silence for so long. This paper explores the juxtaposition of memory and violence on Bali and the political conditions which allow some violence to be spoken of, but which condemn other events to a silence which remains violent. Finally, the paper explores the relationship of exploitative tourism between Australia and Bali as a violent imagination of contemporary space.
Performing the Space of Disappearance: Elliptic, Synesthetic and Elastic Concentrationary Spaces
Most scholarly research has focussed on the spatial dimension of concentration camps in order to address how space was used to intensify the dehumanization process or to make the annihilation more “effective” (Sofsky, 1997; Agamben, 2000). In these works victims are addressed as subjects that can only suffer the space as a pre-existing reality that precedes subjects perception. Focusing my attention into the lived and imagined dimension of space, the aim of this paper is to explore the way in which concentrationary spaces exist not only as part of a State policy but also as the result of how the victims who are confined there, experience and imagine these spaces. In other words, subjects do not only suffer or resist camp spaces but also produce them. In this sense, concentrationary spaces exist as the result of a “deployed” violence and a “lived” violence.
To examine how subjects perform the space of their confinement, I base my analysis on in-depth interviews done with survivors of concentration camps from the last military dictatorship (1976-1983) in Argentina. These ethnographic data allow me to explore how these memory accounts based on camp experiences uncover new spatial features of the concentrationary space. For example, oral accounts remember the space as elliptic, synaesthetic or even elastic.