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On the Branches of Memory By C. Nadia Seremetakis We live in the era of earthquakes... I am proposing that memory is not merely a resource pool of ideas; it has material and sensory coordinates that are part of the living membrane of a city. Memory can be found in the emotional connection to particular spaces that have their own biographies and carry biographies within them; memory can be found embedded and miniaturized in objects that trigger deep emotions and narratives; memory is linked to sounds, aroma, sights. I have explored the issue of the "deep memory" that is embedded in sensory artifacts, particularly in reference to olive cultivation in the Southern Peloponnese, in my ethnography The Last Word since 19911. Olive tree cultivation is much more than an instrumental, economic activity. The olive tree through its cultivation is invested with feeling and history, and is expressive of the men and women whose hands care for it: "...The presence and absence of ornaments on the body is a public statement concerning self and collectivities... Ornaments are the inscriptions of collectivity upon the self, the marks of the many on the one..." The care and tending of olive trees is their adornment, what connects them to a household and to collectivity. The care and tending of olive trees endows them with affective value in relation to other subsistence crops. For instance, there is a discourse on the olive tree but no discourse on the prickly pear (fragosiko), a common everyday food that requires no care. The prickly pear cactus, unlike the olive tree, does not differentiate between the self and other. Each grove of olive trees carries the signature of a person. It is the mark of the one on the many... 'Dressing' with the eyes involves close observation of the other to see 'from whom he/she took after.' This is a search for genealogy of shared substance, a genealogy of detached parts. For shared substance leaves marks on the body, marks transferred from body to body in time. Other instances of the genealogical ordering of shared substance involve olive trees and towers. When women examine abandoned olive trees, or once familiar olive groves now cultivated by a stranger, they remark in reference to the original cultivators: 'where are you—, that you had them with your hands like dolls!' or 'like children!' The mark of the hands, of labor, is imprinted and witnessed on the trees. Olive trees, like people, are invested and divested... Examining their surroundings, women constantly search for 'tracks' of the past and the future in the present. It is a constant search for signs of the self in otherness. This is an archaeology of feeling. Genealogical inscription on olive trees, people, gravestones and towers connects shared substance to the ethics of ordering and storage. One orders households and fields as places of storage in order to leave in the present artifacts and signs of shared substance for others in the future. The concept of the future is always linked to that of storage as an economy of concern and care. Olive tree cultivation is a projection into the future. Olive trees, houses, land and gravestones are tended for those 'who will find it after', 'for those who follow'. The ethic of storage extends reciprocity in time and is thus linked to memory... (The Last Word, pp. 214-17). A well-tended piece of land has the look of the household: it is clean, ordered, and enclosed. Land cultivation is informed by aesthetic, visual values as much as it is informed by instrumental, economic values. The well-tended parcel of land attests to the status and standards of the household to which it belongs. In contrast, abandoned pieces of once-cultivated land are equated with death, emigration, and the destruction of the household. [Fields and houses overgrown with weeds or roofs decaying] signify the destructive passage of the household to the outside. Houses and land have their own form of death, internal exile and emigration..." (The Last Word, pp. 206-207). We take this enmeshed memory for granted until the material supports that stitch memory to person and place are torn out from under us, when these spaces suddenly vanish under debris, when interiors of buildings and persons suddenly become devastated exteriors, and when the past itself is buried under the weight of destruction occurring in the present. Then we are not only given events we prefer not to recall, but we are separated from the material of memory that enables an entire city or region to remember what it was before the disaster2. In 1986, a devastating earthquake left the city of Kalamata in ruins. In 1996, ten years after -and in the context of a two-year cultural and educational program that I was commissioned by the authorities of the region to design and realize- I began searching for the other city, the silent earthquake city that still coexisted with the city rebuilt and restored since the 1986 catastrophe. I began to stumble upon fossils of the disaster, a hidden memory layer of the city itself frozen in limbo. I "listened to" abandoned buildings, closed down olive presses and olive-based-soap producing factories, cemeteries, schools and other sites of urban amnesia. At the same time, citizens responding to my call brought me objects full of memory, fragments from domestic interiors, such as ancestral photographs and curios and brie a brae from shelves and cabinets; objects, of no economic value, that they had saved all these years, objects of the heart, that in themselves represented small triumphs over the attack on memory and identity afflicted by the disaster. These objects, hidden in private space and private memory, collected and curated by the citizens themselves, when brought out from their isolation in their respective homes and linked and presented together in the Cultural Center of the city (next to the official record of the earthquake), created public history. The excavators in this process were the citizens themselves. Thus memory was defined as a site of excavation and as embedded in sensory experience, in matter; which made this exhibit an archaeology of memory. And since memory is sensory and embedded in matter, it comes in pieces, not as a totality. Their assemblage is not their aestheticization. In this case, it re-enacted the process by which the people of Kalamata reassembled their lives and their city from the fragments made by the earthquake. It was a process that focused on how people restored meaning, order, pattern, and aesthetics to their lives in the aftermath of disaster. The excavation and assemblage of these fragments is an archaeological process; it does not show all at once, it is a peeling away of layers, the identification and exploration of a multiple stratigraphy. The research of the earthquake touched one layer, the research of the olive tree and olive grinds touched another layer4. Perhaps some readers may still wonder why the earthquake seems to be the point of reference in this cultural-historical excavation. When I designed this research-based cultural program in 1996,1 believed that the earthquake was one of the central events of the region's contemporary history. It could not be separated from what was there before or what was restored after. Thus this program was designed to make a space and opening for the memory of the city before the disaster, after the disaster, and of that moment when all that housed the city's memories was put into crisis. In this sense, the research on the olive tree, and on olive presses in particular5, was inseparable from that of the earthquake in the region of Messinia, not to mention other areas. For soon we all realized that we live in the era of
earthquakes. The earthquake of '86, originally perceived and classified
as an isolated event, soon became a national and international
experience. Perhaps now we need different methods for capturing
historical experience and for transforming it to public knowledge, to
paedeia. Perhaps the built environment and architectural space has
to abandon much of its monumental aspirations and tendency for
petrification and permanence. Perhaps the built environment has to
become more of a living membrane and empathic skin upon which citizens
can write and capture the flux, immediacy and indeterminacy of everyday
life. We must learn to cultivate and to live in unfinished cities and
cities of polyphonic history. And that is perhaps what the current state
of our entire eco-system can teach us. Here geography and history
reflect each other: the shifting tectonic plates are geological
correlates of the ever shifting foundations of historical consciousness. ----- NOTES
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