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"The Other City of Silence: Disaster and the Petrified Bodies of History" In German and English. Re-Membering the Body. G. Brandstetter & H. Volckers, eds. Wiener Festwochen (Vienna Festival 2000). Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2000. Invited guest- observer of the International Vienna Festival 2000. |
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The Other City of
Silence: by C. Nadia Seremetakis
The City of Statues Walking through this open air museum, the scopic power I of the historical monument struck me. Examples came to mind of historical statues as hieratic figures and models of culture and history that can be linked to the practices of a scopic regime, to the ordering and control of public space. Those figures seemed to survey the city with a blind gaze as if enforcing the cultural attention that must be paid to them. I pondered on whether the scopic power of the historical monument necessarily implies passive memory. Rather, it extracts the daily tribute of active recollection from the people who move under the shadows of the statues. Or could we say that all statuary and buildings constitute a vast laboratory of public memory as legacy and inheritance, and thus are meant to persist and persevere as an active force in the present? In Wim Wender's film Wings of Desire, the angels who monitor the events, lives, and thoughts of Berliners tend to roost and congregate on the heights of monuments that overlook Berlin; they survey the city space as they recite to themselves the entire history of the city from Neolithic times to modernity. We could say that in Vienna too, as in many other European cities, statues mark out the topography of the corporate body of the city, identifying its crucial intersections and centres. By their positioning in the city, they demarcate where and when public remembering should occur, they index what is culturally central and what is not. Was not the destruction of the statues of Lenin and Stalin in Central and Eastern Europe with the fall of communist regimes, or the gathering and storing of public statues in an obscure park on the outskirts of the city in Budapest, an example of this? By their topographic exile, their lack of any claims on the truth of history was sealed.
Intellectual history in Vienna seemed to be embodied as much in the modern primi-tivism of the cult of the professorial head as in books and lectures. The decapitated bronze or stone heads of centuries of professors in the old university were mounted on the walls of a "sacred" place, set aside for their observation and appreciation. Apparently, in the 18th, 19th, and a good part of this century, no other part of these thinkers' and writers' bodies required recognition or visibility. Grafted on to the his-toricising corporate body of the city, the bodies of these intellectuals were historically invisible below the head. Their cultural memorialisation was identical to that part of the body where all their thought was assumed to take place. The normativity of such statuary, thus, does not seem to be limited to the marking of public spaces or the recall of historical events, but it encompasses entire anthropologies - that is, notions of what it means to be human. Walking through the clean, orderly public squares, I enjoyed numerous spontaneous cultural happenings. In the middle of crowds, visitors and passers-by, political demonstrations and campaigns, the "personification of the statue" caught my eye (fig. 1). Young people played at and emulated the isolated statue - a tall, immobile body frozen in mid-air and mid-gesture. Was this an attempt of the living to elevate themselves from the flux of everyday life to the realm of statuary, the realm of public history? Or perhaps these poses humanised the entity of the statue by integrating the latter into everyday life? Was this mimesis meant to enable one to remember the lonely statue that could no longer incite in the crowd the historical memory it was intended to perpetuate? Or was petrifaction the primary cultural and environmental mode of the city to the extent that even the living needed to emulate and simulate the dead and the immobile? Was this tendency towards the monumental pose nothing more than performance art? Perhaps, rethinking Adorno2, it could also be seen as a tactile imitation of an intimidating and possibly aggressive historical other, the monument, which threatens the potential victim with historical petrifaction. Thus the potential victim imitates, like a chameleon, the very historical negation by which he is threatened. Adorno posited the imitation of inanimate objects (such as stones or leaves) by animals under inferred physical threat as a model and anticipation of the phenomena of reification by which humans transformed themselves into things and objects in a world that identified reason with the aggressive control, usage, and administration of things.3 Perhaps the performance artists in Vienna imitate the statues, not in order to come under the power of the monument but to appropriate the cultural authority of the ritualised and petrified pose for themselves - a subversive mimesis which is polysemic, implying homage to the statues while undermining their authority through parody. Perhaps the poseurs in Vienna were also making statements about the public history that was inscribed into the very body of the city, in its buildings as inhabited monuments, and in the anthropomorphic monumental statuary that marked crucial sites. By establishing a mimetic relation to the statue and the monumental, then, performance artists were elevating themselves to the enforced memory that the collation of statues represented, and at the same time, by being historical non-entities themselves, they indicated the actual anonymous, generic quality of many of these ornaments in urban space. They either emptied the statues of the rhetoric of their historical content or confirmed the current lack of historical specificity in the statues. In either case, they pointed not to what each statue recalled, but to the fact that, irrespective of historical content, and even in the absence of any historical information whatsoever, public memory is intended as enforceable memory. And it was the statue's function to do just that, despite the defacement of its historical actuality. Statues, in this case, were icons of mnemonic enforcement even though the details of what they enforced were lost, or were never really necessary. In Lost Words and Lost Worlds, Allan Pred addressed this dimension of statuary as public memory.4 He documented how the 19th-century Swedish working class receded all of the royal squares and much of the aristocratic statuary of Stockholm with scatological terms, that, like modern-day grafitti, linguistically defaced the historical and usually royal personages and battles these edifices and topographies were meant to commemorate. Perhaps Vienna's contemporary pose artists, as much as Pred's Swedish workers and their scatological topography, indicate that beneath and beyond the supposed solidity and permanence of public memory run other cross-currents and counter-memories that relativise and place in cultural parenthesis the event histories and aristocratic biographies that people are told to remember. Among the popular postcards sold in the local stores of Vienna, my eye stopped at those featuring a statue, such as a young woman in a cafe drinking her coffee in the company of a male statue sitting at her table (fig. 2), or heads of two statues in a frozen, tender posture in a window display, their lips almost touching in a smile of contentment (fig. 3). Was this perhaps another attempt to humanise the statue, to integrate it into everyday life? And, in turn, to socialise humans to these effigies through the sharing of intimate social space? The benign facial expressions of these statues brought to mind Bahktinian notions of the hegemonic, statuesque, Classical body as a smooth, contoured surface without orifices and the Classical body's other, the carnivalesque body, the scatological, orificial body in its full senses, the body that leaks and ruptures and cannot be posed.5 The 19th-century Swedish workers, mentioned earlier, transformed the Classical corpus of Stockholm's monuments into a subverting carnivalesque body that refracted their real urban experience to a much greater extent than famous and distant battles and monarchs. Imagine if an earthquake were to set all these frozen bodies in motion, I thought. Those who have experienced earthquakes can sense motion in every stillness and see impermanence in every human achievement. A flashback brought me back to Kalamata, the lovely coastal city of the southern Peloponnese in Greece, which was completely destroyed by a devastating earthquake in 1986. I re-experienced that earthquake ten years later, when the city, having long since been rebuilt, decided to commemorate the past and celebrate the future.
Excavating Private Memory In thinking about the ways in which such official representations affect individual or group conceptions of the past, we might speak of "dominant memory". The term refers to the power and pervasion of certain historical representations, their connection with dominant institutions, and the part they play in winning consent. But the dominant memory of public institutions can also generate forgetfulness and inattention, for these public sites of memory select what is to be remembered and how it is to be remembered. But are there alternative memories of collective experience other than that archived by public institutions6 and the public media?
Another
way of looking at the production of the past is through private memory
(which also may be collective and shared), and it draws attention to
quite different processes. A knowledge of the past and the present is
also produced in the course of everyday life. It is embedded in
place and artefacts that are stratigraphies of personal and social
experience. 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
miniaturised in objects that trigger deep emotions and narratives; If memory is sensory and embedded in matter, it comes in pieces, not as a totality. 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. Public and personal memory invest various locales of a city with sensory capacities and powers to revoke, recall, animate, mobilise, calm, impress, order, and rationalise. A city-destroying disaster, like an earthquake, results in the loss of such sensory organs. The urban space dismembered by disaster becomes a body without organs.
Bodies in Ruins In the course of visiting cemeteries, abandoned schools, and closed-down, ruined factories - sites of urban amnesia - I began to stumble upon fossils of the disaster, a hidden memory layer of the city itself frozen in limbo. At the same time, citizens brought me objects full of memory, fragments from domestic interiors such as ancestral photographs, curios and bric-a-brac from shelves and cabinets such as an antique phonograph or an old photo of the city square, objects 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. Between these "excavation" visits I began to remember a different city, a double of the city rebuilt, a twin city that harbours both its own death and resurrection, a city that bears witness to the birth and rebirth of the city of Kalamata, a city in a transitive state.
These objects, once hidden in private space and private memory and then collected and curated by the citizens themselves, created public history when brought out of isolation in their respective homes and linked and presented together. They were private objects, embodying private experiences, memories, and emotions which were previously not represented in public, but were now placed and staged in the exhibit hall next to the public official record of the earthquake, such as scientific instruments, reports, films, recordings of media and of scientific and governmental institutions. During the event, the donors visited their objects at the exhibit and hundreds of school kids observed, touched, and dialogued with these objects and the accompanying oral histories (figs. 4, 5, 6). The re-membering of the earthquake of '86 in the drawings of visiting school children transformed the exhibit into a learning space.9 The mobilisation of institutions and media to excavate their own materials for the exhibition made the event a participatory museum of the present - that is, a museum in action, one that was not presenting finished cultural objects from the distant past or foreign parts. This mobilisation of memory and the creation of a participatory museum of the present bear witness to culture in process and to participants as social actors in this process. Participants used the exhibit as a vehicle to recognise their relation to a traumatic and silenced past. The photographic image of the city in ruins was another eloquent statement. The pictures had been taken by local, amateur photographers and professionals inhabiting Kalamata in the wake of the earthquake. They revealed parts of buildings detached from each other, skeletal buildings, buildings turned inside out, and the exiled people like the edifices' flesh, cut off and separated from the ruined building. This was an exposure of the devastated interiors of both the persons and the environment they once called home. A pair of glasses lying on top of some scattered papers in the middle of the ruined home gave a freeze-frame snapshot of private life, now vanished, in the moment before its death in the earthquake.
The skeletal building struck me as an ironic image. It was a spontaneous historical monument documenting the action of seismic violence. It is also the petrified image of the impermanence of human achievement and effort, of its erasure by nature, and of the vanquishing of modernity. For Walter Benjamin, modernity was always already ruins since its meat-narrative was the eternal return of the new and the incessant creation of the outmoded.10 But in Kalamata after the earthquake, we briefly witnessed modernity's replacement - the post-disaster city was the Postmodern city par excellence where the ruins themselves were an outdoor museum without walls or modernity's limits, that is, apocalypse, death, and fragmentation. Here Baudrillard's argument about the museumification of social reality prevails." The apocalyptic cannot be rendered into a museum exhibit, whether it be the Shoah or nuclear holocaust12, for we are in the midst of our own living museum as we drift among the debris of modernity. Beheaded and broken sculptures scattered in cemeteries, squares, and art spaces added to the allegorical ambiance of the post-earthquake ruin (figs. 7, 8, 9). A photograph of a beheaded sculpture turned sideways with the ocean and sea cliffs as backdrop made me turn the picture right side up. But the nature in the background immediately indicated the right position. The headless body evoked the destruction or incompleteness of human identity after the earthquake while nature — the ocean and sea cliffs - remains whole, complete, and indifferent. Ruins such as these confront us with an image of the present suddenly and unexpectedly mutated into the past. The event of destruction exiles its victims from their own present. The ruined and abandoned buildings are that present slipping into the past, into otherness; they can never be recovered and experienced in quite the same way. Even if we return to reinhabit these buildings, they will be restored buildings, thus altered buildings. The edifices shown in the photographic record of the earthquake were buildings in pain. They were wounded bodies of our collective life, bleeding memories of the past and of that 1986 present which the earthquake interrupted.
Ruins give a snapshot of a present as past and force
us to take a different stance on time. They freeze the present and
confront us with a petrified world, a city full of hieroglyphs that
present our past lives in a new language we have yet to decipher. We
read the cracks in the walls as the earthquake is rewriting our
once-present lives;
Our response is to heal these buildings in pain as a way of healing our selves and the body of the city. We provide them with new supportive scaffolding, new exo-skeletons that are meant to keep them alive, we amputate dysfunctional parts to save the whole, and often execute buildings, thus sealing the destruction began by nature. We rescue elegant and beautiful fragments of the vanished buildings in the hope that they can be refitted to a future city that is still in the making. We seek a place for the past in the future. And as these interventions continue for long as acts of remembrance that try to recover and revitalise what made the city a breathing body and a membrane for our lives, the scattered shards and fragments of burial stones and grave memorials in the Kalamata cemetery reveal that not only the present is fractured or lost, but also the vehicles by which we remember the past. An old photograph was abandoned with the cemetery debris. The photo, from the first decades of this century, showed a man with a long mustache dressed in a suit and boutonniere. It had not been reclaimed by his descendants. Had the person been forgotten with the picture, now that the place that marked his death was lost? Entire histories and identities were buried with the earthquake, and at the same time, previously buried pasts were suddenly thrown up, objects appeared that had been lost, items that reminded us of earlier inhabitants of this site or revealed a present that had been hidden away. Walking through the fallen walls of the army camp of the area, we stumbled across fine graffiti covering whole interiors unknown to most, written by anonymous draftees as private ruminations which were now exposed to the public eye. The urban environment was transformed into an archaeological stratigraphy and forced us all to become excavators of our lives and past. Like Wender's angels, we could survey the entire history of the city in the forms of its entrails and innards vomited up and exposed in disarray. Like his angels, we whispered the history to ourselves, we strove to locate these displaced artefacts in order, to resituate a memory and an identity that had also been torn asunder.
The City without Walls Not only recollections of people but also collections of pictures by local photographers portray the people of the tents trying in these conditions to reinstall some aspects of past normalcy of their lives. The most mundane acts became crucial and resonant. Consider for instance the image of two women shampooing each other. Actions that partake of the conventional and yet, because of their setting, were marked all the more as strange for they resonated a normalcy that no longer existed. It is as if by engaging in the day-today activities of living and surviving in a tent city, people silently and slowly erected their own habitat by accumulating gestures of normalcy in miniature -cooking, eating, shopping, dressing, conversing. They lived both in the tent city and in a city of the imagination - the imaginary normal. The recollections and images that make the most vivid impression are those of the elderly and the children. The elderly are mostly shown lost in space. A man looking from the small square "window" of a tent appears like an isolated face in the midst of a vast canvas desert. Elderly women standing next to cooking pots with body postures that show the extent to which they were exiled from the customary spaces of food preparation. An old couple in the supermarket surrounded by empty shelves and vacant food baskets go hand in hand with an elderly man who is sitting with his head bent over and resting on his crossed arms in the midst of the abandoned market - signifying the absence of the rich life and activity, the colour and aroma that had once been there. The elderly, with their body postures, faces, and discourse, express most eloquently that they remained violently unreconciled with the tents and with what they lost; they were angry with memory. The children also despaired, but their bodies adjusted and adapted more easily both to the loss of space and the space that replaced it. They entered the provisional and transitory character of life after the collective, natural disaster and familiarised the surprising and the unexpected. They used play and their imagination to create new places in which their bodies could relax, rest, and find a habitat. The children discovered permanence and stability in the spaces of their imagination and in their capacity to imagine. They played with the tents, transforming them into something other. The image of children playing hide- and-seek or peekaboo was commonplace: in one photo three children crouch with their heads lined up one above the other in a vertical row and peer out of the tent opening - the children turned the tents into a carnival mask, a costume, and a play space. The Bahktinian body of the disaster-city was a fertile landscape. Children can take the most unexpected spaces and transform them into playgrounds and sites for the imaginary. In other photos, kids standing on the roof of a building that overlooks the devastated city blow up balloons - in a city that has been broken down, they are playing with what floats. Others turned their tent into an imaginary mountain which could be climbed or a treehouse on which one could sit and look down upon the world. Children can exploit the very precariousness of built structures. The lack of solidity and the imperma-nence after the quake were naturalised as the children walked around balancing on ruined walls or balancing debris on their heads. Children in Greece always used their bodies and imaginations to explore and insert themselves into spaces of ruins, abandoned or unfinished buildings in their neighbourhood.13 After the quake in Kalamata, through spatial play and exploration, they investigated what new identities this space of ruins could offer. The ruins mediated by play passed through the children's bodies as building blocks of new spatial and topographic identities. The children rebuilt with the tools they had at hand and constructed a city of the fantastic - the space of alterity, the city of tents, was remade into a second alterity. They transformed the strange and made it stranger, thereby rejecting the given conditions of post-disaster existence that was arbitrarily imposed on them and inaugurating their own rehabilitation. At first they played, but once they had remodeled their bodies and selves to the new space, they also read and studied; they cultivated a seriousness of their present state, which was different than the seriousness of despair and mourning of the elders. It was as if once they had remodeled their bodies around this new space, they got busy with the task of re-membering the present. There was that single, powerful image of the girl who stares quizzically at the photographer as she sits assertively on the stone banister of a ruined building with one of the central scenes of destruction behind, her legs carelessly crossed, declaring with body and face, "This is still my place", "still my city". She, at least, had returned with a determination that hints at the inevitability of the future reoccupation and restoration of the city and its many lives by the others who will follow in her tracks.
The Objects of Memory Thus memory was the site of excavation in this exhibit. And memory, as stated above, was defined as embedded in sensory experience, in matter, which made this exhibit an archaeology of memory. The assemblage of these fragments was not their aestheticisation, but it re-enacted the process by which the people of Kalamata reassembled their lives and their city from the fragments made by the earthquake - a process we could term the "poetics of fragments" because it focused on how the people restored meaning, order, pattern, and aesthetics to their lives in the aftermath of disaster. This exhibition sought to make a space and opening for the memory of the city before the disaster and of that moment when all that housed the city's memories were put into crisis. That moment of memory under threat was an episode of disaster that should also be recalled. For until we appreciate what was taken away from the city in 1986, we cannot fully acknowledge what has been restored and what still needs restoration. Thus the exhibition proposed that Kalamata was not rebuilt as an act of forgetting, but was rebuilt with multiple memories of all that existed before the quake and with the memories of the quake itself. We must understand that the archaeological process does not happen all at once; it is a peeling away of layers, the identification and exploration of multiple stratigraphy. This exhibition was like an archaeological dig, and we only penetrated and exposed to public view some layers of the history and memory of the 1986 quake, while other layers remain to be uncovered. Once the exhibit began to cohere into a meaningful whole, people and institutions contacted me, declaring they did not want to be left out. In fact, they were saying, "I want to be remembered/' They saw the exhibit as an event that they had to reclaim for their personal and institutional memory. They often interpreted this event as one that would definitively write the public memory of the earthquake. Yet this exhibition was mounted in opposition to any closing of memory and history or any final monopolisation of the past by a single memory, narrative, or institution. It was structured to accommodate many narratives and memories. Cultural documentation as a form of archaeology takes time. It requires research, careful ethnographic research. Ethnographic documentation frequently deals with experiences, histories, practices that have been devalued, abandoned, and forgotten - this pertains to much of the popular memory of the earthquake, thus the recovery of these abandoned memories and experiences becomes a long process of recovery. Too often we delegate the task of archiving our history to public institutions and specialists and thus many things are left out and forgotten. Cultural documentation, particularly of popular memory, is sensitised to the process of official forgetting and works as a counter-memory to this inattention to everyday experience and lives;15 but memory, like an entire city, can vanish overnight, and the rebuilding of a city takes time and has to be done brick by brick, fragment by fragment. The 1996 commemoration challenged the distinction and the hierarchy between public and private memory and history, and sought to rearticulate that which had been silenced. A public space was created for the presentation of both official public memory and alternative memories. By blurring the distinction between public history and private memory, the exhibit transformed the latter into a particular type of poignant public history, a public chronicle of everyday life prior to, during, and immediately after the earthquake. This transformation of private memory into public history occurred through the material vehicles of objects of memory. Some survivors by chance or intent had rescued the old as if such antique objects could replenish the temporal continuity and stability that the quake had ruptured. They used these artefacts to search for threads through time to lead them out of the labyrinth of disasters and destruction. There was the small antique oil lamp that the contributor stated was originally from his grandmother's farm: //! had brought it to our home in Kalamata that afternoon before the earthquake. The night after the earthquake [after the electricity had been shut off] we needed it. We lived under the light of this small oil lamp." There was the framed needlework, given by a middle aged man: "My mother's last needlepoint. She was embroidering it when she died and left this life. It is incomplete." A woman contributed a kerosene lamp of the last century, a decorated wind-up clock, and a tea saucer:
In one corner of the exhibit, among 19th-century window shutters and wooden doors that had been rescued from now-vanished houses, there was a framed, turn-of-the-century family photograph with these comments: "A photograph of my family. Here my father is thirty or thirty-five years old, he died in 1968 when he was eighty-six." An elderly woman contributed a card and shuttle from a loom and a wooden spigot from a wine barrel, saying: "A few tracks I kept, remainders. I will give you these [for the exhibit] but no other objects; I cannot separate from all of them for that long." In my attempt to assemble a public exhibit, I discovered that some citizens had assembled their own secret museums. A middle-aged man contributed a broken, wooden tobacco pipe, a shard of a ceramic vase, a china coffee cup minus its saucer, a glass bottle stopper minus its bottle:
Perhaps the most startling image of absence and loss was the contribution of brass keys by an elderly man: "The keys to our home now destroyed" (fig. 10). And there was the chair that was brought by a bank clerk with the note stating: "This arm chair is made out of the fragments of three others that the earthquake rendered useless", and a painting that featured a coat and hat which were draped as if the body that had worn these items had suddenly vanished: "I had painted him in 1984; he appeared from under the ruins of my house that the earthquake piled up -the 'Invisible Man'."
Re-Membering the Present
To a certain degree, in Habsburgian Vienna there was an attempt to write history through structures of permanence. The same holds true in Greece with its attachment to Classical Antiquity. Except that now this type of memorialisation and the entire ideology of the monument have been rendered especially problematic since the history of our present is marked by national and international disasters. History can no longer be written with structures of permanence alone. It has become more apparent than ever that history emerges out of precariousness, contingency, and self-organising randomness; there is no hidden rationality or directional spirit of history. In the face of all these processes, we will either end up living without history or subsist without long term-memory, in the succession of recent events, each one erasing the preceding. It is no wonder that certain nation-states hold on desperately to archaic, authenticating history and renew their modern legitimacy with the forged past.16 Yet both responses bring dissatisfaction. We need different methods for capturing historical experience and for transforming it into public knowledge. The commemorating event of the quake of'86 is perhaps partly an answer. The intervention of the Viennese artists is perhaps another part of the answer, but others are needed. The commonality between the event commemorating the earthquake and the performance artists of Vienna is the emerging need to bridge the ever-increasing distance between official history and everyday experience. One site where this gap can be bridged is the human body, both the experiential body and the symbolic body. This symbolisation can be encountered not only in the body proper as in the practice of performance artists, but also in various structures and relations with the built environment, the architectural surroundings, and the spatial order of the city. The lessons of Kalamata and the implicit critique performed by the Viennese artists point to the fact that the built environment and architectural space have to abandon much of their monumental aspirations and tendency towards petrifaction and permanence, and that 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. And as my hand tries to freeze this last thought on paper, my feet sense another tremor from the depths of the earth. 1. Alien Feldman, "Violence and Vision:
The Prosthetics and Aesthetics of Terror", Public Culture, no.
24, 1977.
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