Between documentality and imagination: Five theses on curating the violent past

Introductory remarks

The five theses offered here constitute a philosophical rumination after a decade of research into how to make sense of curatorial strategies in spaces devoted to passing on the story of State violence of the last military dictatorship in Argentina (1976–1983). ¹ Much has been written about the example that Argentina has become in terms of transitional justice, being the first country to have a truth commission of sorts, the first to prosecute its military junta in the 1985 trials and, later, having overturned the so-called ‘amnesty laws’, setting the example of systematically prosecuting those military personnel involved in crimes against humanity during that period. These trials continue today. But most agree that transitional justice is a broader project, that takes place beyond legal mechanisms, and that requires a wider cultural shift. The development of diverse sites and spaces of memory, ² many at sites that were used by the military as centres of detention, torture and extermination during the dictatorship, as well as other projects such as Buenos Aires’ Parque de la Memoria and Rosario’s Museo de la Memoria, can be seen as part of that task insofar as they constitute a form of preservation that shelters the possibility of re-telling and of rumination on this history into the future and for future generations. These projects are celebrated as the successful outcome of campaigns by a plethora of different groups, usually groups led by families of the disappeared in that province, but their intended audiences are much wider than personal memorials; many are still in early stages, and it is true to say that all continue to tread carefully, debating the scope and meaning of their several tasks (including the museal, pedagogic, artistic and archival). They have been accompanied by wide-ranging debates around whether, and if so how, such spaces should be curated. Profound philosophical questions arise, and complex ethical and political issues inevitably accompany the decisions about what to do and what to show made at such sites. This ‘curatorial’ dimension is the focus of this article. Many of these questions remain highly contentious not least because the violent past continues to reverberate in the present, meaning these questions have never been merely about ‘the past’ (Bell, 2010, 2014). The strategy of disappearance deployed by the military during the dictatorship continues to have effects on the present at many levels. New stories about what occurred continue to emerge both within the courts as well as outside them, most dramatically perhaps, with the successful searches of the Abuelas who are still being reunited with their illegally adopted grandchildren as the latter seek confirmation of their biological identities. Indeed, the unresolved questions about what actually occurred, and the whereabouts of so many of the disappeared, has meant that some have argued, consistently and forcefully, that the past is not ready to be ‘musealised’ at all, suggesting that this rescinds on the demand that, in particular, one group of mothers has always made: ‘vivos los llevaron, vivos los queremos’ (‘they took them alive, we want them back alive’). The contemporary use of violence, including the disappearance of key witness Julio Lopez in 2006 discussed below, also casts a long shadow over discussions about how to invite the viewer’s participation in these spaces. Moreover, while the political administrations of the Kirchner presidents supported the re-opening of the trials and the projects in the Spaces and Sites of Memory, and promoted an understanding of them as a cornerstone of the nation-state re-imagined along leftist-populist lines, the recent change of government highlights, inter alia, the unsettled dispute between conflicting opinions on that chapter of State violence. One right-wing leading newspaper published an opinion piece the day after Macri’s victory, calling the trials politically motivated forms of revenge. From other less obvious quarters, too, there has long been concern about the need to protect the telling of the story of the dictatorship from too close an involvement of political authorities. All of these relations and unresolved controversies make the work undertaken in the Spaces and Sites of Memory both fragile and highly charged. It requires a careful, considered approach. In this article, I will be referring to some of the Sites and Spaces in which the story of the dictatorship is addressed, insofar as these help to articulate the general philosophical propositions in hand. It is not a comprehensive survey or even an attempt to present a ‘representative sample’ of these; rather, it intends to use examples of some intriguing exhibitions, artworks and curatorial decisions that I have encountered in order to explain, develop and explore some more general propositions concerning how to theorise the task of curating the violent past that would be of interest to readers of Memory Studies.

In the book Documentality: Why it is Necessary to Leave Traces (2013), Maurizio Ferraris presents an ambitious theory of social reality, one which gives a central role to inscription, that is, to how traces are registered and how thereby social objects, the basis of social life itself, arise. ³ Inscription involves the movement of thought into the world. It has the ability to create what Ferraris (2013) terms ‘social objects’ that are born when they exit the mind of one person and are ‘made manifest, and are then inscribed in the external world’ (p. 30). There is, he contends, a crucial difference between ‘thinking of declaring war, of getting married, of promising or buying something’ and ‘saying (writing, meaning on the outside) that war is declared, that one is married, that one promises, that one is buying’ (p. 31). The distinction of the first from the second he explains as that between on the one hand a ‘movement of the soul’, which is vague, fleeting and insubstantial, and on the other the appearance of a ‘shared object, whose existence does not depend only on one or other of us’ (p. 31). Social reality arises through the creation of such shared objects, which emerge through social acts involving at least two people and are characterised by being inscribed, whether that is on paper, digitally or just in our minds.

For Ferraris (2013), there is a hierarchy of traces, registrations and inscriptions. A trace is a modification of a surface, that ‘recalls by recording something’ absent (p. 177); a registration is the representation of that trace ‘laid down in our minds’, an exteriorisation that gives communication social value; and inscriptions, which constitute ‘common objects’ that are open to access by more than one person, are ‘essentially designed to be exhibited’ (p. 178) – Ferraris (2013) gives the examples of passports, money or identity cards – and are central to institutional reality. Institutions – the ‘high point of the social’ (p. 54) – are built upon these inscriptions. Included as institutions here, interestingly, are not only ‘the objects of economics, of politics, of the law and of the “bureaucracy” (which Hegel would have called “objective spirit”) but also objects of art, of religion and of philosophy (which Hegel would have called “absolute spirit”)’ (p. 5). Yet clearly Ferraris (2013) means to critique any account of society that posits a ‘spirit’ behind these inscriptions. It is the inscriptions that fix acts and contribute to the creation of what appears meaningful, as well as confer value by creating what is ‘worthy of being pursued or avoided, praised or blamed, shared or not’ (p. 5). As such, they do not reflect but constitute the realities within which we find ourselves. Indeed, he writes, ‘every role and agreement depends on memory, and every behavior on imitation’ (p. 4) such that our very aspirations are constituted within this world of inscriptions. Put differently, if one were deprived of inscriptions and documents, one ‘would not know what to aspire to, and the aspiration would not occur to him [sic]’ (p. 5).

Ferraris does not directly consider the question of motivation, of why some things and not others gather not only the ‘movement of souls’ around them, but compel people to inscribe and to create ‘social objects’ out of their traces. Yet there are many clues as to motivations throughout the book. In one passage, Ferraris quotes Hamlet’s oath to ‘mark’ his father-ghost’s words. Hamlet swears that he will wipe all trivial memories of his father from ‘the table of my memory’ in order to replace these prior impressions with his father’s ‘commandment’. Ferraris (2013) writes that Hamlet ‘will leave only his father’s order, his call for revenge and justice. Then, just to be sure, he takes his notebook and write [sic]. You never know: verba volent, scripta manent’ (p. 199). ⁴ By making the inscription, the evanescence of speech is dispelled. Yet it is also significant, for our interests, that this note of Hamlet’s, his ‘aide memoire’, concerns the pursuit of justice. It is not only the case that Hamlet seeks to guard against his forgetting, but his inscription seeks also to make a difference, to remind and to promise himself to pursue justice and to maintain that effort into the future. So, as Ferraris (2013) argues, in order to have lasting social value, communication requires registration; if we want to connect with someone again, we do not only listen as they tell us their telephone number, we record it on paper or in our phones. Moreover, as Derrida’s arguments concerning différance prompt us to note, that registration is simultaneously a deferring, a ‘putting off to later’; registration both fixes and entails this crucial temporal aspect that points, as it defers, to the future (p. 185).

At the risk of leaving much of Ferraris’ complex and provocative book aside, I want to emphasise this temporal aspect of inscription since it is here that the work might lend itself to the context within which I have been researching over the past several years. Researching cultural activities of ‘post-dictatorship’ Argentina, my concern has been to suggest that artworks, just as more overt political gatherings such as public mass demonstrations, may work to mark, to gather ‘souls’, if you will, and to inscribe aspects of shared social life. These inscriptions are not merely marks, nor aides to facilitate remembering, but are precisely concerned with, and aimed at, questions of justice: juris-writing, as it has been described (Matthews, 2014, drawing on Douzinas and Wall), an idea to which I will return. As inscriptions that create social objects, in Ferraris’ sense, they are evaluative, electing through their attentions what should and needs to be remembered into the future; in his terms, their aim is to create social objects whose reach in terms of cultural values and social change operates through their ability to sustain a commitment into the future.

An example, Jonathan Perel’s film ‘El Predio’ (2010) is shot on the grounds of the ESMA (Escuela Superior de Mecánica de la Armada), the notorious ex-clandestine centre of detention, torture and extermination (hereafter ex-ccdtye) in Buenos Aires, where thousands of the kidnapped were held, tortured and ‘disappeared’. The film is fragmentary, adopting the aesthetic of the incomplete such that it has been said to be in tune with philosophies of the anti-monumental (Arenillas, 2013). Although without didactic message, the film is itself an ‘inscription’, falling into Ferraris’ (2013) category of the artwork, which is to say that it is idiomatic, an inscription that does not take the place of a person (as does a document or a signature) but instead ‘pretends to be a person’ insofar as it ‘seems to address us and it seems to be the work itself and not its author that does this as if it had representations, thoughts and sentiments’ (p. 279). In this respect, El Predio both thematises and problematises precisely the act of inscription. Taking the viewer on a rambling tour of the large ESMA estate in which one senses in its state of disrepair the toll of the prolonged battle around its destiny, and witnesses the various somewhat scattered attempts to begin taking the buildings and grounds in hand. The film holds lingering shots of broken window panes, radiators waiting installation, rubble and walls on which the painting is peeling and the plaster is crumbling. ⁵ The very walls appear wounded, with holes left by their previous use for pipes and fittings. The film refuses to fill the heterogeneous sensorium of the site – these scenes of abandon, the sounds of the birds singing and screeching, the blasts of radios, of dogs barking, the traffic rumbling along the busy Avenida del Libertador – with a voice-over or visual focus. Instead, one is forced to confront one’s own needs and expectations, for narrative, for documentation, for the film to effect some sort of gathering that names these various impressions, or that ‘signs’ them in Derrida’s sense. ⁶ It obliges one to question: what – and maybe unavoidably also why – do we want it to document, to narrate or inscribe of the events that took place here?

If the film raises this question, it also shows that there is activity at the ESMA – slow and disparate perhaps, but social activity nonetheless – that in its various modes suggests, in Ferraris’ (2013) terms, the movement of thought into the world (p. 31). In addition to the building renovations underway, there are films being shown and there is some sort of artistic intervention taking place: the planting of potatoes in order, as their small poster says, ‘Para hacer memoria y pensar el futuro (To make memory and to think the future)’. ⁷ The point is not to understand these activities as forms of inscription that deliver a collective message; rather, Perel’s film records these activities without proposing to secure their meaning. As Arendt (1958) might have argued, he offers them reification as visual documentation, and thence the possibility of remembrance. For although remembrance is ‘as the Greeks held, the mother of all arts’, as she put it, it requires such reification. Through the process of materialisation, the ‘living spirit’ of action becomes a ‘dead letter’, but it must pay that price if it is not to ‘disappear as though it never had been’ (p. 95). To employ Ferraris’ language, these activities – which are themselves inscriptions – are registered and inscribed as the social object which is the documentary film. The film offers itself as the materialisation of these living activities; not only registering, marking (a difference) but also deferring (concerning the future), as if the film itself requests confirmation of its choice of attentions. In this way, it is important to underscore, Perel’s recording of the activities in the ESMA now (already then, since the film was shot in 2009) is an inscription that is future-oriented. As such, it requires the affirmation of receipt since it risks, as do all inscriptions (and as do all artworks), becoming a message that is written without being received, sent without being delivered, precisely a ‘dead letter’.

One scene that El Predio returns to several times is the work of an artist, Javier Barrio, who was making an intervention – a drawing – on one the walls of a building on the ESMA estate at the time that Perel was filming (Figure 1). This particular activity of inscription – drawing on the walls – is a significant gesture at ESMA, since we know that there are pictures, names and dates that the disappeared etched into the walls during their captivity in La Capucha, the large attic space in the Casino building ⁸ where they were sequestered. Little marks of defiant existence; ‘stubborn traces of life’ as Butler (2009) has characterised the poetry emerging from Guantanamo Bay (p. 61), some of these marks remain visible and some are emerging through investigative work. In Perel’s film, we watch the progress of Barrio’s project ‘El Museo del Gliptodonte’ which, as the artist explains in his blog, was an attempt to ‘investigate’ the traces of the past that were left on the walls when the Navy left the building, purposively leaving it in a ‘ruinous’ condition (http://javierbarrio.blogspot.co.uk). A re-inscription, then, that through its simple act of drawing, reflects upon the Navy’s attempt to erase the past. Moreover, Barrio considers the present activities and debates taking place at ESMA as resonant with the work of palaeontology, which is to say, as a mode of making the past past. Making the past, the inscribing of it as such, is a process that Ferraris (2013) comments upon. He wonders about a difference:

When we visit a museum of ancient art – and even more so, when we visit an archaeological site – we seem to be surrounded by old things. They say that those stones are charged with history. This does not happen on the beach. (p. 198)

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Figure 1.

Still from Perel’s ‘El Predio’ (2010).

Why? Well, he tells us, the answer is simple: ‘The “old” rocks, the ruins, have been subject to inscription’ (p. 198). At the archaeological site, at the museum, and we can add, at ESMA, since the inception of its status as a ‘Space of Memory’, there has been activity that aims towards a world-making activity, the documenting that is ‘made concrete in institutions’ (p. 31). It is an inscription that in its refusal to allow the process of ruination – the tendency of the world, as Arendt would have it – to win out, holds onto something for a (democratic, non-violent) future-to-come. And it does so here, of course, because this is the site of numerous acts of State violence. The activities at ESMA contribute to the campaign to preserve this site, to reclaim it as a space that proclaims the importance of remembrance, to preserve it as a space where people will give time to the past as a safe-guard for the future.

Furthermore, it is of course significant what Barrio is drawing. His ‘Gliptodonte’ stands as a warning about the human process of historiography, since, as Barrio explains on his blog, the excavation of fossils of these prehistoric creatures has also been the site of errors. In the nineteenth century, a new species of gliptodonte – the ‘Glyptodon clavipes’ – was recorded, discovered by a palaeontologist named Richard Owen, only later to be proven to be a mistake, an error arising from the misreading of fossils from two different creatures as if they were one. The artwork stands as a warning, therefore, about the provisional nature of scientific truth. That something is recorded does not of course mean that it is True. Wherever there is conflict about the events and meaning of the past, there is a need to heed such a warning. At ESMA, this has of course been the battle, and the opening of the criminal trials notwithstanding, remains the concern. To confer value on something, to remark upon it, is to aid the possibility of its enduring through time; endurance is not a quality of a thing, but is an achievement (remembering the arguments of Whitehead, 1925 [1948]).Yet that achievement, and the value that such attentions perform and confer, does not fix meaning nor guarantee continued endurance. Indeed, future renegotiations of this past – its place and its meaning – will become possible and necessary.

Is it right to understand all inscriptions as ambitious for their own eventual institutionalisation? Drawings, posters, stencils, writing on the walls, in Argentina as elsewhere, may seem to mark or remark upon events urgently, often angrily, without seeking their own preservation within an institution. I think of a stencil I saw in Rosario a few years ago that depicts a woman running with a plank of wood (Figure 2); the image appeared on the wall of an ex-clandestine centre, this time the ex-police headquarters on the corner of Dorrego and San Lorenzo, the image borrowed from a photograph of the popular uprising, the Rosariazo, that took place in 1969 in that city (the original photograph was by Carlos Saldi, and is displayed in Rosario’s Museum of Memory). Surrounded by other slogans and stencils, it marks out the site of state violence and institutional betrayal, calling for the attention of the passer-by. This stencil does not in and of itself direct the viewer’s response, but is a re-mark, remembering a time of protest, inscribing simultaneously the building’s prior use into the present, reminding the people of that city of its (mis)use, and refusing to let that time slip away into oblivion. Frequently such inscriptions are understood as forms of dissensus in Ranciere’s sense, pulling back from institutions, expressing defiance, disappointment, disgust. ⁹ It is precisely the failure of institutions that is overtly inscribed. Yet Ferraris’ thesis would encourage us to accept this writing as simultaneously an early stage, as it were, of the process from which institutions themselves emerge, and in relation to which, in a democracy, they assume their course.

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Figure 2.

Stencil, Rosario.

Insofar as what is inscribed calls out to others with whom the inscriber lives in common, it seeks to give form to normative sentiments. As the socio-legal theorist Robert Cover argued, an expanded sense of what constitutes law enables us to accept that such movements of thought into the world – such inscriptions – bear a relation to the modes of constitution of both law and of ourselves as subjects in relation to those norms, even and perhaps especially, where they are backward-looking, seemingly concerned with the past. Cover’s work highlights the importance of the force of a sense of justice among people in relation to their self-understanding. Through a process he called ‘juris-genesis’, communities orientate themselves around narratives about law that they continually test and ‘try out’ through adopting different attitudes to it. That is, through all the activities of the nomos, by advocating, protesting, mocking, interrogating its process and its meaning, communities communicate and generate their dispositions to laws and the institution of law (Cover, 1993: 100). These may result in the confirmation of law as an acceptable reflection of the community’s normative sensibilities, or they may not, in which case there is a stimulus to challenge its authority. Cover’s interest was in the relation between the jurispathic state that attempts to close down such impulses for change, and that needed, he urged, to recognise the violence of its imposition of one account as Law, and the jurisgenerative process that is the cause for hope that such closure might be challenged.

There are problems with Cover’s account – its liberalism, its romanticism about ‘community’, the seeming boundedness to that community – but it enables us to see that the long-standing and indeed on-going debates, such as those around if and how to fill the ex-clandestine detention centres in Argentina, ¹⁰ are activities of the nomos, concerning the values and the instantiation of those values in a society; moreover, that, even if the activities are not directly addressed to law as such, they concern law insofar as they are evaluations that are offered to a wider audience. What takes place may not straightforwardly support or denounce Argentina’s institutional present, but it gives a context within which the state’s political and ethical directions are considered, debated and judged. As such, the activities inform both future reflections and reflections about the future.

Indeed, in these curated spaces in Argentina we are often standing at sites that were once state buildings. The ESMA was the training school for Navy cadets, and Rosario’s Museum of Memory was a former police building, as was the D2 in Córdoba’s city centre, which I will mention below and which was also used to detain and disappear people during the 1970s. The D2 is now a Space of Memory and also holds the Provincial Archive relating to the last dictatorship. So while the current uses of these spaces frequently enacts a speaking back to State power that on several measures comes too late, they do facilitate repeated challenges by giving form, or else – for sometimes it is precisely the impulse to give form that is problematised there – by constituting a dedicated, critical space for the exploration and evaluation of the past’s significance. The inscriptions that take place here gather multifarious elements in order to foster such exploration, both ethical and political.

Yet such jurisgenesis cannot be legislated for; it must arise instead from a putting into relation of various elements, including the spectators and socialities that gather around such spaces and their interventions.

In a passage from an interview that Maurizio Ferraris conducted with Derrida in 1993, published as A Taste for the Secret, Derrida and Ferraris (2001), Derrida suggests that openings towards the future are not only proposals concerned with their own inscription in that future, as it were, but are about producing contexts, a ‘chain of marks’ which themselves call for a new context, for a future to come. He speaks of

producing a context, transforming a given [donne] context, opening it up and bringing about a new contextual giving [donne: hand of cards]. From this point of view, a work [oeuvre] – or for that matter, a phrase or a gesture, a mark or a chain of marks – inflects a context and, in doing so, appeals for a new one. A simple phrase takes its meaning from a given context, and already makes its appeal to another one in which it will be understood; but, of course, to be understood it has to transform the context in which it is inscribed … The future is not present, but there is an opening onto it. (pp. 19–20)

Arguably, the activities that take place at Argentina’s memory spaces – the creative works, the discussions and debates, the archives – likewise appeal to new contexts which are not yet, that they seek to bring about. They are not only about memory, if memory is understood as attending to the past; they seek something more ambitious through the staging of gatherings in which spaces, buildings, objects, images, as well as spectators and participants, come into relation in order to effect the opening to the future of which Derrida spoke. An exhibit at Rosario’s Museum of Memory has numerous library membership cards hung from the ceiling of a room in which lecterns display open books for consultation (Figure 3). At head height the cards dangle and twist in the breeze while the visitors who move carefully among these institutional documents realise that these are the cards left behind when people were disappeared or murdered. With their passport-size photographs and handwritten personal details, the cards are institutional documents that have been rendered void in the bureaucracy of one context, yet re-appear, curated in this new institution. One carries the observation: ‘reader considered “disappeared”; her photograph has been given to her daughter’, followed officiously by the date the photograph left the institution of the library: ‘12/11/90’. Putting such institutional documents from the past in relation with recipients in the present, re-shuffling the given like a hand of cards, such exhibitions are attempts to create new contexts. They are re-inscriptions that sustain these ‘remnants’ from the past but as a call to future and unknown contexts; a call which is eschatological, opening and overflowing. At their best, they perform, as Derrida and Ferraris (2001) put it, a commitment that is ‘a promise … that goes beyond being and history’ (p. 20).

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Figure 3.

‘Lectores’ (Readers) Installation by Frederico Fernandez Salaffia and Lucrecia Moras, Museum of Memory, Rosario.

These eschatological terms are also those that Derrida and Ferraris (2001) uses for Justice, or for ‘justice as it promises to be, beyond what it actually is’ (p. 20). Justice overflows law (droit), which is always an ensemble of determinable norms, incarnated and positive (which is to say, institutionalised). So justice has to be distinguished from law, and also from what is in general (Derrida and Ferraris, 2001: 21). In ‘The Force of Law’, where Derrida (1990) famously makes the distinction between the calculable (law) and the incalculable (Justice), he suggests that if one can experience justice, it will not be in the form of judgements, but will be aporetic:

[Law is the element of calculation, and it is just that there be law, but] justice is incalculable, it requires us to calculate with the incalculable; and aporetic experiences are the experiences, as improbable as they are necessary, of justice [that is to say of moments in which the decision between just and unjust is never insured by a rule]. (p. 947)

If these new contexts cannot deliver Justice, then, they are so many invitations to dwell within incalculability. Aporetic experiences are what these spaces offer, and is ‘all’ we could expect of them: experiences that call for Justice while knowing that ultimately it is both unattainable – since even the most condemnatory legal judgments will never fully compensate – and uncontainable, since – as when faced with the pitiable, mere materiality of remnants – one is continually faced with an appeal that extends beyond any legal decision, and beyond any museum exhibit.

For the most part, Argentina’s memory spaces are attuned to the dangers of simple inscriptions that purport to tell History and deliver its ‘lessons’ and embrace instead various philosophies that intend precisely to welcome new contexts without reiterating existent narratives and to allow openings that potentially foster new conditions of possibility. Of course, the attempts to do so are fraught with difficulties and have been much debated, not least because the curation of the past relies upon further processes of inscription which carry their own risks. That is, the spaces and exhibits are themselves involved in an institutionalisation, a ‘memorialisation’ that risks closing off the past as utterly distinct from the present society in which it is remembered as an incomprehensible period of violent outburst (Andermann, 2012; Chababo, 2014) and whereby a certain ‘democratic consensus’ becomes a precondition for those who visit such spaces (Andermann, 2012: 91). As Judith Butler (2012) has argued in a discussion of Benjamin, there is merit in holding off from seeking to name the Past too much or too precisely (p. 109). If we avoid what Benjamin termed ‘overnaming’, there is the opportunity to accept that the past be allowed to interrupt the present through its disorientating possibilities. Knowing these risks, and that no telling of the past can be entirely innocent, different decisions have been taken at different sites, with some choosing to leave these spaces empty precisely because of the pitfalls of writing the past. There the architecture alone ‘speaks’ or presents itself to the visitor (which is still an inscription in Ferraris’ sense, a re-inscription that writes itself as space, or else a form of punctuation, something all writing requires). At other spaces there is explicit curatorial intervention, with exhibition spaces, such as those of the Rosario museum described above. Within these latter, several different strategies are adopted.

Whichever curatorial decisions are made, all the re-inscriptions must accept the paradoxes of writing that ultimately require ‘us’, the spectators, to become responsive in the midst of the aporetic, a process akin to the attempt to prompt a ‘civil imagination’ about which Azoulay (2012) has written (in relation to photographs). In relation to what she terms a ‘civil contract of photography’, Azoulay suggests that there is no guarantee that the spectator’s encounter with a photograph will overcome the aimlessness of the gaze in our contemporary ‘culture of visual plenty’. But there is the potential that encounters with photographs can make one linger and suspend the superficial ‘skimming’ of images that characterises these times. Such encounters are events of plurality, in Arendt’s sense, and since they are not under the control of a sovereign, they have the potential to call to account those who, Azoulay (2012) writes, ‘seek to exclude others’ and those who have been ‘subjected to processes of exclusion’ (p. 71).

Likewise, these spaces have ultimately to put their faith in plurality, which is to say, in the sociality ¹¹ within which, and to a large extent for which, these experiences of being ‘before memory’ take place. Indeed, these spaces might be described as forms of ‘juris-writing’, various re-narrativisations that privilege ‘a prior sense of law as originary sociability’ (Matthews, 2014: 186) insofar as they open up questions of the past and all that subtends – questions of good and evil, of justice, and of social regulation more generally – as questions that belong to ‘the community’ for whom law speaks. In other words, it implicitly draws attention to the a-legality of law’s gesture of writing itself into being (constitutionalism) (Matthews, 2014), and to the fact that law requires our investment in this fiction in order to give it ‘life’ (Cover, 1993; see also Fitzpatrick, 2004, on ‘juris-fiction’). It is this ultimate and necessary hope in the response-ability of the gatherings that constitute themselves around these curated spaces that requires their mode of documentality to be forever accompanied with concern for the quality of the encounters they stage.

If it is the drawing of an interruptive line, a pause or ‘caesura’ that marks and organises the logic of the bio-political state (Foucault, 2003) – how some are written in, how some are located beyond – the re-writings of memory spaces are frequently understood as politically reparative work, including once again those who had been ‘written out’ and guarding against the possibility of such exclusion happening again (‘nunca más’). This highly optimistic reading tempts even Azoulay (2012) when she suggests that photographs might even be able ‘to put the very strategies of exclusion on display’ (p. 71).

I have written elsewhere (Bell, 2014) about an extraordinary collection of photographs of detainees and disappeared that has been exhibited at the D2 in Córdoba, which was once a police building, was used as a ccdtye during the 1970s and is now a Space of Memory holding a museum and the Provincial Archive. These photographs were taken in the years 1974–1978, in that very building, by the police. They are routine images by which the police documented those they arrested and so show the people they brought in to question, to detain and, in some cases, to torture and to disappear. The images are shocking, intriguing and moving; they are depictions of processes at once quotidian and exceptional. Quotidian in the sense that they are the traces of a bureaucratic process that was happening everyday at that time, as well as in the sense of the unexceptional everydayness – the ‘just doing a job’-ness – of the police officers’ own corporeal involvement in the image-making. Many show the officers holding the detainees number and the date on a stick above their heads as the photo is taken; some capture people in the background, casually observing the photographic apparatus (Figure 4). They are exceptional in the way they reflect and provoke further reflection on how the subject-citizen is obliged to become within the state of exception. For Agamben (1998), when the rule of law is suspended, what is excluded or banned nevertheless ‘maintains itself in relation to the rule in the form of the rule’s suspension. The rule applies to the exception in no longer applying, in withdrawing from it’ (pp. 17–18). What these images trace, and what their re-showing at the D2 asks visitors to imagine, is precisely the ways in which the opening up of the caesura between those who remained ‘citizens’ within the discourse of the military and those who were considered ‘in but not of’ Argentina – ‘the repression is directed against a minority we do not consider Argentine’ stated General Videla, an enemy without ‘flag or uniform … not even a face’ (quoted in Feitlowitz, 1998: 23–24) – was a bio-political feat that simultaneously excluded and captured. The state of exception, Agamben (1998) wrote, ‘the situation that results from the suspension’ of the rule of law, ‘[a]t once exclud[es] bare life from, and captur[es] it within, the political order’ (p. 9). ‘Being-outside yet belonging’ is how Agamben characterises the state of exception, which is why the homo sacer has an intimate relation with the sovereign who decides upon the state of exception, mirroring his exclusion–inclusion.

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Figure 4.

Officers captured in background of photographic apparatus at D2, Córdoba, 1975.

If, in the ‘occasion of subjectivity’ (Pollock, 2008) that these images provoke, we are drawn into these photographed scenes and into a ‘locus of commerce with the dead (or undead)’ (Santner, 2006), this is a considerable feat of the imagination. They ask us to consider how, as Eric Santner (2006) puts it, ‘creaturely life emerges precisely at … [these] impossible thresholds’ (p. 29) where the sovereign’s relation to the subject is transformed, exposing those subjects to the ‘outlaw’ dimension of law internal to sovereign authority. This concerns what Santner (2006) calls ‘a traumatic kernel’ of ‘man’s inscription into the space of political contestation broadly conceived’ (p. 13). The peculiar proximity of the human to the animal at the very point of their radical difference renders the human creaturely exactly at these moments of exposure to this dimension of political power and social bonds. A human form of animality, human creatureliness, may be provoked where there is exposure to these dimensions of power and sociality, where exposure does not mean to be cast away from them, but to be abandoned – ‘exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside, are becoming indistinguishable’ (Agamben, 1998: 28–29).

In fragments of the violent past – of which we should make neither too much nor too little (Didi-Huberman, 2008: 38) – we might imagine that we see the attempts of those exposed to State power to precisely gather themselves as human. In one of the images shown at the D2, a woman clutches her handbag to her side, seeking to remain ‘on-side’ of the threshold, as it were, while the police photographer instructs her to sit face on, then in profile. She is t/here, caught in the (literal) flash that enabled her encounter with power to become inscribed, as Foucault (2000) might have said (p. 61), and ‘caught up in the process of becoming creaturely’, which is to say caught up in one’s own becoming subject through the arbitrary commands of an Other, as Santner (2006) puts it (pp. 28–30). Here, ‘creatureliness’ is understood not so much as an essential quality of animality shared between humans and animals, but as a form of exposure.

The re-showing of these images at the D2 cannot direct such a reading nor be understood as an illustration of this threshold; the ‘exposure’ is something imagined, the threshold something abstracted analytically. This new context cannot make their showing a triumphant gesture of overcoming, for the ability of the spectator to imagine and the opportunity for the images to resonate does not in itself halt such bio-political processes nor allow an escape from the constitutive threshold between zoe and bios. Indeed, as the Director of the D2, Ludmila Catela da Silva (2013), has argued, the team there are often faced with intractable ethical questions for which there is no simple solution, including the questions of inclusion, such as who to include and exclude from their own activities around the constructed population of ‘the disappeared’. How these spaces and sites negotiate these difficulties is the curatorial question, as they face the difficult task of curating the re-shuffled fragments of lives, spaces and moments from the past. But every strategy is a negotiation of degrees of failure as they seek to make present that which necessarily withdraws.

Jean-Luc Nancy ([2003] 2005) writes that violence itself is about marking, an inscription if you will, that is entwined with demonstration in the sense of the desire of violence to be ‘monstrative’ (p. 21). Not only because the violent person, monstrously, ‘wants to see the marks he makes on the thing or being he assaults and violence consists precisely in imprinting such a mark’ (p. 20), but also because violence – like truth, ‘whose being is entirely in its manifestation’ (p. 21) – must demonstrate itself, present itself, take up space in a rivalrous show of force. To display this force, in a Space of Memory for example, is attempt to exhibit it through the traces it leaves, entering a delicate relationship with violence’s own intimacy with inscription. That is, one may become complicit, and gift violence that which it seeks: the image of its own force.

Violence is an act of ‘self-showing’ and the realisation of that act occurs, as Nancy ([2003] 2005) writes, in the image. The image, following his argument, turns the thing towards the outside, such that it is the ‘display of presence’ as the thing (‘whether an inert object or a person’ (p. 21)) is ‘posited as subject’ (p. 21). The image is ‘what takes the thing out of its simple presence to pres-ence, to praes-entia, to being-out-in-front-of-itself, turned toward the outside’ (p. 21). Yet an image, any image, simultaneously ‘rivals the thing’, competes with it such that – counter-intuitively perhaps – it does not confirm presence, like a witness, but ‘disputes the presence of the thing’ (p. 21). In the context of photography, this is perhaps best understood in relation to images that survive of those who have passed away. And in the context we have been discussing here, I wonder about the photograph of Julio Lopez taken by Helen Zout that has been displayed both in the museum in Rosario and, in 2015, at her show ‘Huellas de desapariciones’ at the Centro Cultural de la Memoria Haroldo Conti at the ex-ESMA (Figure 5). Lopez’s story is particularly resonant, since he has been disappeared twice. Once during the dictatorship, a detention that he survived, and again, during democracy after having given evidence in the trial of the former Director of Investigations of the Buenos Aires Provincial Police, Miguel Etchecolatz, in 2006. In Zout’s portrait, Lopez’s eyes are shut as if he might not know the image is being taken, but his image is there, while he, having survived, is once again ‘disappeared’. Having gathered himself for the camera, having given Zout the opportunity to ‘tear his image away’, Lopez has been violently withdrawn, his image now uncannily, the death mask of Heidegger’s discussions: ‘The Gesicht (face) of one without Sicht (Sight), such is the exemplary image’ (Nancy, [2003] 2005: 24).

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Figure 5.

Julio Lopez.

The image has a force, so to speak, and yet its blow is accompanied by a profound double withdrawal, the first the requisite withdrawal that it shares with all images and the second, the withdrawal of the specific political context here, that is, of the shocking contemporary continuation of the practice of disappearance. Nancy’s argument confirms an emphasis on the complexities of receiving such images. Their force – by which the unity of the image is achieved and received – is in itself an exhibiting: ‘The image is outside the common sphere of presence because it is the display of presence. It is the manifestation of presence, not as appearance but as exhibiting, as bringing to light and setting forth’ (Nancy, [2003] 2005: 22). To receive these images in the present and to display them in a curated space is therefore to receive a force that already exhibits itself but that arguably demands further exhibition. Photographs of the disappeared ‘ask’ to be set forth in the sense that they force those in the present to wonder about what the image has achieved in order to be ‘before’ us (its ex-position). The image obliges the receiver/curator to wonder at its ability to have so torn itself away, especially those images such as those displayed in the D2, or those smuggled out of the ESMA by Victor Basterra, ¹² that were taken by the State within the detention centres. But this giving is always incomplete, for there is – especially heightened in these contexts of the practice of disappearance – so much the image cannot give. Yet the image has somehow managed to tear itself away from its contexts, and this must also include its temporal context; it gathers and flings itself out and forward, towards the future, towards ‘us’.

Received into their new contexts, it is as if such images, as well as asking for their originary contexts to be imagined (as in Huberman’s argument), ask to become received and exhibited within new relations where their incompleteness is not a source of disquiet. And indeed, in ex-ccdtyes and other memory spaces in Argentina, they are displayed alongside other traces from the past – objects, texts, images that survive – as well as contemporary inscriptions that continue to multiply around the events they concern. Not least, the on-going criminal trials become an important part of those contexts such that ‘the past’ is not curated without reference to a changing juridical present, which marks an incomplete process of social institutions to address the past. Thus in the Rosario museum, old images of the disappeared are displayed alongside Zout’s image of Lopez, as well as alongside a large map marking where the ex-ccdtyes are located in the province; there is also a model of the clandestine centre that was located at the corner of Dorrego and San Lorenzo in the city’s police headquarters, mentioned above (Figure 6). These arrangements are thus an opportunity for ‘past’ inscriptions to be considered within the present constellations of relations still in process. And while that constellation cannot avoid the withdrawal we have been discussing, and will involve numerous leaps of the imagination, it can point towards the on-going tasks that assert themselves through the encounters it enables. Aware of its own artifice, such a constellation is sensitive to the politics of truth production, and the flow between fact and fiction (as Minh-ha (1990) wrote of the best documentaries, (p. 88)), offering a set of relations from within which we must in turn formulate responses. The necessary creative intervention of curation points thus to the requirements that befall the socialities who enter into the constellation, not only to be ‘before Memory’ but also to respond to it, which is to say, to formulate their responsibilities within it.

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Figure 6.

Museum of Memory, Rosario.