17

Public grievability and the politics of memorialization

AA: Your reference to Regina José Galindo’s art follows and appreciates how the ordinariness of living on is often produced and sustained through exceptional, extra-ordinary, and yet unheroizable, modes of endurance. Indeed, such art mimics the intricacies of public grievability and memorialization in ways that show how forms of oppression take up the body, how they are registered on and in the body, and yet how this performing body endures and enacts a different story and a different body politic, a different mise-en-scène of the historical record.

Another piece of performance art comes to mind. In a work entitled Eis to Onoma (In the Name of) (1st Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki Center of Contemporary Art, 2007), performance artist Leda Papaconstantinou engaged with contemporary heterotopias of unclaimed memory in ways that reconfigured the precarious work of re-membering dis-membered bodies, events, and biographies – in all their forgettable (extra)ordinariness. Through symbolic acts of laying a wreath or placing votive offerings in the cemeteries of the Jews and Armenians of Thessaloniki, but also in front of a Pakistani grocer’s store and a telephone booth in the center of Athens, she acknowledged the forgotten dead of the city but also those experiencing a social death – the migrants, the undocumented workers, the unemployed. Such re-membering engaged with the ways in which memoro-politics is produced through, and predicated upon, a constant contestation regarding what matters as memorable, who owns memory, and who or what is dispossessed of the rights and rites of memorability. The artist performed in places where delimitations of memorability “take place” and are archived in the body of the polis: foreign cemeteries and immigrant neighborhoods, where the ordinariness of the memorialized public order is sustained and yet troubled by silent and silenced memories. The gesture of witnessing in the name of others (as in the title of the performance In the Name of), especially those constituted as alien to the forms and norms of memorable national belonging, acknowledges and, at the same time, displaces the norms that authorize collective memory through the proper name (of the father and the fatherland).

JB: I think that these questions of memorialization can also be addressed through performance art of various kinds. Regina José Galindo’s work is suggestive in that respect as well. Like Women in Black, she also dressed in black when she walked barefoot from the Constitutional Court in Guatemala City to the National Palace a few blocks away, carrying a white basin full of human blood. Her walk, we might say, was precisely an effort to make “memorable” or “memorializable” those who were killed under the dictatorships of the 1980s. Her action, shocking as it is (drawing from tragic traditions in which there is a sudden and disconcerting revelation of blood and death), mourned, memorialized, and resisted all at the same time.

Of course, her performance is a single action, but she acts in the name of the people, both lost and present. Can we return, then, to the idea of plural performativity? It seems to have at least two important effects: one is articulating a voice of the people from the singularity of the story and the obduracy of the body, a voice at once individual and social; another is the reproduction of community or sociality itself as bodies congregate and “live together” on the street. They come to enact forms of interdependency, persistence, resistance, and equality that allow them to create a counter-socius in the midst of hierarchical and regulatory power regimes.