Spatialities of Exception, Violence and Memory. Madrid: Researchs Groups ”Narratives of Terror and Disappear-ance”, Universität Konstanz; ”Philosophy aer the Holocaust”; ”e politics of memory in contemporary Spain”(CCHS/CSIC), 01.02.2012-03.02.2012.

Reviewed by Sophie OliverPublished on H-Soz-u-Kult (March, 2012)

Spatialities of Exception, Violence and Memory

e International conference ’Spatialities of Excep-tion, Violence and Memory’ was held from 1-3 February2012 at the Residencia de Estudiantes and the Centro deCiencias Humanas y Sociales of the Spanish National Re-search Council (CCHS/CSIC) inMadrid. It was jointly or-ganised by the ERC funded research Group “Narratives ofTerror andDisappearance” (Universität Konstanz) and bythe research groups “Philosophy aer the Holocaust” and“e politics of memory in contemporary Spain” (CSIC),with the support of the Spanish Ministry of Science andInnovation, the European Research Council, and the MaxPlanck Research Prize/Geschichte+Gedächtnis. Conceptand coordination were undertaken by Estela Schindel(Konstanz) and Pamela Colombo (Madrid). e conceptbehind the conference was to provide a framework forinternational and interdisciplinary reflection about theproblematic of space in relation to trauma and memory,with an emphasis on the spatialities of exception, exclu-sion and state violence. A key aim of the conference wasto explore the significance of critical space theory for de-veloping an understanding of the workings of terror andexception in authoritarian regimes, and in relation to thetraces of trauma and its remembrance. e papers pre-sented addressed a variety of related themes and issuesfrom historical, philosophical, literary, forensic, architec-tural and cultural perspectives.

ALEIDA ASSMANN (Konstanz) opened the con-ference with an inaugural lecture reflecting upon the’boom-up’ emergence of ’involuntary’ places of mem-ory in post-war Germany. Describing a series of initia-tives in which local communities have reclaimed unac-knowledged historical sites as places of memory, Ass-mann stressed the lingering presence of the past evenin the face of official amnesia, and the significance ofnew, localised spatial practices for enacting the transfor-mation from forgeing to remembrance. JAY WINTER(NewHaven) continued the opening session with his lec-

ture on the gradual effacement of the face in artistic rep-resentations of terror in the 20th Century. As the natureof war changed, he suggested, so did its representation,with ’facelessness’ becoming part of the language of post-holocaust art. is was accompanied by a turn, moregenerally, to auditory memory and the ethics of voice;a move from figuration to auditory configurations per-sonified in the figure of the Holocaust witness.

Day two of the conference began with a series of re-flections upon the spatialities of terror and its remem-brance. Applying the Bakhtinian concept, KIRSTENMAHLKE (Konstanz) spoke of ’chronotopes’ of terror un-der the former Argentine dictatorship and their narra-tive reconfiguration in survivor memories. Narration al-lows survivors, as the architects of memory, to recon-struct the time-space of political violence, delimiting ter-ror previously experienced as invisible, unbounded andall-pervasive. JAMES TYNER (Ohio) and ZUZANNADZIUBAN (Poznan) both addressed the politics of mem-ory and the construction of spaces of both remembranceand forgeing/silencing in post-genocide societies, withTyner giving a critical account of selective memorialisa-tion in Cambodia, and Dziuban returning to the chrono-topic frame in her analysis of the construction of land-scapes of traumatic memory at the sites of the former ex-termination camps at Belzec and Sobibor in Poland. Bothpapers emphasised the need to historicise memory andits absences, drawing aention to political and aestheticframings and their effects for visitors to memorials.

In the second panel of the day, the speakers wereconcerned with the use of the forensic to (re)constructcartographies of terror and trauma in the context offorced disappearance and clandestine graves. e sub-ject of ALEJANDRO CASTILLEJO CUÉLLAR’s (Bogotá)paper was the reconstruction of the scenes of massivecrimes in Colombia, within the context of the so-called’Justice and Peace Law’. His presentation of ethno-

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graphic observations from the field provided a frame-work for the discussion of three general themes: thekaleidoscopic nature of truth; the inscriptions le uponlandscapes by violence and war; and the paradox of vi-olence made invisible, present only in the absences itleaves behind. GABRIEL GATTI (Basque Country) con-tinued with the theme of forced disappearance, askinghow one lives in and among thematerial ruins and emptyspaces that mark the absence of victims. Contemplat-ing the possibility, through forensic archaeology, of con-structing narratives in the suffix ’re-’ (re-production, re-construction, re-cuperation, re-turn), Gai argued for an’archive of absences’ and empty spaces that would in turnreflect narratives in the suffix ’de-’ (de-stabilisation, de-construction, de-integration). FRANCISCO FERRÁNDIZ(Madrid) spoke about the exhumation of mass graves inSpain, and the emergence over the last decade of a publicdebate about historical memory of the Spanish Civil Warand what forms this remembrance should take; formswhich could include the judicial, ritual, narrative, andartistic.

EYALWEIZMAN (London) closed the day’s proceed-ings with an analysis of ’forensic architecture’ as a toolfor beer understanding the workings of violence. Us-ing the example of the Occupied Territories, Weizmandemonstrated how apparently benign decisions regard-ing the allocation and the engineering of space can infact act as ’weapons’, aiding and abeing the violationof human rights. e targeted bombing of Gaza was, hesuggested, a form of architectural violence, the work-ings of which can be understood through the forensictestimony of objects and spaces, in ways that the testi-mony of the living cannot achieve. Forensic architecture,Weizman argued, turns objects into witnesses, with theforensic scientist acting as translator. Weizman’s lecturelaunched a debate, which was to continue into the fol-lowing day, about the usefulness of the Agambean con-cept of the ’state of exception’. For Weizman, it wasless useful to speak of states of exception that describecertain situations as existing outside of the law, ratherwe should speak of thresholds between different judicialframeworks; law, he argued, offers no real protection.

e motif of the state of exception reappeared in dif-ferent forms over the course of the final day of the con-ference, with the speakers in the first panel focusing ontheatrical representations of spaces of exception. eSpanish playwright and philosopher JUAN MAYORGA(Madrid) spoke about three of his plays, each of whichdealt with spaces marked firstly by violence and, sec-ondly, by the tension between memory and forgeing.MARIANA EVA PEREZ (Konstanz) presented her analy-

sis of the different dramatic spaces in theatre, and drewaention to the destabilisation of the space of the familyhome in two Argentinian plays dealing with the themeof the forced disappearance of children through State ter-rorism. e aesthetic and moral choices associated withdramaturgy were the subject of discussion in this panel.For Mayorga, the role of art was to ’fill in the gaps’ of theofficial archive, to be aentive to these, and to create anartifice that itself helps spectators to be aentive, also.

SILVANA MANDOLESSI (Konstanz/Leuven) wassimilarly concerned with literary representations of vio-lence and its remembrance. Her analysis of recent Argen-tinian novels about the dictatorship drew aention to theuse of two spatial motifs of the ghostly and the gothic torepresent political violence and its lingering effects: thatof the ’haunted house’ and the disappeared city. Whilethe motif of the haunted house features in the novels’thematisation of the tension between the ’closed space’of inside and the perceived threat of outside space, aswell as of the intrusion of the violent past into the spaceof present, that of the disappeared city draws aentionto the dialectic between absence and presence in a soci-ety marked by forced disappearances. As such, Mando-lessi argues, the fantastic is an aempt to articulate thatwhich exceeds signification. MELTEM AHISHKA (Istan-bul) explored the theme of monstrosity within a differentcultural context in her analysis of the politics of monu-ments, memory and countermemory in Turkey. roughher discussion of a vandalised workers’ monument in To-phane - a former industrial area of Istanbul, recently gen-trified with a complex of art galleries - Ahiska revealedthe web of discursive meanings that can aach to a sin-gle, apparently excluded, site or object. ’Monstrous’ in itsdisfigurement, when threatened with removal this par-tially destroyed monument was revealed to be an impor-tant site of memory for the local - largely disenfranchised- migrant community living around it. In this sense, sheargued, the ’monstrous’ can also be seen to speak, and,in its own way, to remember.

In a recorded contribution, DAVID HARVEY (NewYork) reflected upon the relationships between daily vi-olence, power and space within economies of exploita-tion, in particular in relation to the policing of urbanspace. For Harvey, the analysis of class struggle in thiscontext provides a more useful framework than the con-cept of states of exception, a position not shared bySTAVROS STAVRIDES (Athens) in his account of urbanprotest in the Occupy Syntagma Square movement inGreece. Stavrides extends Agamben’s concept to un-derstand the state of exception as a mechanism basedin the continuous effort to justify the suspension of the

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law. For Stavrides, the urban landscape is increasinglymade up of enclaves, such as the sweatshop, the shop-ping mall or the gated community, each of which arecharacterised by normalised states of exception in whichgeneral law or rights are suspended and distinct adminis-trative rules apply. e Occupy movement not only rep-resents a (re)appropriation of urban space, it is also a re-definition of public spaces as common space, a space ofnegotiation and of thresholds: a space ’in between’ thatbelongs to everybody and to nobody. e collective im-provisation involved in creating such spaces emerges as aform of opposition against controlled public spaces, andagainst normalised states of exception. e final paperof the conference, by PILAR CALVEIRO (Puebla) offereda comparative analysis of three concentrationary modelsthat serve as paradigms of the state of exception: the Naziconcentration camp, clandestine detention centres in Ar-gentina, and Guantánamo Bay and other ’black sites’ ofthe so-called ’War on Terror’. Analysing how spatial-ities were constructed and controlled in each context,Calveiro traced the ways in which such spaces of excep-tion have served, by both physical and auditorymeans, tocreate scenarios of radical isolation and alienation, con-structing otherness in order to exterminate it.

e conference ’Spatialities of Exception, Violenceand Memory’ brought together scholars from all over theworld and from many distinct disciplines. e paperswere connected, however, in their explorations of thecomplex cartographies of violence and its remembrance.e spatialities of power and resistance, examined herein their historical, political, geographical and culturalmanifestations, propose new ways of understanding hu-man experience as well as, potentially, hope for new andutopian forms of spatial politics in which exception is nolonger the rule. e rich and varied papers, as well as thelively discussions following each panel emphasised thecurrent relevance and significance of space theory bothin the examination of the structures of violence and ex-clusion, and in explorations of memory and trauma stud-ies.

Conference overview:

Inaugural LectureAleida Assmann (Universität Konstanz): Framing

places of terror in postwar Germany

JayWinter (University of Yale): Faces, voices, and theshadow of catastrophe

IntroductionKirsten Mahlke (Universität Konstanz): On spaces of

terror and how to narrate them

Panel I - e traces of annihilation in landscapes: in-scriptions and absences

James Tyner (Geography. Kent University, USA): Vi-olent erasures and erasing violence: Making the Cambo-dian genocide visible

Zuzanna Dziuban (Adam Mickiewicz University):Landscapes of Traumatic Memory in ContemporaryPoland: e Politics of Framing

Panel II - Actors, territories and spaces in process of po-litical violence

Gabriel Gai (Universidad del País Vasco): e over-whelming spatialityof the victim. Notes to countercur-rent thinking of a weak identity

Alejandro Castillejo Cuéllar (Universidad de los An-des): Towards thebody traces: space, confession and theplaces of law

Francisco Ferrándiz (CCHS - CSIC): Mass graves,landscapes of terror

Eyal Weizman (Goldsmiths, University of London):Violent surfaces: the texture of the laws of war

Panel III - Spatial representations of disappearance andexception

Juan Mayorga (CCHS-CSIC): eatrical representa-tions of spaces of exception

Mariana Eva Pérez (Universität Konstanz): e ’fam-ily’ home in the dramaturgy about the disappearance ofchildren in Argentina

Panel IV - Space and monstrositySilvana Mandolessi (Constance University): Haunted

houses, horror literature and the space of memory in Ar-gentine Postdictatorship literature

Meltem Ahiska (University of Istanbul): Monumen-tality, monstrosity, and counter-memory: A case studyfrom Turkey

Panel V - Spaces of exception: power and resistancesDavid Harvey (City University of New York): Mem-

ory, that powerful political force (videorecorded contri-bution)

Stavros Stavrides (National Technical University ofAthens): Emancipating spatial practices in struggleagainst the urban “state of exception”: Towards the “cityof thresholds”?

Pilar Calveiro (Universidad Autónoma de Puebla):Spaces of exception

A video projection of “In between” by Silvina DerMeguerditchian was screened during breaks.

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If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the list discussion logs at:hp://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl.

Citation: Sophie Oliver. Review of , Spatialities of Exception, Violence and Memory. H-Soz-u-Kult, H-Net Reviews.March, 2012.URL: hp://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=35825

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