panel 5Woundings: Archives of Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation
Transforming Historical Trauma: “Wounding” and Repair in Contemporary Art
Amy Louise Stenvert
During the spring of 1863, a man known by the name of Peter escaped from a plantation in Louisiana and found safety among Union soldiers encamped at Baton Rouge. Before enlisting in the military, he underwent extensive medical examination. His back was heavily mutilated and filled with horrific scars. The photograph that was taken of Peter’s back, often referred to as “The Scourged Back” and in some instances as “Whipped Peter” or “A Map of Slavery,” became proof of slavery’s brutality and was used by the abolitionists in their efforts to end slavery. A journalist for the New York Independent wrote: “This Card Photograph should be multiplied by the 100,000, and scattered over the States. It tells the story in a way that even Mrs. [Harriet Beecher] Stowe cannot approach, because it tells the story to the eye” (as cited in Collins, 1985, p. 45). And this is exactly what happened: copied by engravers for publication in Harper’s Weekly, July 4, 1863, the picture was reproduced many times and spread across the country soon after.
Now, more than 160 years later, the image still provides a powerful imprint of the horrors of slavery. It doesn’t come as a surprise that recently Emancipation, a Hollywood blockbuster film, was produced in which the story of “Whipped Peter” takes center stage. Interestingly, the image has also been reproduced in contemporary artworks, most notably by Arthur Jafa, Victor Sonna, and Fabiola Jean-Lewis. During this presentation, I will analyze Jafa’s “Ex-Slave Gordon,” Sonna’s “Wall of Reconciliation,” and Jean Lewis’ “Madame Beauvoir’s Painting” through the lens of Griselda Pollock’s approach to trauma. Rather than focusing on the common “model of cure,” Pollock (2013, p. 27) argues for an understanding of trauma that confronts “wounding” and shows how aesthetic practices might mediate and transmit traces of trauma (after-affects). Through close visual analysis, I will argue that each of these works have the power to transform – going beyond cure or repair – historical trauma in their own specific way.
References
Collins, K. (1985). The scourged back. History of Photography, 9(1), 43-45.
Pollock, G. (2013). After-affects, after-images: Trauma and aesthetic transformation in the virtual feminist museum. Manchester University Press.
Amy Louise Stenvert is a freelance curator, writer, and researcher living and working in Utrecht, the Netherlands. She holds a BA in Classical Archaeology from the University of Groningen and a MA in Curating Art and Cultures from the University of Amsterdam. She has worked together with many artists and curated several exhibitions of contemporary art, amongst others Freehaven (2019), Empathy: No Man is an Island(2020), Where the Wild Roses Grow (for Trudi) (2022), and Do for Love (2023) for Museum IJsselstein. Currenty, she works for The Mondrian Initiative, an international artist residency programme which takes place in the former studio of Piet Mondrian in Laren. Her main research interests and topics on writing include: curating, applied arts around 1900, discrepancy between theory and artistic practice, and the themes of loss, repair, and healing in contemporary art.
Re-futuring the Soil: Interdisciplinary Artistic Collaborations with the Inclusion of Art Education
Brenda Bikoko & Toshie Takeuchi
In part 1 the presentation focuses on the artistic research titled “Refuturing the Soil,” which delves into the overlooked history of the Shinkolobwe uranium mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo. This mine supplied the majority of uranium for the atomic bombs used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This exploration, grounded in interdisciplinary collaboration, involves artists, geologists, activists, and archivists. The aim is to integrate anthropological and decolonial perspectives to re-narrate the impacts of war from the scarcely documented local Congolese viewpoints, re-linking the narratives between the exploited land, uranium, forced labour, ongoing colonial impacts, and the representations of atomic bombs globally. The presentation will demonstrate why collaborative approaches are vital in reconstituting these connections and what “care aesthetics” have emerged from this process, referencing scholars like Arturo Escobar (2018), and Su-ming Khoo and Anique Vered (2020). The artistic outcomes of this research will be showcased at the Biennale de Lubumbashi 2024 through a collaborative performance and video presentation with artists Sixte Kakinda and Roger Peet.
In part 2 the process of presenting “Refuturing the Soil” to art students as an introduction to ethics of care is addressed. Furthermore, the students will be introduced to the Arte Útil methodology (Saviotti, 2023), which advocates artistic thinking to imagine, create, and implement tactics that change how we act in society. Within this context, the students will contemplate in different groups about what could be a sustainable Arte Útil project with special focus on care. The participation of the students from Sint-Lucas Karel de Grote University College Antwerp is assured. Depending on the availability of financial resources a joint with students from the Academy of Fine Arts in Kinshasa will be instituted.
References
Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the pluriverse: Radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds. Duke University Press.
Khoo, S. & Vered, A. (2020). Including the “invisible middle” of decoloniality. Journal of International Women’s Studies, 21(7), 225–242.
Saviotti, A. (2023). Hacking art education: Arte Útil as an educational methodology to foster change for curriculum planning [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. Liverpool John Moores University.
Brenda Bikoko specialises in the re-appropriation of colonial archives in contemporary art at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, focusing on female artists. A lecturer at Sint-Lucas Karel de Grote Hogeschool Antwerp, she teaches Anthropology of the Arts and Art and the Congo, blending historical narratives with identity and art. She is also part of Troubled Archives, a project reassessing colonial legacies and a board member of Sophia the Belgian Gender Studies Network.
Toshie Takeuchi (she/her) is a visual artist, filmmaker and organiser of community art activities. She was born in Aichi, Japan, and currently living and working in Copenhagen, Denmark. Her art practice explores micro stories such as personal memories, site-situated local tales and folk traditions to widen critical perspectives on hegemonic historical and geopolitical narratives, which are often shaped by imperial colonial systems of memory and sensorial control. Her works emerge from layered of collective engagements in transformation and making relations. Her works has been shown e.g. at Kunsthal Charlottenborg (DK), De Appel Amsterdam (NL), Wadden Tide Vadehavsfestival (DK), Galleri Image (DK), Artspeak (CA), and Australian Centre for Photography (AU). toshietakeuchi.com/
Mending as the Means: Yasmine El Meleegy’s Enactments of Care and Reimagination of Colonial Memory through Craft
Jamila Abdel-Razek
Can craft practices mend colonial memory and help reimagine processes of resistance? This paper engages with the Egyptian artist Yasmine El Meleegy’s site-specific intervention, Scaffolding a Familiar Epoch (2021). The Cairo-born (b. 1991) and based artist’s performative intervention was undertaken over three months in which she renovated, cleaned, and archived Stephenson Pharmacy, a British colonial-era pharmacy in Downtown Cairo. Producing a participatory museum-like experience, El Meleegy’s intervention explores craftwork’s potential to work through trauma and reimagine political imaginaries. Drawing on Glen Adamson’s theorisation of craft and memory (2018), Sara Ahmed’s inquiry on “use” (2019), and Marianne Hirsch’s conceptualisation of “postmemory” (1997), I ask whether El Meleegy’s processes of craft have the potential to mobilise forms of care such as mending colonial memory, working through familial mythologies, and creating political imaginaries. Beyond craftwork, I will consider whether the role of the craftworker and pharmacist act as caretakers of memory and tradition while disrupting conventional notions of healing.
I will answer such questions by exploring the following: discussing how craftwork, through its haptic gestures, mimics the act of “working through” trauma, how the continuity of craftwork through family businesses conflates personal and collective memory, and how laborious efforts of craftwork protest the impersonal and capitalistic production of the current pharmaceutical industry. Throughout, I will discuss El Meleegy’s insertion of her own craft-based objects that contest notions of “use” and rely on postmemory to fill the void between an object and its maker. To conclude, I will consider how the pharmacy, which is still in use and has been run by an Egyptian family since Egypt’s independence from British colonial rule, stands as a testament to reclamation, especially of the role of museums in Egyptian colonial history, while reimagining political resistance.
References
Adamson, G. (2018). The invention of craft. Bloomsbury Visual Arts.
Ahmed, S. (2019). What’s the use? On the uses of use. Duke University Press Books.
Hirsch, M. (1997). Family frames: Photography, narrative and postmemory. Harvard University Press.
Jamila Abdel-Razek is a Gallery Assistant at Gypsum, Cairo, and a writer whose work has most recently been featured in Frieze Magazine. She holds a BA in History of Art from University College London, where she completed a dissertation titled Mending as the Means: Reconstruction and Repair in Egyptian Postmemory. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary art and the cultural history of the Middle East and North Africa, with a particular interest in craft-based practices as acts of love, solidarity, and care.
Location
23-25 January 2025
Kontakt der Kontinenten, Amersfoortsestraat 20
3769 AS Soesterberg
Online
23-25 January 2025
Kontakt der Kontinenten, Amersfoortsestraat 20
3769 AS Soesterberg
Online
Contact info Louis van den Hengel
Images homepage: Merel Visse, Christine Leroy
design website: Johanne de Heus and Marielle Schuurman