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.
Thinking With Archives: Creatively Engaging with Traces of Multispecies Care in Documents to Excavate and Repair Inherited Ways of Being and Acting in the World
Elizabeth Vander Meer & Alette Willis
María Puig de la Bellacasa encourages communities of care to acknowledge their interdependence not only with actors in the present, but also in and with the past. In the present, both authors live care with companion animals, cats and a dog respectively. In our academic practices, we think with care about contemporary ethics and practices through circus and memoir respectively. In the political sphere we are differently but relatedly positioned in relation to issues concerning multispecies care. In this paper, we come together to explore our inheritance of caring affects, ethics, politics, and practices in Edinburgh, where we both now dwell, through archival material from three institutions that are still part of our urban context: the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland, One Kind, and the Royal (Dick) Veterinary College. These archives go back to the early nineteenth (RZSS) and early twentieth centuries. They provide two hundred years of traces of matters of care in multispecies interdependencies in Scotland.
Working with “found” imagery, prose, and poetry, we interweave our own lives with past lives to form novel narrative possibilities for multispecies care in twenty-first century Scotland and beyond. This paper contributes to bringing “thinking with care” through arts-based methodologies to archival research, practicing a way of being in relationship to previously unknown (to the authors) pasts that nevertheless live on in the present. Through our arts-based practice, we can acknowledge the affective and ethical aspects of coming into relationship with texts, images, and objects bequeathed to us by members of an extended community of multispecies care who are no longer living and breathing on this Earth. We argue that this is a reparative process of coming into kinship with those who have come before us.
Elizabeth Vander Meer, University of Edinburgh, has just completed a PhD in anthropology (anthrozoology subdiscipline) at the University of Exeter, titled They Are Exactly Like People: The Symbolic, Embodied and Material Lives of Wild Animal Circus Performers in France. Her research is multidisciplinary, drawing on anthropology, compassionate conservation, performance studies, philosophy, and social theory. She combines interests in biodiversity conservation with human-animal studies, conducting multispecies ethnographic studies that focus on human-wildlife conflict and co-existence and captive wild animals in circuses, rescue centres, and zoos.
Alette Willis, PhD, University of Edinburgh, is a cultural geographer, author, and performance storyteller. She is a Senior Lecturer in Counselling, Psychotherapy and Applied Social Science, with a research focus on narratives as mediators of ethics, values, and care in more-than-human worlds. She works, teaches, and supervises with arts-informed methodologies. She has worked collaboratively with local organizations, including Book Trust Scotland, The Scottish Storytelling Forum, and Scottish Communities Climate Action Network on research exploring how stories contribute to shifting values in relation to the other than human. She served as Storyteller in Residence for the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland for two years and has been a Talking Tree at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.
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
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design website: Johanne de Heus and Marielle Schuurman