Memory and materiality

Whilst a growing body of literature working at the intersection of security and visual studies recognizes the value of studying images, how these visualities are produced is less theorized, especially with respect to materialities and their capacity to compel meanings. Analysing the tours of Joint Task Force Guantanamo arranged by the US military for VIP visitors since the site opened, this article argues that the selective organisation and presentation of specific matter was image-making and therefore meaning-making. Through efforts to produce a spectacle of detention, Guantánamo was deliberately constructed as ‘safe, humane, legal, transparent’, in the process shifting the meaning of these very concepts. Guantánamo’s tours as visual and material practices were therefore used to produce meaning in the debate over the future of the site and over how best to secure the US state post-9/11. They were part of the constitution of the war’s legitimacy leading, ultimately, to certain understandings of security. Guantánamo with its ‘object lessons’ and ‘concrete messages’ is therefore a useful case study for understanding security meaning-making as produced by the interaction of linguistic, visual and material domains and their elements.

"The paper discusses the role of material culture for historical
re-enactors of the Viking Age. Three issues are
analysed: (a) the clothing and accessories worn by a
typical contemporary warrior, craftsman and woman
of the Viking times and the range of goods available
for purchase at historical re-enactment markets, (b)
the active and transformative aspect of material culture
for present-day Vikings, (c) the paradox of how
mirroring the material past by historical re-enactors is
actually a deeply ahistorical category. The main conclusion
of this study is that historical re-enactment of
the Viking Age is essentially about material culture.
The paper is based on observations made during the
Viking Week that took place at the Museum of Foteviken
(Sweden) on 24–30 June 2013."

""Next to a hand-coloured etching showing a naked woman, Louise Bourgeois writes in pencil: “I Give everything Away”. The statement could be interpreted as being consistent with the revelatory nature ascribed to her art, that of a woman without secrets. For Bourgeois, as is well documented, life and art merged, and often the discussion of her art has focused on its subject matter – core themes of femininity, sexuality, childhood trauma, abandonment and isolation. In turn, this has led to the circulation of narratives mined from her biography, especially of her vocalised fears and traumas. Critical discourses have proceeded to (re)narrate the events of her life, attempting to create a precise symbolic relationship between subject matter, form and matter. Sadly, the narratives have also given rise to reductive commentary that infantilises the artist, and portrays her as the neurotic, if not insane, ‘spider-woman’. This kind of ‘biographical criticism’, with its emphasis on the artist’s life, can also detract from the encounter with her work.  In the case of the ‘fabric works’, (psycho)biographical readings tend to have nostalgic overtones, or to overemphasise the correspondence between her experience in the parents’ tapestry workshop and the symbolic repair of psychic damage. But how to account for the affective force of the work? I suggest this stems from an encounter with loss – the artist’s and ours; her work as a form of staging loss.

Through my research on her late work with textiles, I explore how its materiality may offer us a way to approach the question of loss in her life and art, the relationship between loss and artistic practice, and consider the viewer’s response to the work. By concentrating on this late body of work, on its materials and processes, whilst trying to avoid psychobiographical interpretation, I suggest that her choice of material is not purely experimental from a formal perspective, nor simply a nostalgic way of recovering the past. Rather a way of dealing with memories more akin to mourning and melancholia. The fabric works emerge from her encounter with past and future losses – separation, exile, death and her own mortality are woven into the textiles she kept over a lifetime. She transforms them into artworks that carry the traces of the lost objects; they carry the trace of the Other and the Other as trace. For a woman who never threw anything away, who accumulated a lifetime’s worth of beautiful clothes, house linen and old rags, late in her life and practice she finally gives everything away.""

"There is always something to learn from Sherlock Holmes. It is a good sign that an archaeologist has been often identified with the private detective:

The Sherlock Holmes type detective has become a common association with archaeology.
Although the detective has been associated with other disciplines too […], the link with archaeology is nevertheless extremely close. As has often been pointed out […], both archaeology and (forensic) criminology draw, in parts, on seemingly incontrovertible material evidence, which is carefully documented and taken to provide significant clues as that what really had happened at the site under investigation (Holtorf 2007: 75-76)."

Archaeology has been for many years identified with its own method, that of excavation. It is the way the public sees archaeology and many archaeologists think of themselves too (e.g. Holtorf 2007). However, Rodney Harrison recently pointed out the crucial role of the surface in archaeological thinking (Harrison 2011, in press).

"Archaeology as practiced by anthropologists is no longer only about prehistoric societies. As the world becomes increasingly preoccupied with preserving cultural heritage for future
generations, archaeologists are increasingly shifting their attention from mummies and pottery to contemporary phenomena. Cultural heritage that is worth preserving could be almost
anything: from Stonehenge, through to the pyramids in Egypt, to places where Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings were filmed. Even such places as the ruins of Nazi factories or Soviet
war infrastructure are fragments of our history and can say something significant about our past. In fact, blockbuster films can be just as valid a topic for anthropological investigation."

Archaeologists have been interested in Hollywood films for a number of decades. Initially, their attention was focused on cinema’s misperception of the practice of archaeology and the subject under study (the past). Every film is, to use a Hegelian distinction, a story in itself, presenting a  more or less coherent story. At the same time, each film is for itself: a meta-film (meta-story) which reflects on and encapsulates the context within which it was made. In this paper these two levels of cinema are scrutinised in relation to How to Train Your Dragon (2010), an animation about Vikings and dragons. The paper aims to show how the (imaginable) past is used to both mask and stage tensions of contemporary politics. 

The abundance of the references to the past in the present causes some theoretical problems. In other words, usually analysing different manifestations of the past in e.g. computers games, Hollywood films and so on to much attention is paid only on content (what is presented). Formal aspects of each film, computer game and so on are omitted. I want to explore this problem a little bit in this short text by taking as an example a historical re-enactment movement of the Viking Age.

""We live in a world–or so we’re told–in which we’re obsessed with the new. Shopping malls, glossy magazines, and catwalk parades encourage us to buy more new, shiny stuff. But the famous song line, “Hey, Macklemore! Can we go thrift shopping?” by American rapper Ben Haggerty (a.k.a. Macklemore) suggests that fashion on a different trajectory.
To put it simply, Macklemore’s song suggest that what’s old is new again. It is only by wearing kitschy material culture from the ’80s and ’90s found in a thrift shop that one can be considered fashionable and–as it is often said–cool. What ten years ago would have been discernible as a sign of a lack of good taste is today an ultimate example of being fashionable. In short, non-fashion is its own fashion today. The only new things are from the past.""

I was sitting with a group of historical re-enactors in front of a fire and listening to them attentively. It was during the thirteenth Meeting of the Slavic Warriors in Grzybowo (Poland) in 2012. One of the re-enactors commented that, during his day-to-day life and work, he feels like the living dead. It is only during summer weekends, when historical re-enactment events take place, that he casts off this zombie-like persona and truly feels alive. Other re-enactors present agreed with him. Historical re-enactment is not, for them, a hobby. It is their way of life.

One of the many examples of material culture where materiality and memory are deeply interwoven is a certain tram cemetery in Wrocław (Poland) (fig. 1). That is why I will shortly describe the history of the site, to focus later on interesting problems which confront us, such as heritage sites as tram and/or car cemeteries. I refer also to cinema, where issues often discussed by archaeologists, like ruins, material culture, heritage in becoming, etc. are staged in such a way that is worthy of closer attention.

A spectre is haunting contemporary archaeologies – the spectre of the present. That is to say, one has recently been witnessing a shift in archaeological approaches: a new, ‘neo-materialistic paradigm’ (so-called return to things) is slowly emerging on the scene. It indicates weak aspects of post-processual perspective with its emphasis on the social, meaning, sings and analyses of discourse, among others. On the contrary to post-processual approaches, here attention is mostly paid to materiality of things. What has also been clearly pointed out is the fact that, more than ever before, the present slowly becomes more important and interesting for archaeologists than the distant past (e.g. the Neolithic) (fig. 1). It is rather the materiality of things than constitutes archaeology than the focus on the distant past (e.g. Lucas 2004).

""""The Cold War was one of the most significant geopolitical conflicts of the twentieth century. It’s no wonder that, decades on, cinema is still exploring the motif. Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Stranglelove (1959) and the James Bond series are just two well-known examples out of many.
The Cold War has not only fascinated film directors. It has recently become research focus for archaeologists as well.
Between military installations, nuclear bunkers, spy equipment, and a trail of documentation, the Cold War left behind a massive material legacy in many countries that is fascinating to study for its physical and human dimensions. (In fact, universities run courses on it.)""

It is generally understood that archaeologists study ancient societies, or to put it in another way, a distant past. The empirical basis for such studies is prehistoric artefacts and other material remains. But first of all, an archaeologist has to look for his or her objects of study. To do so, it is necessary to conduct excavations, which consist in slowly, meticulously and carefully removing the ground’s layers one after the other. The scientific process of excavating the ground seems to be a very specific feature of archaeology (see Edgeworth this volume).