I work in places where presence—the presence of the contemporary past—is conflicting, controversial and painful. I look at destructive development, totalitarianism, repression and war in different regions of the world: Spain, Ethiopia and Brazil.
-In Brazil, together with other colleagues, I document the traces of campsites and roads made by illegal loggers who are destroying a pristine Amazonian forest and threatening the lives and livelihood of a group of hunter-gatherers. I am interested more generally in the modernist ideology that has traditionally permeated Brazilian politics and that has enormously destructive effects.
-In Spain, I am involved in projects that explore the remains of the civil war (1936-1939) and the subsequent dictatorship (ended in 1975), with an especial interest in the technologies of punishment: concentration camps and prisons. I have also studied the material evidence of massive emigration, which is somewhat linked to the outcomes of the war. I have tried to capture the drama of broken peasant lives through the documentation of abandoned houses, things and personal artefacts.
-In Ethiopia, my work focuses on the remains of communism, fascism and colonialism, and development projects. One of the poorest countries of the world is literally filled with expensive industrial rubbish: from tractors to tanks, from collective farms to factories.
In all cases, I am interested in politics, trauma, violence and memory. I am also deeply interested in rhetoric and mediation.
SEVEN POINTS ON PRESENCE
1- Presence and the agency of the past.
Commenting on American tortures in former Saddam Hussein’s prison, Abu Ghraib, Eelco Runia (2006) writes: “The past may have a presence that is so powerful that it can use us, humans, as its materials”. Torture practices were so overwhelmingly present in Abu Ghraib that Americans had to repeat them. This example is pertinent to one of my concerns: how does affect Spanish politics the presence of an unchallenged fascist legacy in the form of buildings, monuments, memorials, barracks and prisons? Are not we, in a sense, condemned to repeat fascist politics by the agency of this omnipresent totalitarian built environment?
2- Presence and metonymy.
According to the Webster Dictionary metonymy is “a figure of speech consisting of the use of the name of one thing for that of another of which it is an attribute or with which it is associated”. A rusty tank in Ethiopia stands for the experience of war in the Horn of Africa. Memorials and museums of war and genocide resort to metonymy all the time in order to convey a sense of presence. The most poignant exhibits of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum are ordinary things and fragments from the past: a burned child’s trycicle, young women’s hair lost from the effect of radiation. The same occurs in Auschwitz Memorial and Museum: shoes, glasses, clothes. Things from the past that stand for that past as a whole. They haunt more than any detailed historical narrative could ever haunt. Eelco Runia (2006) thinks that “Presence is not the result of metaphorically stuffing up absences with everything you can lay your hands on. It can at best be kindled by metonymically presenting absences”. I have spent many hours in abandoned houses in Galicia, in northwestern Spain, drawing plans, documenting artefacts, making inventories of vanished lives. And I have felt the drama of emigration through the most trivial things: an abandoned kitchen with dishes, pots and pans, a coat still kept in a closet, family letters and photographs. You do not need a well-structured and complete narrative to understand emigration. You just need a couple of old shoes. And it is not necessary to have more than an abandoned military camp full of rusty tin cans to understand the politics of famine in communist Ethiopia.
3- The production of presence.
Edward Castronova (2005) points out that the success of online games is not based on a very detailed virtual recreation of reality. Actually, the graphics of most of those games are rather coarse and simple. Yet the games manage to produce a sense of presence and people feel strongly immersed in them. Presence does not require extreme accuracy nor realistic representation. One of the most effective war memorials ever built—Maya Lin’s Vietnam War Memorial in Washington D.C.—has no naturalistic reproduction of war or of war’s victims, but just names. On the contrary, Disneyland-like historical reconstructions usually fail to produce presence. What produces a sense of presence then? Traces, fragments: a tank turret perforated by two rocket-propelled grenades, a bottle of nail polisher abandoned in an illegal logger campsite in the Amazon forest, newspaper clippings in a prison cell, a bullet hole…
4- Presence and narrative.
Eelco Runia (2006) states that “Presence is not brought about by stories”. “The things that stick do so because they do not connect to something already in the mind (…) they just float around”. Presence might be achieved by picking up those things that float around—marginal things that lurk in the fringes of linear, teleological narratives. The Betsimisaraka of Madagascar when questioned about the traumatic experience of French colonialism did not often produce what we would call a coherent narrative—the French came and conquered the land, did this and that, and then left. Instead, they remember that the colonizers had “terrible, small yapping dogs” (Cole 1998). That is the way presence is summoned up—through metonymy. The trivial and the marginal are sinister and eloquent. We need other sort of narratives to produce presence: non-linear, fragmented, catachretic narratives. What really impressed me when I recently visited one of Europe’s largest prisons—Carabanchel, in Madrid—was not the monumental Benthamian architecture (which was impressive enough), but those things that lay outside the main narrative of punishment and repression: the clothes hangers, the photograph of an Austrian landscape in a prison cell, the syringes and blood analyses abandoned in front of the prison’s infirmary. One feels that, in a way, this is the truth of discipline and punishment. It was also the thousand of graffiti, the rubbish everywhere and the immense devastation produced by vandals and looters. They are all post-abandonment phenomena not related to the original use of the building, yet they made the presence of the past incredibly vivid and unbearable. The experience of the prison is for me now irremediably associated to walking over broken glass. You can hear its echo on the immense prison vaults.
5- Presence and aesthetics.
What is the danger of overemphasizing rhetoric in our quest for presence? What are the political implications of a hollow ‘aestheticized knowledge’ as Slavoj Žižek (2004) has criticized? In the case of photographer Camilo José Vergara, an obsession with faithful documentation precludes artistic strategies to which other authors resort (black and white stills, overexposed colors, play with textures and contrast). Are truth and rhetoric opposed then? Following Aristotle and Ginzburg’s (2002) reading of the Greek philosopher, I would argue that they are inseparable. It is not aesthetics per se that are problematic, but what we do with them. There is a risk of banal sublimation. Is presence necessarily about the sublime? That is, about feeling the past a sublime experience? From this perspective, aesthetics could be a helpful way to enhance the experience, but this is also politically dangerous. This is the way fascists understood presence. Rik Peters (2006) thinks that “When presenting the past they (the fascists) cared more about presence than about meaning, more about rhetorical effect than about meticulous interpretation, and more about the arousal of emotions than about critical historical judgment. The practice of fascist presence-culture was not dialogue with the past, but a monologue in the present”. In Spain, after the civil war, churches of all over Spain were theatrically inscribed with huge crosses and the names of the soldiers fallen in the war against the Republic. Presiding over crosses and names were always the word “Present!” as if the dead were still alive and replying to the roll-call. This helped arise patriotic emotions and create a strong sensation of presence. However, presence can be the opposite, too: an act of desublimation. We can feel the presence of the past poignantly through its most abject remains. Thus, a revolving experience can produce presence without producing myths: the photographs of syringes and blood analyses in the infirmary of Carabanchel prison, a cow rotting near a latrine of an abandoned development project in Ethiopia, a pot of beans thrown over the floor and full of flies in a deserted logger campsite in the Amazon. For a long time already art has been about much more than pure aesthetics, it would be wrongheaded to over-aestheticize our quest for presence. Rhetoric can be used as a mechanism of desublimization that helps to mobilize both presence and politics.
6- Presence and place.
How does the presence of the past change the nature of a place and affect politics and daily practice? One of the things that struck me when I started to be interested in the archaeology of the Spanish civil war was how invisible the remains of the conflict were in the landscape. They are everywhere but few people seem to be aware of their presence. The surroundings of Madrid are full of trenches, bunkers and concentration camps, interspersed with new buildings, freeways and parks, but it is as if they did not exist. They are present and absent at the same time. However, if you mention them, if you try to attract people’s attention to these places, their presence becomes ominous and controversial. They come to life, as if one had awoken a sleeping monster. They change our perception of place, the nature of the neighbourhood, our identity, our history.
A good case of invisibility is the University of Madrid, which was a battleground for the most part of the civil war. The place was heavily reconstructed by the new regime, eager to erase all traces o the memory of leftist resistance associated to the university. Today, there is no commemorative plaque, monument or street name that remembers the battle. There are, on the contrary, a number of plaques commemorating General Franco’s visits and inaugurations. What happens if we make another past present, a history of struggle for democracy instead of a history of silence and dictatorship? Can we do that? Again, we have to resort to the marginal: traces and fragments—the things that “float around”, in Runia’s apt words. A few buildings that were reconstructed after the war still bear the marks of the conflict, in the form of shell, bullet and shrapnel holes. Nobody seems to notice them. I myself was completely unaware of their existence until I started to be interested in this topic. However, in 2006 a group of former members of the International Brigades were invited to the university and visited the places where they fought, looking for traces of the battle. Through their ritual pilgrimage to those places the divide between past and present was abolished, and with it the divide between past and present politics. The problem is that their pilgrimage itself was an ephemeral performance as well: an unrepeatable event. How to keep the presence of these pasts alive? How to make it change our perception of place and politics in a durable way?
Most photographers and artists focus on people to denounce a particular situation and place plays a negligible role—if any: many photographers use neutral backgrounds and even screens to emphasize individuals. Consider Avedon’s photographs of the American Midwest. Even artists such as Sebastião Salgado tend to leave landscape unproblematized. What about the ‘power of absence’? The absence of people, that is. There is an increasing number of photographers working with the poetics of absence: Camilo José Vergara or Joel Sternfeld are two good examples. They focus on place and show that emptiness is not only uncanny, but also politically motivated. We have to ask ourselves how is it that this place is empty? Why is there no monument or commemorative plaque here? Why does everybody avoid this place? In my case studies, the pertinent questions are: why are the premises of this agricultural project in Ethiopia abandoned? How is it that nobody is driving the tractors or tilling the soil? And where are all the peasant that should be living in those farms in northern Spain? Why has nobody returned to this house to pick up family photographers, heirlooms, letters? And above all the key question, what happened here? A road in the outskirts of a village in Galicia, in northern Spain, was the scenario of brutal executions during the civil war. Nobody knows exactly where the victims were buried. They are somewhere between the road, the bridge, the river and the birches. What makes this place so uncanny and the presence of death so powerful is the mixture of absence and the knowledge that something terrible happened here: an empty place in a forest full of ghosts.
7- Presence and the politics of documentation.
Can documentation be subversive? What are the politically disturbing implications of producing presence? What are the strategies used to neutralize the potential power of presence? Our archaeological documentation of recently abandoned logger sites in the Amazonian forest is an obvious political act. The same occurs with the remains of failed development projects in Ethiopia. The prison of Carabanchel is an important, yet ambivalent, symbol of the struggle for democracy in Spain, but also a legacy from a troubled past that many want to forget and erase. Therefore, the transformation of the prison, or part of the prison, of Carabanchel into a museum finds unsurmountable obstacles. Political authorities and research institutions are reluctant to fund projects that deal with the material legacy of civil war and dictatorship. However, those who would oppose any engagement with the actual building in a meaningful and creative way are probably ready to spend much more money in a 3D reconstruction of the prison: the virtual is a much safer world. Of course, there are other bolder ways of neutralizing presence. In Spain, local governments and town councils do whatever they can to prevent the exhumations of the 100,000 people killed after the war by the new dictatorial regime. Presence, for many, only means trouble and the reopening of old wounds (that were never healed, in the first place). Making the past present and public tears a veil of silence woven through 40 years of dictatorship and 30 years of complacent democracy. How dangerous it is to document the past in certain contexts? Some scholars have been sued in Spain for denouncing infamous war criminals and some monuments erected to memorialize mass graves have been defaced. Thus proves Walter Benjamin right when he says: “Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious”.
The enemy Benjamin talks about abhors presence: archaeology can be a powerful political weapon to bring the dead back and haunt the living.
REFERENCES CITED
- Castronova, E. 2005. The Business and Culture of Online Game. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
- Cole, J. 1998. The Work of Memory in Madagascar. American Anthropologist 25(4): 610-633.
- Ginzburg, C. 2001. Rapporti di forza. Storia, retorica, prova. Milan: Feltrinelli.
- Peters, D. 2006. Actes de présence: Presence in Fascist Political Culture. History and Theory 45(3): 362-374.
- Runia, E. 2006. Spots of time. History and Theory 45(3): 305-316.
- Žižek, S. 2004. Organs without bodies. Deleuze and consequences. New York; London: Routledge.
