Art, Anthropology, and Contested Heritage: Ethnographies of TRACES 9781350088108, 9781350088139, 9781350088115

Table of contents :
Cover page
Halftitle page
Series page
Title
Copyright
Contents
Figures
Contributors
Acknowledgments
1 Working with TRACES Arnd Schneider
Introduction
Art, anthropology, contested heritage
Contested heritage and ethnographic research with TRACES
Methodologies and strategies: ethnography, experiments, and intervention
Ethnographic work with the CCPs
Ethnographic interventions
Notes
References
2 The Scattered Colonial Body Serendipity and Neglected Heritage in the Heart of Rome Arnd Schneider
Serendipity from the outset
Serendipitous vignette
A scattered body: the setting and challenges of access
Objects in transit
Agency, re-enactment, and “reanimation”: facial plaster casts in the Pigorini
Libyan collections and Italo-Libyans: the long decolonization
Serendipitous vignette: mending memory objects
Background: ambiguous de-colonials
Twice returned: displaced memories and return travels, and the non-recognition of “places”
Conclusion: the challenges and limits of art- intervention, or the ethnographic field as artistic laboratory
Notes
References
3 The Palm, the Couscous, the Face Leone Contini
Interview with my grandmother Ersilia, 2002 and 2009 (edited in 2017)
The couscous and the palm
Re-stolen
Notes
4 Research on Research on Research On Reflexive Relationality Matei Bellu
Interlude: the mosquito dream
Part 1. Nesting frictions: unshelling knowledge into institutional policy
Part 2. The decoys of friendships in research
Interlude: a walk on the hill of cemeteries
Part 3. Elusive conflict: The Jewish Bath Business Center
Conclusion: the defaults of boundaries
References
5 Framing Faces A Conversation Between Răzvan Anton and Julie Dawson Led by Matei Bellu Răzvan Anton, Julie Dawson, and Matei Bellu
CCP1
Notes
6 An Ethnography of Process Following the Realization of the Awkward Objects of Genocide Project Katarzyna Maniak
Introduction
Participants in the project
The course of process: what did they see?
Translated into an exhibition
Affective violence in art
Conclusion
Notes
References
7 Awkward Objects of Genocide Project—Difficult Encounters with Holocaust Folk Art A Hybrid Record of Research and Exhibition Planning Roma Sendyka, Erica Lehrer, Wojciech Wilczyk, and Magdalena Zych
Paths towards a collaboration
Research process, field notes
Curatorial researching, documenting, dreaming, and planning: visual log
Notes
References
8 From Something to Nothing A Peculiar Ethnography of a Peculiar Art Project Blaž Bajič
An expectation to say something
The pre-history of DRS’s engagement with death masks
From contentiousness to cultural sainthood
Masking a nothing
From message to massage
Notes
References
9 Casting of Death Domestic Research Society
Creative Co-Production pizza chart with a “Casting of Death” glossary
Artistic upgrade
Research cone chart
Notes
References
10 Dead Images Multivocal Engagement with Human Remains Aglaja Kempinski
My positionality
“The one thing you can guarantee is that it’s going to be controversial”
Multiplicity of viewpoints
Using humor to navigate the unresolvable
Conclusion: outcomes and reactions
Notes
References
11 Disposing of Dead Images Reflections on Contentious Heritage as Toxic Waste John Harries with Tal Adler and Aglaja Kempinski
Dead Images
An ethnography of “Dead Images”
Destroying an exhibition
The big photo coming down
Making contentiousness
The promiscuity of images
Toxic remains
References
12 Participatory Approaches to Places of Unresolved Heritage Working with The Communities of Long Kesh/MazeLaura McAtackney
Introduction
Contentious heritage and Long Kesh/Maze Prison
Positionality: anthropologist, archaeologist, and insider
Insights into “TRACES: Transforming Long Kesh/Maze Prison”
Some final thoughts
References
13 Dispersed Presence Long Kesh/Maze Prison, its Artifacts as Catalysts of Testimony Martin Krenn and Aisling O’Beirn
Method 1: restaging
Method 2: reappropriation
Method 3: retelling
Conclusion
Notes on the figures
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

Art, Anthropology, and Contested Heritage

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Also available from Bloomsbury Alternative Art and Anthropology, edited by Arnd Schneider Experimental Film and Anthropology, edited by Arnd Schneider and Caterina Pasqualino Practicing Art and Anthropology, Anna Laine

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Art, Anthropology, and Contested Heritage Ethnographies of TRACES Edited by Arnd Schneider

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Copyright © Arnd Schneider and Contributors 2020 Arnd Schneider has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editor of this work. Cover and back-cover image © Leone Contini, Video Stills, “Restolen,” 2017 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: ePDF: ePub:

978-1-3500-8810-8 978-1-3500-8811-5 978-1-3500-8812-2

Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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Contents List of Figures Contributors Acknowledgments 1 2 3 4 5

6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13

Working with TRACES Arnd Schneider The Scattered Colonial Body: Serendipity and Neglected Heritage in the Heart of Rome Arnd Schneider The Palm, the Couscous, the Face Leone Contini Research on Research on Research: On Reflexive Relationality Matei Bellu Framing Faces: A Conversation Between Răzvan Anton and Julie Dawson Led by Matei Bellu Răzvan Anton, Julie Dawson, and Matei Bellu An Ethnography of Process: Following the Realization of the Awkward Objects of Genocide Project Katarzyna Maniak Awkward Objects of Genocide Project—Difficult Encounters with Holocaust Folk Art: A Hybrid Record of Research and Exhibition Planning Roma Sendyka, Erica Lehrer, Wojciech Wilczyk, and Magdalena Zych From Something to Nothing: A Peculiar Ethnography of a Peculiar Art Project Blaž Bajič Casting of Death Domestic Research Society Dead Images: Multivocal Engagements with Human Remains Aglaja Kempinski Disposing of Dead Images: Reflections on Contentious Heritage as Toxic Waste John Harries with Tal Adler and Aglaja Kempinski Participatory Approaches to Places of Unresolved Heritage: Working with The Communities of Long Kesh/Maze Laura McAtackney Dispersed Presence: Long Kesh/Maze Prison, its Artefacts as Catalysts of Testimony Martin Krenn and Aisling O’Beirn

Index

vi xi xvii 1 15 37 47

65 75

93 103 121 131 147 159 175 187

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Figures Every reasonable effort has been made to trace and acknowledge the ownership of copyrighted material (including illustrations) included in this book. Any errors that may have occurred are inadvertent and will be corrected in subsequent editions, provided notification is sent to the editor. 2.1

2.2 2.3

2.4 2.5 2.6

2.7

2.8 3.1

3.2

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Corridor of the Museo Prestorico Etnografio “Luigi Pigorini” (part of Museo delle Civiltà), Rome, with model of Sabratha amphitheater, and painting from colonial period (details in note 4, Chapter 2). Photo: Wolfgang Thaler.

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Bronze bust of Rodolfo Graziani, during removal from IsIAO premises, Via Aldrovandi, Rome, March 2017. Photo: Arnd Schneider.

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Leone Contini mounting exhibition “Bel Suol d’Amore—The Scattered Colonial Body,” Museum L. Pigorini, Rome, June 2017. Photo: Wolfgang Thaler.

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Map of colonial Libya (detail), Italy, 1930s, collection of former IsIAO, Rome. Photo: Arnd Schneider.

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Plaster head from Puccioni expedition in Cyrenaica 1928/1929, inv. no. 1987, 4943, 17/22, Museum L. Pigorini, Rome. Photo: Leone Contini.

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Scanning of plaster heads from the Cipriani and Puccioni collections during the opening of the exhibition “Bel Suol d’Amore—The Scattered Colonial Body,” Museum L. Pigorini, Rome, June 2017. Photo: Cinzia Delnevo.

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A group of former Italo-Libyan settlers interviewed in the library of the Museum L. Pigorini, video still from documentation video, Rome, 2017. Photo: Leone Contini.

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Leone Contini and Tina Gaudino repairing the palm at Museum L. Pigorini, 2017. Photo: Arnd Schneider.

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General view of the exhibition, from Ersilia’s perspective, “Bel Suol d’Amore—The Scattered Colonial Body,” Museum L. Pigorini, Rome, June 2017. Photo: Leone Contini.

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Detail of the installation “Inner Libya,” “Bel Suol d’Amore—The Scattered Colonial Body,” Museum L. Pigorini, Rome, June 2017. Photo: Leone Contini.

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Figures 3.3

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Our Palm, Rome 2018. Still from video “A Tripoli,” Leone Contini. Photo: Leone Contini.

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Emblem of the Italian–Libyan association “Associazione politica per il progresso della Libia” (“Political Association for the Progress of Libya”), exhibited at “Bel Suol d’Amore—The Scattered Colonial Body,” Museum L. Pigorini, Rome, June 2017. Image print on booklet Associazione Politica per il progresso della Libia—Statuto, from Contini’s family archive.

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Detail of showcase, exhibition “Bel Suol d’Amore—The Scattered Colonial Body,” Leone Contini, video still from documentation video. Museum L. Pigorini, Rome, June 2017. Photo: Leone Contini.

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3.6

Still from video “Restolen,” Leone Contini. Photo: Leone Contini.

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3.7

Unveiling Sabratha. Still from video “A Tripoli,” Leone Contini. Photo: Leone Contini.

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The house next to the synagogue, with the former Jewish school and courtyard behind the street buildings. Photo: Răzvan Anton.

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5.2

Sketch in prayer book. Photo: Julie Dawson.

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5.3

Art camp students during workshop with archival images and sun-printing. Photo: Julie Dawson.

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First panel of 2017 exhibition “Liminal Portraits: Stories from the Margins.” Photo: Răzvan Anton.

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Still image from video of book created by art camp students. Photo: Gabriel Boldiș.

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Interview with Antoni Kroh. Nowy Sącz, July 2017. Photo: Katarzyna Maniak.

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Interview with German collector Walter Graetz. Berlin, September 2017. Photo: Katarzyna Maniak.

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Wojciech Wilczyk taking a photograph of an object during the research conducted in the Ethnographic Museum in Rzeszów, September 2016. Photo: Katarzyna Maniak.

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View of a part of the exhibition, Ethnographic Museum in Krakow, December 2018. Photo: Wojciech Wilczyk.

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View of a part of the exhibition, Ethnographic Museum in Krakow, December 2018. Photo: Wojciech Wilczyk.

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Erica Lehrer, interview with Zofia Winnicka, Przysietnica, Rzeszów region, southern Poland. Photo: Wojciech Wilczyk.

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3.4

3.5

5.1

5.4 5.5 6.1 6.2 6.3

6.4 6.5 7.1

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Figures

7.2

Erica Lehrer and Magdalena Zych, interview with Louis Galinski, Berlin. Photo: Wojciech Wilczyk.

7.3

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Roma Sendyka and Magdalena Zych, interview with Władysław Naumiuk, Kaniuki, Białystok region, northern Poland. Photo: Wojciech Wilczyk.

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Roma Sendyka and Wojciech Wilczyk, at work in the archives of the National Museum in Kielce, photographing documents regarding Józef Piłat’s Jewish Shop. Photo: Erica Lehrer.

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Erica Lehrer and Wojciech Wilczyk, at work in the photo studio of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. Photo: Roma Sendyka.

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The Match Gallery with posters for the “Casting of Death” exhibition. Photo: DRS.

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Death mask of Simon Gregorčič (1844–1906) at Pixxelpoint festival. Photo: DRS.

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DRS’s research in the depot of the City Museum of Ljubljana. Photo: DRS.

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Damijan Kracina, Alenka Pirman, Jani Pirnat, and Janez Polajnar discussing possible layouts for the exhibition. Photo: Blaž Bajič.

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A public tour of the exhibition with the Resusci Anne manikin. Photo: DRS.

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9.1

Creative Co-Production pizza chart, 2017–18. Photo: DRS.

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9.2

Portrait of death masks from Slovenian public collections, sorted by profession of the depicted persons, 2017–18. Photo: DRS.

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Research stages cone chart. Photo: DRS.

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7.4

7.5 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5

9.3

11.1 “Dead Images” announcement poster at the entrance to the Edinburgh College of Art, June 2018. Photo: Tal Adler.

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11.2 Mounting of the 30-meter-long “Skull Cabinet Panorama” at the “Dead Images” exhibition, Edinburgh College of Art, June 2018. Photo: Tal Adler.

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11.3 Sign at the entrance to the space in which the “Skull Cabinet Panorama” was mounted, “Dead Images” exhibition, Edinburgh College of Art, June 2018. Photo: Tal Adler.

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11.4 Detail of the proposed exhibition’s floor plan with a photo of a revolving door, used for the exhibition-design workshop for CCP4 by Francesca Lanz and Jacopo Leveratto, at the ECA, April 2017. Photo: Tal Adler.

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11.5 Signed agreement for the use of the digital files of the “Skull Cabinet Panorama,” June 2018. Photo: Tal Adler.

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Figures

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11.6 Destroyed “Skull Cabinet Panorama” in flimsy garbage bags, October 8, 2018. Photo: John Harries.

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11.7 Destroyed “Skull Cabinet Panorama” alight in University of Edinburgh Fire Laboratory, October 8, 2018. Photo: John Harries, Joan Smith and Linda Fibiger.

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12.1 Aerial map of Long Kesh/Maze prison hanging on a wall inside the prison (c. 2007). Photo: Laura McAtackney.

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12.2 An overview of the “Troubles” Gallery’ at the Ulster Museum (c. 2014). Photo: Laura McAtackney.

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12.3 Mosaic wall “mural” commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the 1981 hunger strikes, located at the junction of Beechmount Avenue and the Falls Road in nationalist West Belfast (c. 2006). Photo: Laura McAtackney.

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12.4 An example of prison art as located in an exhibition of Conway Mills Irish Republican History Museum, West Belfast (c. 2007). Photo: Laura McAtackney.

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12.5 A piece of prison infrastructure—a blood pressure gauge with “HMP Maze Hospital” written on the side—that has transitioned from Long Kesh/Maze to the Conway Mills Irish Republican History Museum (c. 2007). Photo: Laura McAtackney.

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13.1 Somewhere my Love, testimony and artifact courtesy of Chrissie McCorry, 50+ Group. Materials: music box, brass chain, brass tacks, lollipop sticks, mahogany, matchsticks, paint, timber strips, upholstered velvet, and wood. Photo: Martin Krenn and Aisling O’Beirn, 2018.

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13.2 Thankfully Never Used 1976–2000, testimony and artifact courtesy of Phil Holland, former prison officer. Description: stainless steel whistle on a chain with buttonhole clasp. “Made in England” embossed on whistle barrel. Photo: Martin Krenn and Aisling O’Beirn, 2018.

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13.3 Porridge Stage 1, testimony and artifact courtesy of loyalist ex-prisoner, repaired by Martin Krenn and Aisling O’Beirn. Materials: brass fittings, broom bristles, doll’s bed, draughts pieces, lollipop sticks, matchsticks, paint, plum velvet, printed pictures, prison yard pebbles, wood, and varnish. Photo: Martin Krenn and Aisling O’Beirn, 2018.

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13.4 Message 1981?, testimony courtesy of loyalist ex-prisoner, object made by Martin Krenn and Aisling O’Beirn in response to testimony. Materials: chalk, found display drawer lined with plum-colored velvet, fishing line, panel pins. Photo: Martin Krenn and Aisling O’Beirn, 2018.

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13.5 The Bully Bully Bus, testimony courtesy of the 50+ Group. Artifact made by the 50+ Group with Martin Krenn and Aisling O’ Beirn. Materials: card, glue, lollipop sticks, paper tape, wood, and varnish. Photo: Martin Krenn and Aisling O’Beirn, 2018.

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Contributors Tal Adler is an artist and researcher at the Centre for Anthropological Research on Heritage and Museums at the Humboldt University of Berlin. For the TRACES project, he developed long-term creative co-productions between artists, researchers, and institutions for creating meaningful and sustainable ways to disseminate contentious cultural heritages. Between 2011 and 2016 he worked at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, conducting artistic research on the politics of memory and display, concentrating on difficult heritage at marginal and established museums, landscapes, sites of commemoration, and civil society organizations in Austria. For over two decades he has been developing methods of collaborative artistic research for engaging with difficult pasts and conflicted communities in Israel/Palestine and in Europe. Răzvan Anton is a visual artist based in Cluj, Romania. He is currently teaching at the University of Art and Design and is a member of the Paintbrush Factory artist collective. Some of his more recent exhibitions are “. . . but we brought it back . . .”: Objects, Paths, Stories, curators: Julie Dawson, Alexandra Toma and Răzvan Anton, Casa de lângă Sinagogă, Mediaș (2018); Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear, Eastwards Prospectus, Bucharest (2018), Life a User’s Manual: I work, therefore I’m not, curators: Ami Barak and Diana Marincu, Art Encounters, Timișoara (2017), Future of Memory, Casa Tranzit, curator: Olga Ștefan, Cluj (2017), The Factory of Facts and Other (Unspoken) Stories, curator: Alina Șerban, Domino, Cluj (2016). Artist in residence at Mediaș Jewish Archives between 2016 and 2018 as part of Absence as Heritage project (TRACES) and at Museums Quartier, Vienna in November 2018. Blaž Bajič received his PhD (2017) in cultural anthropology at the University of Ljubljana. In his dissertation, based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Ljubljana, Bajič discussed recreational running as an aesthetic practice, rooted in late capitalist dynamic. Since 2017, he has been employed as a postdoctoral researcher in Cultural Studies in the SENSOTRA research project at the University of Eastern Finland. His key research interests are anthropology of space and place, anthropology of the senses, anthropology of art, popular culture, and memory studies, as well as epistemological and theoretical underpinnings of these areas. He is also the current president of the Slovenian ethnological and anthropological association, KULA. For TRACES Bajič worked as an embedded ethnographer in the creative co-production “Casting of Death.” Matei Bellu is an artist and writer with a background in architecture and anthropology. In his research-based practice he explores the constructions of hegemonial realities. More often than not he collaborates with his sister Andrea Bellu. xi

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Contributors

Leone Contini studied Philosophy and Cultural Anthropology at Siena University. His research, on the edge between ethnography and art, is focused on intercultural frictions, conflict and power relations. His media include installations, lecture-performances, interventions in public space, writing, drawing, and audio-visual narratives. He exhibited or held interventions at Manifesta 12, Palermo, 2018; Pigorini Museum, Rome, 2017; GAM, Turin, 2017; Mudec, Milan, 2017; Quadriennale, Rome, 2016; Cittadellarte, Biella, 2016; D-0 Ark Underground Biennial, Bosnia, 2015; Delfina Foundation, London, 2017, 2015, 2014; MART, Rovereto, 2015; Galleria Civica, Trento, 2014; Khoj, New Delhi, 2014; Kunstraum, Munich, 2014; Villa Romana, Florence, 2014; DOCVA, Milano, 2014 and 2015; Kunstverein, Amsterdam 2013; Tirana Art Lab, Tirana, 2013; Pecci Museum, Prato, 2012. He took part in the following residencies: Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart; Cittadellarte—Fondazione Pistoletto in Biella, Italy; Delfina Foundation, London, UK; Kronika, Bytom, Poland; Khoj, New Delhi, India. Leone lives and works in Tuscany, Italy. Julie Dawson is a researcher at the Leo Baeck Institute and directs their Jewish Bukovina and Transylvania project, a long-term survey of archival records related to Jewish history in Transylvania and Bukovina (jbat.lbi.org). She has been involved with preservation and heritage activities at the Mediaș synagogue (Transylvania) since 2008. In the context of the EU Horizons 2020 project “TRACES: Transmitting Contentious Cultural Heritages with the Arts” she acted as researcher in the Mediaș team, developing material with artist Răzvan Anton for the exhibition “Liminal Portraits: Stories from the Margins” (2017) and the oral history project and exhibition “ ‘. . . but we brought it back . . .’: Objects, Paths, Stories” (2018) at the multi-functional arts and cultural space, Casa de lângă Sinagogă (house next to the synagogue) in Mediaș. Ms. Dawson is writing her PhD at the Institute for Contemporary History of the University of Vienna on post-war diaries found in the Mediaș synagogue. The Domestic Research Society is a curatorial and artistic collective based in Slovenia. It was established by Damijan Kracina, Alenka Pirman, and Jani Pirnat in 2004 to record, collect, research, and present domestic phenomena. They conduct collaborative and interdisciplinary research, which enables the development of innovative approaches in contemporary art, actually addressing a broader audience. Jani Pirnat, art historian, is employed as a contemporary art curator in the Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana. Alenka Pirman is a contemporary artist and PhD student of Heritology at the University of Ljubljana. Since 1991 she has collaborated with various heritage institutions, including police museums. Damijan Kracina is a sculptor, media artist, and teacher. Beside his prolific artistic career he teaches at the School for Design and Photography in Ljubljana. http://www.ddr.si/ John Harries received his PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2002, where he is a senior teaching fellow in Social Anthropology. His research concerns the memory and materiality with particular reference to contemporary politics of identity in settler colonial societies. He explores these issues through an ongoing ethnographic study into the ways in which the Beothuk, a thought-to-be-extinct First Nations people, are

Contributors

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remembered in Newfoundland, Canada. In the context of this work, he has become increasingly interested in the affective presence and emotive materiality of human remains, as well as other things and substances (stones, blood, etc.) that are enrolled into the ways in which we materialize the presence of the past. He is also involved in the TRACES project, which investigates the challenges and opportunities raised when transmitting complex pasts and the role the arts in engaging with the difficult heritage in contemporary Europe. Aglaja Kempinski received her PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Edinburgh in 2019 after completing her MA at SOAS. Her PhD investigated how the Ju|’hoansi of Namibia (otherwise known as San or Bushmen and commonly romanticized, considered stand-ins for stone age hunter gatherers, or reduced to the status of an impoverished minority) inhabit the varied and often contradictory images of themselves they are confronted with by tourists, researchers, filmmakers, and NGOs. Being a trained filmmaker herself, Aglaja uses collaborative film and a holistic imagebased approach to consider the role of images in terms of environment, social technique, strategic product, and ways of making sense of the world. Her interests, besides all image-based anthropology, include indigeneity, development, paganism, and the exploration of multiplicities. Martin Krenn is an artist, artistic researcher, and curator. He teaches at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria. He works with various types of media, especially text, photography, and video. Most of his work in public spaces takes the form of social sculpture. His key area of interest lies in the strained relationships between art and society. By consistently expanding the field of art he tries to initiate discussions about sociopolitical topics and to challenge conventional thinking. Krenn holds an MA (Mag. art.) from the University of Applied Arts, Vienna, (1997). In 2011, he received the Vice-Chancellor’s Research Scholarship at the University of Ulster in Belfast and was awarded a PhD by Ulster University in 2016. In 2017, Krenn was awarded the venia docendi in “Art and Communication Practices” at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna. Erica Lehrer is a sociocultural anthropologist and curator. She is currently Associate Professor in the departments of History and Sociology-Anthropology and held the Canada Research Chair in Museum and Heritage Studies (2007–17) at Concordia University, Montreal, where she also is Founding Director of the Curating and Public Scholarship Lab (CaPSL). She is the author of Jewish Poland Revisited: Heritage Tourism in Unquiet Places (Indiana University Press 2013) and co-editor of Curatorial Dreams: Critics Imagine Exhibitions (McGill-Queens 2016), Jewish Space in Contemporary Poland (Indiana University Press 2015) and Curating Difficult Knowledge: Violent Pasts in Public Places (Palgrave 2011). She curated the exhibit Souvenir, Talisman, Toy at the Kraków Ethnographic Museum (MEK) in 2013, and in 2014 published the accompanying book Lucky Jews and the online exhibit www. luckyjews.com. In 2018 she co-curated the exhibition “Terribly Close: Polish Vernacular Artists Face the Holocaust” at MEK.

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Contributors

Laura McAtackney is an Associate Professor in the Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies at Aarhus University, Denmark. An archaeologist by training, her current research uses contemporary and historical archaeological approaches, and its heritage implications, to explore areas as diverse as material barriers in post-conflict Northern Ireland, female experiences of political imprisonment during the Irish Civil War, and race/social relations on early modern Montserrat in the Caribbean (the latter is as a member of the SLAM project at Wayne State University and Brown University in the US). She is the author of An Archaeology of the Troubles: The Dark Heritage of Long Kesh/Maze Prison (2014) and is co-editor, with Krysta Ryzewski, of Contemporary Archaeology and the City: Creativity, Ruination and Political Action (2017), both with Oxford University Press. Katarzyna Maniak received her PhD in ethnology and cultural anthropology from Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland (2018). She is an assistant professor at the Institute of Ethnology and Culture Anthropology, Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Forms of institutionalization of culture and theories and practices of exhibiting cultural heritage are her fields of interest. She specializes in curatorial strategies realized in contemporary museology. She has published numerous articles, among others, in The International Journal of the Inclusive Museum, Zeszyty Naukowe UJ Prace Etnograficzne, and Zbiór Wiadomości do Antropologii Muzeualnej, and took part in international conferences such as “The Future of Ethnographic Museums,” Keble College, University of Oxford (2013), and the conference of International Institute for the Inclusive Museum, National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen (2013). She has edited the book Culture Dictionary (National Centre for Culture and Imago Mundi Foundation in 2016), summarizing a research art project dedicated to the field of Polish culture. Aisling O’Beirn is an artist based in Belfast and an Associate Lecturer in Sculpture at Ulster University. Her work is interdisciplinary and explores the relationship between politics and place, uncovering the tensions between disparate forms of official and unofficial information. She examines space and place as physical structures and political entities by making and animating forms relating to observed and theoretical structures being studied by contemporary astronomers and physicists. Her work also questions how people process and understand both scientific and political developments. Her work takes various forms, including sculpture, installation, animations, and site-specific projects, depending on the context. Dialogue is key to her practice, which has been facilitated by Armagh Observatory, Dunsink Observatory, and The Centre for Astronomy, NUIG, Galway. O’Beirn has exhibited nationally and internationally. She was included in Northern Ireland’s first participation in the 51st Venice Biennale and was shortlisted for the MAC International prize in 2018. Her work manifests variously as sculpture, installation, animation and site-specific projects. www.aislingobeirn.com. Arnd Schneider (volume editor) is currently Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo, and was formerly Reader in Anthropology at the University of East

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London and a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Hamburg. He writes on contemporary art and anthropology, migration, and film. He was a co-organizer of the international conference “Fieldworks: Dialogues between Art and Anthropology” (Tate Modern, 2003). His main publications include Futures Lost: Nostalgia and Identity among Italian Immigrants in Argentina (Peter Lang 2000) and Appropriation as Practice: Art and Identity in Argentina (Palgrave 2006). He edited Alternative Art and Anthropology: Global Encounters (Bloomsbury 2017), and co-edited (with Chris Wright) Contemporary Art and Anthropology (Berg 2006), Between Art and Anthropology (Berg 2010), and Anthropology and Art Practice (Bloomsbury 2013). He co-edited with Bernard Müller and Caterina Pasqualino Le terrain comme mise en scène (Presses universitaires de Lyon, 2017). Experimental Film and Anthropology (co-edited with Caterina Pasqualino) was published by Bloomsbury in 2014. Between 2016 and 2019 he has been a partner of TRACES (Transmitting Contentious Cultural Heritages with the Arts: From Intervention to Co-production) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 program. Roma Sendyka, Dr. Hab., teaches in the Department of Anthropology of Literature and Cultural Studies, Faculty of Polish Studies, at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. She is co-founder and Director of the Research Center for Memory Cultures. She specializes in cultural theory, visual culture studies, and memory studies. Her current work focuses on so-called “non-sites of memory” and visual approaches to genocide representation. She is author of The Modern Essay: Studies in Historical Awareness of a Genre (2006), From “I” Culture to the Culture of the “Self ” (2015), and co-editor of four volumes on memory studies. She is principal investigator for the research project “Uncommemorated Genocide Sites and their Impact on Collective Memory, Cultural Identity, Ethical Attitudes, and Intercultural Relations in Contemporary Poland” (2016–19), as well as the “Awkward Objects of Genocide” project under the auspices of the grant Transmitting Contentious Cultural Heritages with the Arts: From Intervention to Co-Production (TRACES, 2016–19). Wojciech Wilczyk is a photographer, curator, poet, art critic, and lecturer at the Krakow Photography Academy. He has undertaken many documentary projects: Black and White Silesia (1999–2003), Kalwaria (1995–2004), Life after Life (2004–6), Postindustrial (2003–7), There is No Such Thing as an Innocent Eye (2006–8), Holy War (2009–14) and, together with Elżbieta Janicka, The Other City (2011–12). Twice nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, he was awarded Photography Publication of the Year 2009 (for the Innocent Eye album) and Photo Book of the Year 2014 at the Grand Press Photo 2015 exhibit (for Święta Wojna—Holy War). Since 2009 he has blogged at hyperrealism.blogspot.com. Together with Grzegorz Wróblewski, he undertook the intermedia project Blue Pueblo (2013–14), combining text and photographs, and accompanied by an artbook issued in 350 numbered, signed copies. Magdalena Zych is a cultural anthropologist, curator, and graduate of the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology of the Jagiellonian University, Krakow. At the Seweryn Udziela Ethnographic Museum in Krakow she coordinates research projects

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including a current reinterpretation of the museum’s Siberian collection, and an exploration of the presence of the Holocaust in Polish folk art collections. She is completing her doctorate on contemporary ethnographic museum collections at the Jagiellonian University’s Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology (IEiAK). She held a Ministry of Culture and National Heritage scholarship in 2016 and is author and co-editor of the books The Art of the Allotment (2012) and Weddings 21 (2015). She has published in journals including the quarterly Autoportret and Konteksty. Cultural Anthropology. Ethnography. Art.

Acknowledgments This book is the outcome of a three-year research project with TRACES (www. tracesproject.eu), which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement no. 693857. The views expressed in this volume are the sole responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Commission. This volume is the result of the collaborative effort of many people in the TRACES network and beyond. In the first instance, I would like to thank all the contributors to this volume, ethnographers and members of the Creative Co-Productions (CCPs) within TRACES, for their interesting chapters. Special thanks are due to Karin Schneider (University of the Arts, Zurich) for having invited me to the TRACES network, Klaus Schöneberger (University of Klagenfurt) for having steered the TRACES ship past many cliffs, Marion Hamm (University of Klagenfurt) for her invaluable input at various stages, and Gisela Hagmair (University of Klagenfurt) for her indefatigable coordination and support. At Bloomsbury, particular thanks go to my editors, Miriam Cantwell and Lucy Carroll, for seeing this book through to publication. I also thank Hege Bakken for compiling the index. Throughout the work with TRACES, the collaboration with artist Leone Contini has been particularly rewarding—the outcomes of our research in Italy are presented in chapters 2 and 3. Leone generously offered an inspiring still image from his video “Restolen” (2017) for the cover image of this book, for which we are very grateful. I would also like to thank colleagues, hosts, and audiences to whom I have presented my ideas over the last few years: Riccardo Putti (University of Siena), Jonas Tinius and Margareta von Oswald (Humboldt University, Berlin), Alberta Arthurs (New York), Michael F. DiNiscia (NYU), Valentina Bonifacio (University of Venice), Eleana Yalouri (Panteion University, Athens), Elpida Rikou (Athens School of Fine Arts), Wenzel Geissler and Elisabeth Schober (University of Oslo), Theo Barth and Maziar Raein (Oslo Academy of the Arts), Loretta Paderni and Rosanna di Lella (Museum L.Pigorini/ Museo delle Civiltà, Rome), Ivan Bargna (University of Milano - Bicocca), Gloria Bovio (Fondazione Dialoghi d’Arte, Noli), Andrea Canziani (Fondazione Dialoghi d’Arte, Noli).

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1

Working with TRACES Arnd Schneider

The true museum is one that ages with its objects.1

Introduction The ethnographic case studies presented in this book are part of a large, multidisciplinary research project, TRACES, which was funded through the EU Horizon 2020 program. The project comprised eleven partners (universities, museums, independent research organizations, and NGOs) working in locations across Europe.2 The role of the ethnographers, themselves coming from different disciplinary backgrounds of anthropology, archaeology, architecture, and visual arts, was to critically engage in reflexive participant observation with the projects. The results of their work are presented in the longer ethnographic chapters in this book, coupled with shorter, more hybrid interventions from the projects themselves, consisting of narrative text, conversation dialogues, and images. These projects, which are at the center of TRACES’ practical “experimentation”, are extensively featured in the ethnographic case studies in this volume. The projects were developed through a new way of transmitting contentious cultural heritage: the Creative Co-Productions (henceforth CCPs), consisting of multidisciplinary teams between emerging scholars, artists, and cultural workers. This innovative approach responds to the current economic-political conditions, a Europe in crisis. It reflects and takes further cutting-edge theoretical groundwork on the configuration of a renewed European identity, epitomized by the idea of reflexive Europeanization (Römhild 2009; Römhild 2019). The project research of TRACES was carried out by (CCPs) based in Romania, Poland, Slovenia, Austria, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. “Absence as Heritage” (CCP1; featured here in chapters 4 and 5) looked at an abandoned synagogue in a multi-ethnic part of Transylvania (Romania), “Awkward Objects of Genocide” (CCP2; chapters 6 and 7) investigated art and craft objects relating to the Holocaust, but made after the Second World War and which are now in private and public collections in Germany and Poland. “Casting Death” (CCP3; chapters 8 and 9) focused on the making and public status of death masks in Ljubljana (Slovenia), whilst “Dead Images” (CCP4; chapters 10 and 11) investigated the extensive skull collections in the Natural History 1

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and University museums in Vienna and Edinburgh. “Transforming Long Kesh/Maze Prison” (CCP5; chapters 12 and 13) worked with prison art made by former republican and loyalist inmates in Northern Ireland. Finally, Arnd Schneider, together with artist Leone Contini, carried out research and developed an exhibition “Bel Suol d’Amore— The Scattered Colonial Body” (presented here in chapters 2 and 3), at the Pigorini Ethnographic Museum in Rome (part of the Museum of Civilizations).

Art, anthropology, contested heritage Research featured in this book, then, is set in a triangular relationship between art, anthropology, and contested cultural heritage. Not all sides of this imaginary, relational triangle necessarily have the same length. Moreover, standing back from the triangle, they do not seem to have the same status. Ethnographic work with contemporary artists is now a widely established field. Rather than being merely research on artworlds (Becker 1982), this has now evolved into research with artists, much of this in a collaborative vein (Schneider and Wright 2006, 2010, 2013; Schneider 2017). At first sight, art and anthropology appear somewhat as the heuristic and epistemological means with which to explore a third field, that is contested cultural heritage. This latter, however, cannot be conceived just as a passive recipient of other disciplinary interventions. Rather, it is a dynamic social field, characterized by contested issues, even conflict, and which is actively involved in the research process. In addition, art and anthropology are not just the tools performing an enquiry, but also stand in a specific relationship to each other. Over long stretches of its history, anthropology conceived of art to be researched as a passive object knowledge, not something to be engaged with, affected by, or even to collaborate with. The exceptions at certain historical moments seem to be confirming the rule. One can think here, among others, of the productive encounter of French Surrealism with anthropology in the 1920s and 30s, where the editor and philosopher Georges Bataille, anthropologists Alfred Métraux, anthropologist and writer Michel Leiris, art historian Carl Einstein, and artists André Masson and Joan Miró, among many others, worked in innovative ways on the journal Documents. Here, different artistic genres and anthropological approaches were juxtaposed in both formal and in theoretical terms. Montage and collage were used to transgress different disciplinary practices, where artists were appreciated through an ethnographic lens and subjects of anthropology and archaeology were reworked artistically, often with surrealist devices (cf. Clifford 1988; Ades and Baker 2006; Kelly 2012). Filmmaker Maya Deren’s excursion into Haitian ethnography in the 1940s and 50s is another example. Deren, an experimental filmmaker, famous for her film Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), set out to make a filmic study of Haitian Voodoo, having consulted beforehand with renowned anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson and the mythology scholar Joseph Campbell. However, she found writing more apt to capture her intentions to write an ethnographic monograph, whereas her film rushes were only edited posthumously. The book she published eventually, Divine Horsemen (1953), is written in a very personal voice and clearly shows her attempt as an artist to succeed in cultural description and analysis.

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More recently, the work of artists such as Susan Hiller, Lothar Baumgarten, and César Paternosto, as well as many others since, has involved fieldwork and crossed the boundaries between art and anthropology (Clifford 1988; Schneider 1993, 2006, 2011; Schneider and Wright 2006, 2010, 2013). In sum, the three poles of the triangle of art, anthropology, and contested and contentious heritage in institutional settings stand in dynamic relationships with each other and across disciplinary boundaries, and none can be thought of as independent of the others or in isolation. In this triangular setting, and when seen from an anthropological perspective, heritage and contested heritages obtain specific features. In fact, recent decades have seen a veritable boom in heritage studies, and contested and contentious cultural heritage in particular. No attempt is made here to summarize this vast literature, but a few significant contours, symptomatic for certain trends and issues, might be delineated. Anthropologist Helaine Silverman (2011) states that “[a]ttention to contested cultural heritage is, fundamentally, awareness of the construction of identity and its strategic situationality and oppositional deployment” (2011:1). She identifies a number of paradigmatic shifts which have helped in shaping this awareness, chief among them Edward Bruner’s early insight that self and society are never fully formed and fixed, but rather always in production, process—insights which were also applied in the seminal and sea-changing volumes Exhibiting Cultures: The poetics and Politics of Museum Display by Karp and Levine (1991) as well as the follow-up volumes Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture (1992), and Museum Frictions (Karp et al. 2006). The work of Sharon Macdonald (2013, 2019), has been absolutely crucial in this field—the memory–identity–heritage complex being one of the pivotal concepts and areas of research she identified for the contested arena of heritage practices in Europe.3 The principal idea here is that heritage is to be understood as a relational process between multiple identities and history, characterized by contestation, and ultimately shaped by social relations and practices, and not constituted by fixed identities and immovable patrimonies. Museums are “sites of passage and contestation” (Clifford 1997: 210) and, for a considerable time, anthropologists working with (and in) museums have written about indigenous and first-nation communities (often called “source communities”—though this term has been questioned more recently, see below) who lay claim to objects in museums of which they or their ancestors were originally divested through colonial appropriation. Periodically, over the last decades, this debate has been addressed in terms of the politics and poetics of presentation, possible collaboration and decisionmaking, categorization, and display of objects, coalescing at certain turning points, such as the “ART/artifact” exhibition at the Center for African Art (later Museum of African Art) in New York in 1988 (Vogel 1988), and the polemics surrounding the new Musée du Quai Branly in Paris since 2006 (cf. Price 2007), as well as the soon to be opened Humboldt-Forum in Berlin (now planned for 2019), and other institutions (see also Plankensteiner 2018: 25, 35–6). In various ways these issues can also be found in our examples, especially when they refer to institutional collections and their problematic and contentious heritage (such as the skull collection in the Vienna Museum of Natural History investigated by the project “Dead Images,” or folk art in

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Polish ethnographic museums referring to the genocide of Jews during the Second World War, researched by the Krakow project “Awkward Objects of Genocide”). In the post-colonial context, debates about ethics of display of objects in Western museums are central here (which implies researching and questioning the moral relationships at the base of collections, Clifford 1997: 192), and the legitimacy of their “possession” in the first place. Linked to this, the discussion on provenance has gained renewed traction (furthered also by a parallel discussion of art looted principally by the Nazis, and others, during the Third Reich and more generally during the Second World War). These debates are informed by a fundamental rethinking, also in the public sphere, of restitution of art objects held in Western museums from former colonies to their rightful owners. In this context, one of the most outspoken critics of continued Western “ownership” is the French art historian, Bénédicte Savoy, who in her inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in 2017 called museums “archives of human creativity,” emphasizing that “insider knowledge of museums had to become public knowledge” (Savoy 2018: 48, 56), and insisting that those “who have enriched us” (ibid.: 54, 57) must be included in the discussions, research and negotiations concerning the historic provenance, and the future of these objects, including their possible restitution (ibid.: 57–8).4 Sharon Macdonald, Henrietta Lidchi, and Margareta von Oswald take heed from some recent discussions around decolonial thinking, and propose to decolonize the museum (2017: 96, 97, 102) in order to explore its cosmopolitan potential. Their cosmopolitanism is precisely not linked to older, colonial Enlightenment ideals, but through readings of post-colonial advocates of cosmopolitanism, such as Paul Gilroy and Kwame Appiah. Macdonald, Lidchi, and von Oswald explicitly name the “contexts of unequal power, sometimes outright violence in which collections were made” and the “problematic depictions of ‘others’ exhibitions” (2017: 96). They state that the “extended legacy of colonial relations are questions about particular knowledge formations and modes of knowledge making, the nature of the ethnographic museum to whom it orients itself, and access to the collections and involvement in shaping their futures, in both the past and the present. Decolonizing the museum requires critical attention on all these fronts” (2017: 97). They are also critical of the “term ‘source community’ (or ‘community of source’) because of its potential restatement of a colonial model of discrete peoples and single origins” (ibid.: 99); similarly, the term “ ‘community’ . . . too easily ignores differences within groups” (ibid.). Certainly, museums are contact zones (Clifford 1997), and arenas of contestation. It is here that interrelations between issues of “research, authority, the archive and the public good” (Macdonald, Lidchi, and von Oswald 2017: 98) will have to be carefully gauged, and are brought to the fore.

Contested heritage and ethnographic research with TRACES What can be learned from this discussion, taken from this more specific context of museums and contested heritage, for the context of the TRACES projects? Similarly, what can the projects contribute to this discussion? In fact, the research on provenance,

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the rights and claims of indigenous people, “original” owners, and source communities which has become ever more prominent in recent years plays an important role in the projects. The colonial dimension appears particularly present in the project “Bel Suol d’amore” on the post-colonial legacies of the former African Museum in Rome and attempts through the project to de-colonize it (cf. Schneider and Contini in this volume), and the project “Dead Images” on the skull collections held at the Vienna Natural History Museum and the University of Edinburgh (see the chapter by Harries with Adler and Kempinski). A significant number of these skulls come from former European colonies or people who stood in a colonial relationship to the nation-states that incorporated them, such as the Sami in Northern Europe. However, the concepts developed from these debates can also be applied and transposed to other contexts within Europe. In fact, the Belfast-based project “Transforming Long Kesh/Maze Prison” can also be said to have a colonial (if not post-colonial) dimension, seen at least from perspectives which emphasize the long colonial history between England and Ireland, and Northern Ireland’s continued status as a “province” of the United Kingdom (see chapters by McAtackney, and Krenn and O’Beirn). Moreover, the issue of contestation is not restricted to the (post)-colonial context, but is also very vividly present in other ways in at least three projects, carried out in Mediaș (Romania), Krakow, and elsewhere in Poland, whilst in a fourth, in Ljubljana on death masks, contestation was problematized as a construct, and explored for its “potential contentiousness” (Macdonald 2019; for the ethnographic chapters, see Bellu, Maniak, Kempinski, and Bajič, all in this volume).

Methodologies and strategies: ethnography, experiments, and intervention Macdonald and Basu (2007) draw a very useful parallel between experiments in exhibition making and experiments in ethnography. This is also something that has characterized the TRACES projects, and the ethnographers researching them. Experiments are, of course, “knowledge generating procedure(s),” and experiments create “new phenomena” (ibid.: 2). All the TRACES projects, as part of the CCPs, involved research on and with contested cultural heritage, the making of exhibitions (of different kinds and scales, and composition), and the ethnographic research accompanying this process. The individual ethnographic projects also followed the “object” and “stories” in their specific research and exhibition settings (cf. Macdonald and Basu 2007: 7, Marcus 1998), often with serendipitous turns generating new insight. The ethnographic interventions, embedded within these projects on contested and contentious heritage, which all included exhibition projects, were then precisely such knowledge-generating exercises which might be called “art-anthropology interventions” (Schneider 2016) where two disciplinary endeavors come together to engage with a third, in our case contested cultural heritage. A good example of this is the project “Bel Suol d’amore—The Scattered Colonial Body” where artist Leone Contini and anthropologist Arnd Schneider collaborated over a period of six months and which

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culminated in an exhibition in Rome in June and July 2017 at the National Ethnographic Museum Luigi Pigorini (part of the Museum of Civilizations) (see chapters 2 and 3 in this volume). In contradistinction to the CCPs, which were pre-defined in the TRACES project, and where five ethnographers were following the process of artists working together with heritage institutions, in the Rome project, the team of myself, an anthropologist, and Leone Contini, an artist, set in motion an “art-intervention” (see above) into a collection “hidden” at the Pigorini Museum, and examined it critically through an exhibition. The embedded ethnographers reflected on the ethnographic research process they were involved in. They found themselves in very specific, creative co-productive settings. This productive, relational set-up provided particular challenges but also opportunities. To differing degrees the ethnographers were operating both within and without the CCPs. Rather than closed units, we might consider the CCPs as open social fields; and of course, anthropology has long abandoned the idea of bounded social, cultural, or spatial units that would make up the terrain for fieldwork. For at least three decades, if not longer, fieldwork has been multi-sited, and temporally and spatially diverse (see Clifford 1988, Marcus 1995). Increasingly, it is also carried out with local experts, in non-places (Augé 1992), and even with “virtual” communities and sets of relations on the internet. Linked to the temporal and spatial complexity of the ethnographic settings is the serendipity which characterized many of the ethnographic research projects. Serendipity, in its classic understanding via Horace Walpole’s story The Three Princes of Serendip, is the “discovery of something useful while on the hunt for something else” (Martínez 2018a: 2). Serendipity as a theoretical concept and epistemological tool has recently gained some traction in anthropology (and the social sciences more generally). This is not the place to review the substantial literature in this respect (e.g., Pieke 2000; Laviolette 2013; Martínez 2018a, 2018b). For instance, Rivoal and Salazar (2013: 178) suggest that serendipity is “widely accepted as a key characteristic (and strength) of the ethnographic method.” Serendipity is “the faculty of making happy chance find” (Chambers English Dictionary), “an aptitude for making desirable discoveries by accident” (Webster’s College Dictionary) or “the art of making an unsought finding” according to van Andel (1994: 631). More specifically, a “serendipitist” is the person practicing serendipity, “the one who believes in serendipity” or “who has that faculty” (Chambers). The serendipitist has to combine creatively not only chance and intuitive reason but also sagacity—much of this links to creativity and experimentation. In anthropology, of course, it seems then that serendipity is both “a key to enter the field” (Rivoal and Salazar 2013: 178), but also from the serendipitous process “the field emerges” (ibid.: 178). Some scholars, such as George Marcus (2002), have even suggested it could become a mode of enquiry, and be the basis for model building in anthropology (see Rivoal and Salazar 2013: 181), a kind of “epistemic partner” in Martínez’s expression (2018a: 1). And looking for material traces has a particular serendipitous quality to it. Though not mentioning serendipity specifically, Geissler and Lachenal, in their introduction to a book on the archaeologies of medical research in Africa, articulate this very well: “Traces are puzzling . . . Their significance has to be established and re-established in material engagements. They remain as inchoate

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matter, irregular detritus, until momentarily recognized and re-established as form, by someone who happens upon them—sometimes wilfully researching the historical past, sometimes carefully tracking signs of passage, more often unintentionally while doing something else” (Geissler and Lachenal 2016: 16). Serendipity is also important in another, more figurative (but also more ancient) sense, that of a hunter retracing and re-stepping tracks (and sometimes turning back on his/her own) in pursuit of game. This tracking of spoor has been taken—in an at once speculative and original thesis presented by Liebenberg (1990)—to lie at the origins of the development of “research” in the history of humankind, a kind of first episteme or paradigm one might say. Contemporary artists, too, especially those “tracking evidence” connected to the Spurensicherung movement in Germany and elsewhere (Metken 1977), have emulated the tracking of spoor or traces, with close affinities to fieldwork practices in archaeology and anthropology (Schneider 1993). Serendipity was particularly relevant for the projects “Bel Suol d’Amore—The Scattered Colonial Body” (chapters 2 and 3 by Schneider and Contini) and “Dead Images” (featured in the chapters by Harries with Adler and Kempinski, and Kempinski) In these and other TRACES projects, many instances of research could not be planned, or the course of events predicted with certainty—rather unforeseen challenges and opportunities arose which had to be dealt with. Perhaps what the ethnographers most clearly provided for the CCPs was to act as a kind of screen or receptors, even catalysts, who could both record and also express developing issues and concerns from the project. Although this is not always made explicit in the chapters, potentially the ethnographers could also be the interface to the communities, users, stakeholders— the public at large—or, in any case, observe the relations of these with the CCPs. The CCPs, in turn, were not the passive recipients of the anthropologists and the ethnographic interventions into their fields, but stand in dynamic relationships to them.

Ethnographic work with the CCPs The CCPs, devised by Tal Adler (Adler 2019) as part of the original TRACES set-up, are defined as: The Creative Co-Productions (CCPs) . . . represent an innovative approach for processing and mediation of contentious cultural heritage, while moving beyond the way art-and-research projects usually function in the cultural field. The CCPs are based on a mutual, equal process in which the artist, researcher, heritage agencies (museums, sites, phenomena) and stakeholders (citizens, organizations, policymakers) develop together ways to reflect on, approach, research, communicate, display and educate the contentious, difficult heritage in question. Besides specific outputs, the CCPs aim at sustainably changing forms of understanding and representing cultural heritage within the respective host (institution, agency or community). Using art and research, the CCPs produce

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Art, Anthropology, and Contested Heritage participatory public interfaces to support a reflexive, cohesive and sustainable emergence of Europeanization. TRACES proposal 2015: 8

How did ethnographic research intervene in the settings of CCPs and what kind of results could it yield? What were the potentialities of generating knowledge (and for whom)? Ethnographic research with the CCPs faced a number of challenges that have to do with the extremely varied and fragmented field locations and research processes which can be characterized as multi-sited and multi-temporal—in contradistinction to traditional anthropological fieldwork in seemingly bounded social settings. This is clear, for instance, from the research carried out with CCP4 (“Dead Images”) by Aglaja Kempinski in Edinburgh, Vienna, and Berlin, and by Matei Bellu with CCP1 (“Absence as Heritage”) over several fieldwork stays (mostly in the summer), in Mediaș, Romania. A further challenge was certainly to observe different epistemological logics in different disciplinary fields, which consisted of theoreticians and practitioners with different backgrounds (anthropology, archaeology, history, visual arts, etc.). In other words, to make different “epistemic perspectives” (Holfelder and Schönberger 2018: 9) subjects and objects of research. As regards the ethnographic research on the CCPs featured in this book, we aimed at asking specifically, the following questions: What are the challenges and innovative potentials of CCPs? How can ethnographies on processes of artistic collaboration and co-production help to produce innovations and knowledge regarding how these co-productions can be established? Are such long-term, cross-disciplinary collaborations able to open up new and multiple perspectives on contentious cultural heritage and European identity? How can the reflexive qualities of artistic and ethnographic forms of knowledge production and representation be forged into a transferrable set of tools and strategies for stakeholders and policymakers? Whilst with hindsight the questions might have been overambitious, a number of themes nevertheless emerge from the chapters of the ethnographers. Thus the principal challenges for the CCPs were respectively the multiple ethnic communities and their historical identity claims and understanding of contested heritage in question (CCP1 “Absence as Heritage,” the heritage organizations and understanding of the collectors’ motifs (CCP2 “Awkward Objects of Genocide”), the development and problematization of a notion of contestation (CCP3 “Casting Death”), the collaboration between artist and research team, and the multi-sitedness of the project (CCP4 “Dead Images”), the divergent understanding of history by the communities (CCP5 “Transforming Long Kesh/Maze Prison”), and the fragmentation of the research site, and a certain initial resistance by the institutions involved in the Schneider/Contini collaboration in Rome. However, in this latter case (discussed in chapter 2), the institution—partly instigated by our research—is now continuing critically reflective research into the (post-)colonial collections. From the research carried out and presented in this book, it is clear that the CCP model has innovative potential in bringing different, multidisciplinary teams of

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researchers (artists and academics) together to investigate contested cultural heritage. It is especially the artists’ contribution which makes “visible” not only the research process but also the contested nature of the heritage. In this sense, while there are no immediate “transferable” tools (in EU parlance) to be advised, certainly, such crossdisciplinary collaborations, and particularly between ethnographers and artists, are recommended to open up new perspectives.

Ethnographic interventions Looking at the ethnographic research carried out with the CCPs, a number of themes emerge. 1. The ways of working together, or what in the introduction to Anthropology and Art Practice (2013) Chris Wright and I have called “ways of working” in reference to Tim Ingold’s and Elizabeth Hallam’s “the way we work” (2007: 28), and where notions of creativity, collaboration, and interdisciplinary exchange are emergent and processual, rather than given, and disciplinarily bounded. The working and research methods involved in the projects presented here are probing, exploratory, and often remain fragmentary and open-ended in their results. The process of working with people and materials in ethnographic situations becomes as, or even more, important than the finished product. Schneider and Wright 2013: 4 2. Following from this, many instances in these projects/ethnographies with the CCPs are indicative of the constructed and performative character of fieldwork. Fieldwork, in these cases has turned into a veritable “mis-en-scène” in the words of George Marcus (2010: 86). Rather than being characterized by “objective,” withdrawn or distant researchers, and a discreet and unaffected reality to be observed, the “mis-en-scène” is constituted by a socially relational ensemble of researchers, artists, and research subjects, both human and non-human. This “mis-en-scène” character becomes evident, for example, in Katarzyna Maniak’s account (Chapter 6) of the photographic shoots by CCP2 artist–photographer Wojciech Wilczyk. Here, the artist-photography interacts with the objects of the research (representing scenes of human rights abuses and genocide), when shouting words of condemnation or punishment at the figures representing perpetrators (an SS officer, for example). This clearly blurs the distinction between a presumed role of a distanced, “objective” documentary photographer, and a discreet object (or subject) of artistic, or indeed ethnographic, research. 3. Following from the discussions around contested cultural heritage (see above), the specific settings are arenas of contestation and friction between different communities, stakeholders, and researchers, also within the research projects by the CCPs themselves where in complex group dynamics the political and

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personal intersect (to bring forth new outcomes, cf. Chapter 10 on CCP “Dead Images”). 4. The conditioning frame of notions of contested heritage (i.e., heritage politics, stakeholders, etc.), which are both present in the material, and also evident on a more abstract meta-level, for instance, in the rhetoric of the EU around the topic (see chapters in this volume by Bellu, and by Anton, Dawson, and Bellu, on the TRACES project “Absence as Heritage”). A number of theoretical approaches have been used by the ethnographers in the individual projects and inform their chapters in this volume. It has to be stressed that the projects, and consequently the field situations, were extremely heterogeneous themselves, but also variegated when compared with each other, which, in turn, led to a great and eclectic variety of theoretical avenues being explored. Whilst, at first impression, the approaches might therefore seem idiosyncratic and eclectic, they can nevertheless be applied to start theorizing across the range projects. Among these are Luiza Nader’s notion of affective violence made productive by Katarzyna Maniak (Chapter 6), Chantal Mouffe’s concept of “agonism” employed by Aisling O’Beirn and Martin Krenn (Chapter  13), Jacques Derrida’s “Archive Fever” employed by Roma Sendyka (Chapter 7), and his “Hauntology” referenced by Aisling O’Beirn and Martin Krenn (Chapter 13). Common to all of them is that they put into sharp relief the issues of contestation (even conflict) and problematic identity and memory constructions which crystallize in various temporalities around the objects and artifacts used and interpreted in the present. The quote with which I opened this introduction, “The true museum is one that ages with its objects,” points to the historical contingency and construction of “the museum,” and, ultimately, any collection of things, and of course, their “poly-temporality,” as Geissler and Lachenal (2016: 16) termed it in the context of work with the remains of “past” medical science in Africa. To understand, at least partially, the making of these temporalities, through museums, galleries, collections, and collectors, and communities and individual agents of all kinds, lies at the back of the ethnographic projects that have been working with TRACES. All the projects deal with communities of memory, historic and present-day, and the links between these and their contested histories, centering on a range of objects and material practices (e.g., museum, gallery, collectors’ collections, abandoned architectural heritage, bodily remains, or impressions of bodies/death masks, etc.). Perhaps it is also finally significant that a number of projects engaged the notion of “repair,” such as when Aisling O’Beirn “repaired” an artifact of a former prisoner in Northern Ireland (Chapter  13), or Leone Contini mended a tin palm from colonial times, with a former Italo-Libyan settler, an object in which both their families were materially invested (Chapter 3). An important strain of recent theoretical approaches in this context addresses the profound ethical issue of “repair,” “care” (as also in “curating,” taking care of), thus ultimately leading to the questions of mutual, or crossed, understanding, perhaps even reconciliation (admittedly, always partial, and possible only in some cases) (cf. Reeves-Evison and Rainey 2018; Elhaik 2016)—and this could be said to be one of the great potentials to emerge from TRACES.

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Notes 1

2

3

4

Paul Ingendaay on the Belgrade flat—now a museum—of the Serbian writer, and Nobel Prize winner for Literature, Ivo Andrić (1892–1975), (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 21/07/2018, p. 14; my translation). Fieldwork was part of TRACES (www.tracesproject.eu), which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement no. 693857. The views expressed in this chapter are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Commission. Some elements of this introductory chapter are published in different form and context in Schneider (2019). I am grateful to Sharon Macdonald for insightful comments on an earlier draft. Sharon MacDonald has been directing one of the work packages under the TRACES program (Contentious Collections) of which this book is one of the outcomes in a different work package (Ethnographic Research on/with Art Production). More recently (in November 2018), Savoy, together with Senegalese scholar and writer, Felwine Sarr, published a much-discussed report for the French President, Emmanuel Macron, entitled “The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage. Toward a New Relational Ethics” (http://restitutionreport2018.com/sarr_savoy_en.pdf; accessed March 12, 2019).

References Ades, Dawn and Simon Baker (eds.) (2006), Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and DOCUMENTS . London/Cambridge, MA : Hayward Gallery/MIT Press. Adler, Tal (2019) “Pursuing significant and sustainable change: an experimental model for artistic engagements with contentious cultural heritage,” in Marion Hamm and Klaus Schöneberger (eds.), Contentious Heritage and Art: A Critical Companion. Klagenfurt: Wieser Verlag. Augé, Marc (1992). Non-Places: An Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso. Becker, Howard (1982). Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press. Clifford, James (1988). The Predicament of Culture. Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press. Clifford, James (1997). Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press. Deren, Maya (1953). Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. London: Thames & Hudson. Elhaik, Tarek (2016). The Incurable Image: Curating Post-Mexican Film and Media Arts, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Geissler, Paul Wenzel and Guillaume Lachenal (2016). “Brief instructions for archaeologists of African futures,” in Paul Wenzel Geissler, Guillaume Lachenal, John Manton, and Noémi Toussignant (eds.), Traces of the Futures: An Archaeology of Medical Science in Africa. Bristol: Intellect. Holfelder, Ute and Klaus Schönberger (2018). “Ethnografisches und künslerisches Forschen—von der Kooperation zur Ko-produktion,” in Ute Holfelder, Klaus Schönberger, Thomas Hengartner and Christoph Schenker (eds.), Kunst und Ethnografie zwischen Kooperation und Ko-produktion. Zurich: Chronos.

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Ingold, Tim, and Elizabeth Hallam (2007). “Creativity and cultural improvisation: an introduction,” in Tim Ingold and Elizabeth Hallam (eds.), Creativity and Cultural Improvisation. Oxford: Berg. Karp, Ivan, Corinne Kratz, Lynn Szwaja and Tomás Ibarra-Frausto (eds.) (2006). Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations. Durham, NC : Duke University Press. Karp, Ivan and Steven Levine (1991). Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Washington DC : Smithsonian Institution Press. Karp, Ivan, Christine Mullen Kreamer, and Steven Levine (1992). Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture. Washington, DC : Smithsonian Institution Press. Kelly, Julia (2012). Art, Ethnography and the Life of Objects: Paris c. 1925–1935. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Laviolette, Patrick (2013). “Introduction: storing and storying the serendipity of objects,” in Things in Culture, Culture in Things. Tartu: Tartu University Press. Liebenberg, Louis (1990). Art of Tracking: The Origin of Science. Cape Town and Johannesburg: David Philip Publishers. Macdonald, Sharon (2013). Memorylands: Heritage and Identity in Europe Today. London: Routledge. Macdonald, Sharon (2019). “Contentious collections,” in Marion Hamm and Klaus Schöneberger (eds.), Contentious Heritage and Art: A Critical Companion. Klagenfurt: Wieser Verlag. Macdonald, Sharon and Paul Basu (2007). “Introduction: experiments in exhibitions,” in Sharon Macdonald and Paul Basu (eds.), Exhibition Experiments. Oxford. Blackwell. Macdonald, Sharon Henrietta Lidchi, and Margareta von Oswald (2017). “Introduction: engaging anthropological legacies toward cosmo-optimistic futures?”, Museum Worlds: Advances in Research, 5: 97–109. Marcus, G.E. (1995). “Ethnography in/of the world system: the emergence of multi-sited ethnography,” Annual Review of Anthropology, 24: 95–117. Marcus, G.E. (1998). Ethnography through Thick and Thin. Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press. Marcus, G.E. (2002). “Beyond Malinowski and after writing culture: on the future of cultural anthropology and the predicament of ethnography,” The Australian Journal of Anthropology 13(2): 191–9. Marcus, G.E. (2010). “Affinities: Fieldwork in anthropology today and the ethnographic in artwork,” in Arnd Schneider and Christopher Wright (eds.), Between Art and Anthropology. Oxford: Berg. Martínez, Francisco (2018a). “The serendipity of anthropological practice,” Anthropological Journal of European Cultures, 28(1): 1–6. Martínez, Francisco (2018b). “Doing nothing: anthropology sits at the same table with contemporary art in Lisbon and Tbilisi,” Ethnography, 20 June, 1–19. Metken, Günter (1977). Spurensicherung: Kunst als Anthropologie und Selbsterforschung. Fiktive Wissenschaften in der heutigen Kunst. Cologne: DuMont. Pieke, Frank (2000). “Serendipity: reflections on fieldwork in China,” in P. Dresch, W. James, and D. J. Parkin (eds.), Anthropologists in a Wider World: Essays on Field Research, 129–50. New York: Berghahn Books. Plankensteiner, Barbara (2018). “Being a world culture museum today,” in Barbara Plankensteiner (ed.), The Art of Being a World Culture Museum: Futures and Lifeways of Ethnographic Museums in Contemporary Europe. Bielefeld and New York: Kerber/ Artbook International.

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Price, Sally (2007). Paris Primitive: Jacques Chirac’s Museum on the Quai Branly. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Reeves-Evison, Theo, and Mark Justin Rainey (2018). “Ethico-aesthetic repairs: an introduction,” Third Text, 32(1): 1–15. Rivoal, Isabelle and Noel Salazar (2013). “Contemporary ethnographic practice and the value of serendipity,” Social Anthropology, 21(2): 178–85. Römhild, Regina (2009). “Reflexive Europäisierung. Tourismus, Migration und die Mediterranisierung Europas,” in G. Welz, A. Lottermann, E. Braga (eds.), Projekte der Europäisierung: Kulturanthropologische Forschungsperspektiven. Kulturanthropologische Notizen. Frankfurt am Main: Institut für Kulturanthropologie und Europäische Ethnologie der Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität. Römhild, Regina (2019). “Reflexive Europeanisation,” in Marion Hamm and Klaus Schöneberger (eds.), Contentious Heritage and Art: A Critical Companion. Klagenfurt: Wieser Verlag. Savoy, Bénédicte (2018). Die Provenienz der Kultur. Berlin: Mattes & Seitz. Schneider, Arnd (1993). “The art diviners,” Anthropology Today, 9(2): 3–9. Schneider, Arnd (2006). “Appropriations,” in Arnd Schneider and Christopher Wright (eds.), Contemporary Art and Anthropology. Oxford: Berg. Schneider, Arnd (2011). “Unfinished dialogues: notes toward an alternative history of art and anthropology,” in Marcus Banks and Jay Ruby (eds.), Made to Be Seen: Perspectives on the History of Visual Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schneider, Arnd (2016). “Art/anthropology interventions,” in Samuel Bianchini and Erik Verhagen (eds.), Practicable: From Participation to Interaction in Contemporary Art. Cambridge, MA : MIT Press. Schneider, Arnd (ed.) (2017). Alternative Art and Anthropology: Global Encounters. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Schneider, Arnd (2019). “Serendipity and art-anthropology interventions,” in Marion Hamm and Klaus Schöneberger (eds.), Contentious Heritage and Art: A Critical Companion. Klagenfurt: Wieser Verlag. Schneider, Arnd and Christopher Wright (eds.) (2006). Contemporary Art and Anthropology, Oxford: Berg. Schneider, Arnd and Christopher Wright (eds.) (2010). Between Art and Anthropology, Oxford: Berg. Schneider, Arnd and Christopher Wright (2013). “Ways of working,” in Arnd Schneider and Christopher Wright (eds.), Anthropology and Art Practice. London: Bloomsbury. Silverman, Helaine (2011). “Contested cultural heritage: a selective historiography,” in Helaine Silverman (ed.), Contested Cultural Heritage: Religion, Nationalism, Erasure, and Exclusion in a Globalized World. New York: Springer. TRACES proposal (part B) to EU Horizon 2020 programme Reflective Society (2015), unpublished, 89 pp. Van Andel, Pek (1994). “Anatomy of the unsought finding. Serendipity: origin, history, domains, traditions, appearances, patterns and programmability,” The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 45(2): 631–48. Vogel, Susan (ed.) (1988). ART/artifact: African Art in Anthropology Collections. Munich: Prestel.

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2

The Scattered Colonial Body Serendipity and Neglected Heritage in the Heart of Rome Arnd Schneider

This chapter uses notions of process and serendipity to reflect upon a research and exhibition project in Rome in 2017—a collaboration between artist Leone Contini and anthropologist Arnd Schneider—which had as its subject the collections of the former colonial museum, now in storage in the Museo Pigorini (part of Museo delle Civiltà).1 In the first part, the chapter provides insight into this process through a number of thematic sections: a methodological remark on serendipity, an overview of the research setting, including the particular conditions of access to the collections of the former Italian colonial museum, and our intervention into a particular part of this collection (the facial plaster casts). Following from this, the second part of the chapter presents first results from our ethnographic work with former Italo-Libyan colonists. The final exhibition, “Bel Suol d’Amore—The Scattered Colonial Body,” is the subject of the following chapter by Leone Contini.

Serendipity from the outset As briefly outlined in the first chapter, serendipity as a theoretical concept and epistemological tool has recently gained some traction in anthropology (and the social sciences more generally). In anthropology, of course, it seems then that serendipity is both “a key to enter the field” (Rivoal and Salazar 2013: 178), but also from the serendipitous process “the field emerges” (ibid.: 178). Some scholars, such as George Marcus, have even suggested it could be the basis for model building in anthropology (Rivoal and Salazar 2013: 181, referring to Marcus 2002). It is particularly this latter notion which is of relevance here, as our field was increasingly taking contours from a number of serendipitous encounters. In fact, the main research path and process followed from completely unexpected leads, and in our case, serendipity proved to be crucial to our enquiry early on.

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Serendipitous vignette During earlier visits in the survey phase of the research (May and October/November 2016) we had explored the possibility of working on artifacts from the Pigorini Museum and setting them in relation to immigrant communities in Rome. However, we abandoned this idea eventually because either the communities had no items (or insignificant amounts) in the collections, such as the Filipino community which was present with temporary, unauthorized food stalls at the Fermi metro station in the proximity of the museum, or the subject had been covered already in previous exhibition projects by the museum (Munapé 2012).2 However, during our visit in November 2016, in the corridor of the offices of the curators and technical staff at the Pigorini Museum, Leone and I noticed large-scale models of archaeological sites covered under a thick, transparent tarpaulin. We unveiled them and Leone recognized the models as being of the archaeological remains (and their restoration) of Sabratha in Libya, a site which had been excavated and restored under the supervision of his grandfather, Giacomo Caputo, Superintendent of Antiquities in Libya from 1933.3 Right above the model a picture was hung, displaying two Italian soldiers on motorbikes and an armored vehicle driving at full speed through a Libyan landscape (purveying the idea of speed—almost reminiscent of the futurist glorification of war machines, military efficiency, and colonial domination).4 It was this

Figure 2.1 Corridor of the Museo Prestorico Etnografio “Luigi Pigorini” (part of Museo delle Civiltà), Rome, with model of Sabratha amphitheater, and painting from colonial period (details in note 4, Chapter 2). Photo: Wolfgang Thaler.

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encounter with the colonial past stored in the museum which provoked our interest and persuaded us to work with the collections of the IsIAO (L’Istituto italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente), in temporary storage at the Pigorini and other institutions in Rome.

A scattered body: the setting and challenges of access The IsIAO, established in 1995, resulted from the merger of the former Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente (IsMEO) and the Istituto Italo-Africano (IIA). The IIA, in turn, incorporates the Museo Coloniale (Colonial Museum), founded in 1923 and from 1947 entitled the Museo Africano (closed in 1972),5 and based in Via Aldrovandi, at the northern edge of the Rome Zoo, and next to the Zoological Museum. Since the closure of the IsIAO in 2012, a large part of the African Museum’s collections have been housed in the Pigorini Museum, while others (just as the other IsIAO holdings) were kept in various other museums, including the Municipal Zoological Museum, the National Gallery of Modern Art, the National Library, and not least the Historical Museum of the Italian Infantry (Museo Storico della Fanteria), or indeed on the premises of the defunct IsIAO next to the Zoological Museum, from where we could observe their removal (see serendipitous vignette, ‘Objects in transit’, below). Due to the dispersal of its collections and the transitoriness of these arrangements, research on the collections of the IsIAO provided particular challenges of access. From the time our research began in May 2016, the Pigorini Museum went through a change of three directors, and we had to repeatedly renegotiate and revalidate our research permissions to gain access, in order to see collections which include a wide array of objects in the depots of the Pigorini, made both by Italian colonial manufacturers and colonists (colonizers) and indigenous colonial subjects themselves (sometimes overlapping), or singularly by colonial subjects, and also items taken as war booty during the colonial wars Italy engaged in at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. As mentioned, during the period of our fieldwork, a large part of the IsIAO’s holdings were scattered over a number of museums and other institutions in the Italian capital. Thus the significant practical challenges of doing work on such a dispersed, indeed “scattered body” (as the title of our exhibition suggests) were formidable.6

Objects in transit The transitoriness and dispersed assemblage of the IsIAO collections were made visibly and physically manifest during the removal of the remaining collections from the IsIAO premises in Via Aldrovandi 16 in March 2017. We had an opportunity to witness the removal, and the objects that most intrigued us and attracted attention were the bronze busts, green with patina. These were the Italian “imperial” generals and politicians connected to the colonial enterprise. Rodolfo Graziani, in particular, caught our interest. Graziani, a fanatical Fascist, had committed war crimes—including the use of gas and concentration camps—both in the campaigns to pacify Libya in the 1920s (where he was also vice governor of Cyrenaica (1930–4)) and in Ethiopia (as

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Figure 2.2 Bronze bust of Rodolfo Graziani, during removal from IsIAO premises, Via Aldrovandi, Rome, March 2017. Photo: Arnd Schneider.

Figure 2.3 Leone Contini mounting exhibition “Bel Suol d’Amore—The Scattered Colonial Body,” Museum L. Pigorini, Rome, June 2017. Photo: Wolfang Thaler.

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Viceroy 1936–7). The bust in the collections seemed to us to have a particularly brutal and warlike appearance. Now, during the transit Graziani was bandaged, somehow contained, going to yet another place of storage, but also going to a new exposure, eventually, in our exhibition which would involve a new unmasking and re-bandaging— the beginning of a critical re-examination. Another very noticeable set of items were the large-scale relief maps of the Italian possessions in Africa which give an idea of the colonial pretensions of the “Empire,” but also the extent of toponymical colonization (with the establishment of new colonial villages in Libya and Eritrea for instance). In the case of Libya (the “fourth shore”), the tight links to the metropolitan mother country with frequent routes and the names of ocean liners and other services, including by seaplane, were meticulously indicated. On the enormous map of Libya, oriented north to south from the Italian viewpoint across the Mediterranean (so that the idea of the Quarta Sponda, “Fourth Shore,” comes into full relief) the route from Tripoli to Syracuse is indicated with dotted lines and a miniature ship, on which several of our interview subjects (see further below) would have traveled (Figure 2.4). The removal was a truly “moving” event, both emotionally and physically—here one really saw the colonial regime coming out of storage, and we would have hoped for a wider public exposure. However, in the absence, to date, of a full public debate—apart from a few critical historians and activists (notably Angelo del Boca and Nicola

Figure 2.4 Map of colonial Libya (detail), Italy, 1930s, collection of former IsIAO, Rome. Photo: Arnd Schneider.

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Labanca)—on Italy’s colonial legacy, the move of the items seemed to be hidden from the public eye, almost going on in secret. Whilst the library of the IsIAO was transferred to the National Library (a part of the move we could not observe), the bulk of the objects, including the busts of Fascist officials, canons, and relief maps, went into storage in the Pigorini Museum, where they awaited further cataloging and eventual use in future exhibitions. It is from these objects that we chose a number of busts and canons to display in our exhibition (see the following chapter by Leone Contini). Even during the move, there was an element of serendipity, when one of the removal men told us that his grandfather lived in Libya during colonial times. He later lent for the exhibition the school registry book from right after the Second World War, where, tellingly, the subject “Fascist Culture” (cultura fascista) had been crossed out.

Agency, re-enactment, and “reanimation”: facial plaster casts in the Pigorini One particular part of the collection (of the former African Museum /IsIAO) regards the facial plaster casts by Italian physical anthropologists, among them Lidio Cipriani (1892–1962), a prominent anthropologist during Fascist times, director of the Florence Museum of Anthropology (1937–40), and signatory of the Manifesto della Razza (1938) (Manifesto degli scienziati razzisti; Manifesto of Race, or Manifesto of the racist scientists) (Landi and Moggi Cecchi 2014: 26–7), which was followed by the introduction of the racial laws in October 1938, which stripped Jews of Italian citizenship and governmental and professional positions. This collection consists of forty plaster casts, busts, and heads stored in nine boxes in the Pigorini Museum/Museo delle Civiltà (Fiorletta 2012/13); nineteen of these were cast by Lidio Cipriani, primarily from Tuareg individuals.7 The artist Leone Contini and I decided to reproduce some facial plaster casts as 3D copies, which would permit us to take them out of the museum depots—for instance, to use in discussions but also in the exhibition—and eventually we chose the head of a young man. We think that this head might belong to another part of the plaster cast collection that was assembled in 1929 in Libya (since 1911 an Italian colony), by the colonial government of Cyrenaica, consisting of twenty-two plaster casts.8 One of the plaster heads examined in spring 2017 by Loretta Paderni (curator of the Asian collections at the Pigorini) and myself bears precisely the label “Governo della Cirenaica, Ufficio Studi, Missione antropologica, 1928–29” (inv. no. 1987, 4943, 17/22). The head chosen by Contini and myself (Figure 2.5) has inventory number 1987, 4943, 20/22, and thus must belong to the same series, although it does not have the paper label of the Cirenaica government. Although to date there has been no further evidence found in the catalogs and archives of the Pigorini (and specifically how the plaster casts came to IsIAO), it is possible that this particular expedition for the anthropometric research and execution of facial plaster casts might have been the one carried out between 1928 and 1929 by Nello Puccioni (1881–1937), a director of the Florence Museum of Anthropology (1931–7) and predecessor of Lidio Cipriani (Surdich 2016; also Landi and Moggi

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Figure 2.5 Plaster head from Puccioni expedition in Cyrenaica 1928/1929, inv. no. 1987, 4943, 17/22, Museum L. Pigorini, Rome. Photo: Leone Contini.

Cecchi 2014: 24–5). The results of this expedition were published in two volumes as Antropometria delle genti della Cirenaica (“Anthropometry of the peoples of Cirenaica”) (Puccioni 1934a, 1934b). In an introductory note on the collection of the material, Puccioni specifies the periods of research between mid-January 1928 and the end of March 1928, and from March 1929 to May 1929 (Puccioni 1934a: 3). Anthropometric research was carried out on 928 individuals (829 Arab-Berbers, and 99 Sudanese living in a village in the proximity of Bengasi) and 190 photographs were taken, as well as a series of thirty plaster casts, donated to the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology, University of Florence, and “reproducing some of the most significant types of the Arab-Berbers, and the Sudanese” (ibid.: 4). Puccioni writes about the northeastern suburb of Es-Sabri of Bengasi which contains a rather extensive village of Sudanese, containing nine “tribes,” originally from the south of Lake Chad, and numbering 519 people (Puccioni 1934a: 428). Puccioni mentions that the people from this village live from the work they find in the city: handymen, mechanics, and some drivers of cars. The conditions for research, and the colonial context (and the means used to persuade or force people to have anthropometric measurements and plaster casts taken) are not further specified, only that Puccioni can measure a sample of ninety-one men, but that women and people under 18 are not accessible, and that the eight women of the sample were prostitutes (Puccioni 1934a: 428).

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One can only speculate here about the precise conditions of this racist anthropometric research under colonial conditions, and there is no further context provided for the Sudanese material. As regards the “Arab-Berber” populations examined by Puccioni, there is only brief reference that on two occasions, despite the “goodwill” (buona volontà) of the officials of the colonial government, he could not assemble the number of individuals required for a sufficient sample (Puccioni 1934a: 10). Whether these difficulties (for Puccioni) were due to logistical or other issues, perhaps of persuading the population, or even an indication of resistance, cannot be discerned from the text—the only indications given are that these were partly remnants or displaced people of the population after the Italian occupation of 1913 (Puccioni 1934a: 428) which led to widespread population displacement. In addition, from 1923 to 1931 there was the Second Italo-Senussi War, mainly carried out in Cirenaica (cf. Evans-Pritchard 1949), but whilst Puccioni’s expedition falls into this period, the war is not mentioned in his book, and we are left to speculate how it influenced the research (i.e., what role in the attitudes by the native population toward their oppressors, and indeed vice versa by the colonial officials it might have played). Of course, we cannot be certain, but the mask we had chosen might be relating to an individual of sub-Saharan African origin. Thus, without falling ourselves into the trap of racist physical anthropology and its classifications, it might be possible that the plaster cast chosen belongs to the Sudanese section of the Puccioni collection, if this is indeed the one in the Pigorini Museum (as part of the IsIAO collection). Unfortunately, the photographic plates reproduced by Puccioni (Puccioni 1934b: 249ff.) do not permit identification of the individual from our mask, if indeed he was part of the sample. So far, we have been unable to establish the exact provenance of the mask, or indeed of the individual from whom it was taken, and under what circumstances. This will have to await further research, in the archives of the IsIAO, and possibly also in the Florence Museum of Anthropology. The aim of the 3D procedure was to deconstruct the original act of appropriation from the colonial subject. With the process of scanning (repeated as a performance during the opening of the exhibition) and subsequent 3D printing we also wanted to critically invoke a process of “reanimation” of the colonial subject, who would come “alive” as a kind of simulacrum in the copy. The agency of the subject had been repressed through the colonial regime, and the often forced and violent “impression” of plaster to obtain the facial negative mask, where wet plaster is applied directly to the face with closed eyes, leaving only the nostrils for breathing open. This was a very unpleasant procedure for the person on whom it was executed, implying a certain danger, and at least inducing the fear of suffocation, and signs of duress and pain experienced are clearly visible on the masks. It is not clear at this point if the subjects of the plaster casts of the collection we researched were “volunteers”, or whether they were forced to participate and under what circumstances (Puccioni 1934a: 428). In any case, the plaster casts were taken under the colonial regime from colonial subjects subordinate to the Italian administration, at the service of Italian physical anthropologists working for the colonial government of Cyrenaica. In the late nineteenth century, and the first decades of the twentieth century, taking facial plaster casts was common practice among physical anthropologists working for

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colonial governments—a well-documented case is the practices of Dutch anthropologists working in Indonesia (Sysling 2016). The procedure was timeconsuming, intrusive and uncomfortable, sometimes even painful (ibid.: 90–1). Colonial officials and physical anthropologists had to win over natives with tricks, gifts, and persuasion, and were met with fear and resistance (ibid.: 92–3). As Sysling writes, it is clear that “the making of plaster casts was much easier to do within the disciplinary structures of the colonial state” (ibid.: 93). For our specific case, we could not find documentation other than numeric entries in the catalog, and sparse information on the provenance (cf. Puccioni 1934a, 1934b). In addition, the diary and private papers of Lidio Cipriani (and indeed Nello Puccioni) at the Museum of Anthropology and Natural History in Florence are not directly accessible to researchers at present. What, then, do to with this head? We commissioned Mnemosyne, a Naples-based company specializing in 3D printing, and which also does reconstructions of skulls (replicas) for the physical anthropology department of the Pigorini Museum to scan and replicate one of the skulls as a 3D copy—a process we also documented, and the scanning part of which we repeated at the exhibition (see next chapter by Leone Contini). During the exhibition performance one of the original plaster cast heads was scanned live, and the process contemporaneously visualized on the computer screen, thus seemingly “reanimating” a facial cast (Figure 2.6).

Figure 2.6 Scanning of plaster heads from the Cipriani and Puccioni collections during the opening of the exhibition “Bel Suol d’Amore—The Scattered Colonial Body,” Museum L. Pigorini, Rome, June 2017. Photo: Cinzia Delnevo.

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The question then could be asked of what kind of agency is involved in the plaster mask and its 3D replication, which involved the original subject (at the material remove of the mask), its colonial masters, and the anthropologists taking the plaster mold, the original mask, and its 3D replica. There was certainly some new agency involved in the process of scanning and printing, and in an uncanny way the “subject” of the facial mask seemed to come “alive” through the 3D process. Not only was the mask reproduced, but the representation on the screen seemed through various movements, layering, colors, and changes in pixilation to “give life to” and “animate” the former subject and not just its sculptural representation (a process captured in Leone Contini’s video “Restolen #2”, 2017, a still of which is the cover image of this book). The mask—a positive copy from the original plaster mold—is both a remnant of and testimony to the original process as experienced by the subject and inherent colonial violence, as executed by the colonial anthropologists. It also served as a tactile and haptic document and artifact for us. It thus almost became an uncanny object of desire and projection of our research on the past process of making a facial “copy” of a living human being. The process of reconstruction through the 3D copy then comes into the middle of the two “sides” of the mask, its inside so to speak showing the contours of the facial mold in direct contact with the face of the subject, and its outside, which is the mask we see. The 3D copying then probes into this process and also constructs something new with a new artifact, both virtual on the screen, and in its materiality. Further, during the exhibition a scan of the mask was performed in situ, and the copy of the mask exhibited for the public to view, and a picture taken with a “fictive” auto shutter—part of the artwork “Restolen #1”, 2017, by Leone Contini (see the following chapter by Contini).

Libyan collections and Italo-Libyans: the long decolonization During our research at the museum we increasingly concentrated on materials from the Libyan collections of the former IsIAO. Though originally focused on objects of Libyan provenance now kept in the Pigorini Museum and other institutions, this part of our research soon achieved a dynamic of its own through the encounters with ItaloLibyans (mostly elderly former settlers), and recording of their life histories, nostalgic recollections, personal objects, and food practices. To our great surprise it had turned out that a number of museum staff themselves where of post-colonial Italo-Libyan extraction: they had been born there and “returned” as young children to Italy either in the 1960s or as part of the forced exodus in 1970. Through one of them, Gianfranco Calandra (a graphic designer and head of the public relations department at the Pigorini Museum), we got in touch with an association of Italians who had been colonists in Libya and students at the Catholic La Salle Schools.9 This line of enquiry concerned a group of elderly Italian colonists from Libya—the “white others,” so to speak—little known or written about in present-day Italian society. As mentioned, an initial idea had been to set the Italian Libyans in relation to the objects in the museum. However, on one occasion when we placed a facial plaster cast

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Figure 2.7 A group of former Italo-Libyan settlers interviewed in the library of the Museum L. Pigorini, video still from documentation video, Rome, 2017. Photo: Leone Contini.

on the table during a group interview in the museum’s library, it did not arouse much attention or comment, and instead the participants focused on their own histories (Figure  2.7). Similarly, at the exhibition opening the artifacts and objects from the museum were raising less interest among the Italo-Libyans (but rather among other visitors, artists, students, etc.), and like the colonial busts and canons were not fully understood in our critical intentions, whereas their own personal belongings from colonial times—exhibited in a showcase—and the interview extracts on the screens were subject to immediate comment (see also the following chapter by Leone Contini).

Serendipitous vignette: mending memory objects Serendipity was characterizing our research and artistic interventions in an ascending scale since we had discovered the model of the Sabratha ruins in the corridors of the museum that had been excavated by Leone’s grandfather, Giacomo Caputo (see above). Serendipity acquired an even more personal meaning when Tina Gaudino, a museum employee, born in Tripoli of Italian parents and one of our interviewees, discovered that her father had worked for Leone’s grandfather as a mosaicist and skilled craftsman in archaeological excavations in Libya. In addition, it turned out Leone had in his family’s possession a small artifact, a tin palm, made by Tina’s father. The tin palm, which Leone had inherited from his deceased grandmother, was in a fragile state with some parts broken off. For the artistic intervention, Leone invited Tina to work with him to repair the tin palm. This act of joint soldering symbolically tied them together, a joining of memories, life, and family histories which never had been shared in this way (see also next chapter by Leone Contini) (Figure 2.8).

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Figure 2.8 Leone Contini and Tina Gaudino repairing the palm at Museum L. Pigorini, 2017. Photo: Arnd Schneider.

Background: ambiguous de-colonials These former Italian settlers have an ambiguous status in Italy. They are only partly comparable (in others very dissimilar) to other returnees from former European colonies in Africa, such as the French pieds noirs or Portuguese retornados, since Italy did not face a war of decolonization from the Libyans before their independence in 1951. Italy de facto lost its colonies during the Second World War after Mussolini’s fall in 1943, and the process of formal decolonization was only concluded in the early 1950s. The colonial Italian settlers and their descendants—still around twenty thousand—had to leave Libya only in 1970 after Colonel Gaddafi’s coup d’état in 1969. Therefore, Italy’s colonialism and subsequent decolonization, whilst not entirely phenomena sui generis, and certainly not decoupled from global developments, are difficult to classify with the standard conceptual tools of post-colonial studies. In contrast with other colonial empires, decolonization was not primarily the result of struggles for independence, although resistance movements put up a fierce fight against the Italian occupiers right from the beginning, especially the Senussi Order (EvansPritchard 1949) and the Senussi rebel leader Omar Mukhtar.10 Instead Italian colonialism was brought to an abrupt end through Fascist Italy’s defeat in the Second World War in 1943, resulting in the case of Libya from the German–Italian defeat in North Africa in 1943, and in East Africa of Italian forces by the British in 1941. Thus

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Libya is characterized by a long and drawn-out process of decolonization, not marked by one single date (for instance, of independence in 1951). Rather there are certain turning points which put this process into relief and signify important stages, and which historian Pamela Ballinger addresses with her critical questions: [C]an we say that practical or de facto decolonization came about between 1941 and 1943 and formal decolonization in 1947 as a result of Italy’s defeat in war? Does this even count as decolonization in Le Sueur’s terms, if decolonization entails “hard-won battles between nationalists and metropolitan colonial powers”? Or, by this definition, can decolonization in a territory like that of Libya . . . only be said to occur in 1951 with the achievement of independence? Or does decolonization in a genuine sense occur in 1956, with the Italo-Libyan accords that laid out the terms by which Italian projects of demographic colonization would formally cease and remaining colonial settlers would assume the mortgages for their lands? Does 1970 instead signal the final act of decolonization, with the expropriation of Italian property and the expulsion decrees issued by Gaddafi’s revolutionary regime and the flight of the approximately 20,000 Italians still resident in Libya? Or, rather, does the 2008 Italian and Libyan Friendship Treaty in which Italy pledged $5 billion compensation for colonial atrocities mark the true closing of the decolonization era? Ballinger 2015: 814–15

The Italo-Libyan interview subjects of our research are then living remnants of this process as post-colonial subjects in today’s Italy, constructing a particular and nostalgic version of their history, and current relation with Libya, that ultimately defines their identity in contemporary Italy. In the main, the community of mainly elderly Italo-Libyans preserves strong nostalgic memories, both privately and through the communal activities of its associations. In order to understand their mainly positive evaluation of the (post-) colonial past up to 1970, one has to look at their structural position in terms of history and in relation to (post-)colonial society. Those still alive in 2018 were obviously born after the occupation of Libya following the Italo-Turkish war (1911/12) and the subsequent colonial administration and repression of indigenous resistance during the 1920s and 1930s, and only very few had been young children during the Second World War. In effect, they are descendants of original colonists. In their majority, they have a conservative outlook, stressing the Italian contribution to the development of Libya, in terms of modernity, infrastructure, and agriculture, and emphasizing overall good relations with the Libyan Arabic population, and indeed an important Jewish community, as well as Greek and Maltese settlers. This trope of positive nostalgic remembrance of the colonial and post-colonial past also gets ritually celebrated in regular encounters of their associations, and special cultural events. An example of this is the exhibition “Gli italiani in Libia: il contributo allo sviluppo del paese,” held in Bologna in 2016 (AIRL 2006a).11 The positive, and largely self-congratulatory, evaluation of the Italian contribution to the development of Libya in fact is strongly evinced in this recent exhibition and

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catalog produced by the Italian association of returnees from Libya. The invitation leaflet stresses three types of memory this exhibition intended to address: The Proustian, involuntary memory, which “reinvigorates in the heart of the Italians in the unforgettable perfume of life in Libya,” the voluntary memory which “makes to reemerge intermittently the memory of forced and painful abandon of persons, places and things,” and “therapeutic memory which alleviates every suffering and which projects itself as a treaty of union, of brotherhood between the past and the present, between the Italians of Libya and the young Libyans of today. AIRL 2016b, with variation AIRL 2016a: 9

Over the years the importance of the impact of the work of the Italians in the former colony, before and after the Second World War has been forgotten. All of Libya benefited from a radical transformation which made it a modern country. AIRL 2016b

These tropes of memory we also found to be present in our conversations with ItaloLibyans. A significant number of Italo-Libyans whom we interviewed were enrolled in the 1940s and 1950s in Catholic schools (specifically, La Salle) and have childhood memories from this time and communal activities organized by these schools, such as football clubs. Most of them have a conservative outlook and only a very few others have antifascist and socialist roots. An example of the latter included the artist collaborating with me, Leone Contini, whose mother was born in Tripoli, and who showed video interviews with his grandmother in the exhibition which were very critical of colonialism (see the following chapter by Contini). In other words, it is not just that the contribution of Italian colonials has been “forgotten” (as suggested by the above-mentioned catalog), but rather that the subject of Italian colonialism, its historical responsibilities and legacy, has not been fully addressed to date in Italian society, but rather has been the subject of widespread amnesia, with a few exceptions by critical historians (e.g., Del Boca 2010, 2014, 2015; Labanca 2002, 2012). In this context it is useful to look at other European settlers and forced migration of former settlers from European colonies in Africa. Former European settlers and their descendants having “returned” to the home countries (i.e the former colonial powers) as diverse as the French pieds noirs (as well as their allies, the native Muslim Algerian Harkis), Portuguese retornados, and the former Italian colonists of Libya, in their present configuration are then communities of memory, or “mnemonic communities” (Cappelletto 2003, in Crapanzano 2011: 193). That is to say, they are not defined by the geographic place they currently inhabit (i.e., France, Portugal, or Italy). Yet they are defined, I would argue, certainly by the place and society that surrounds them. In this sense, they are also “part of and apart from their own nation,” as Eldridge (2013: 121; also 2016) says of the pieds noirs in France. As anthropologist Vincent Crapanzano writes of the Harkis, the Algerian auxiliary troops who were fighting with the French in the Algerian War of Independence

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(1958–1962), “their communities are not founded on place, but on shared memories” (2011: 193). Whilst their structural position regarding memory is similar, the Harkis’ historical experience, of course, is highly diverse from the pieds noirs. The “white” French settlers fled en masse after 1962, protected and helped by the French army, quite unlike the Harkis, who were offered no such protection, persecuted in Algeria as traitors, settled in camps, and treated as forgotten and underdogs in French society, and equally despised by other Algerian immigrants in France. Similarly, the Portuguese retornados still seem to carry the stain of colonialism with them (David 2015), and became “internal strangers” in Portugal after 1974 (Lubkemann 2003: 76, 84). By contrast, the position of the Italian settlers was quite different. The Italians in Libya, despite having lost the colony, kept a privileged status in society and continued to have positions as administrators, technical personnel, agricultural technicians, and also farmers under the government of King Idris from 1952 (when Libya became a federal monarchy). After the coup d’état by Colonel Gaddafi in 1969, and their subsequent expulsion in 1970, they lost their raison d’être and their memories became displaced in time and space. As I observed at one of their gatherings, the former Italian settlers in Libya look back on their time in Libya in very positive and idealized ways—they even share a strange sense of elation at these gatherings, since they have nowhere to go back to (and no reference community left behind), only in their memories. As a rather privileged and overall highly regarded community before expulsion, their case is also different from the many communities the world over who, historically and in contemporary times, had to flee their homelands, or were displaced following a history of economic and social marginalization, and ethnic or other forms of repression. Italo-Libyans after 1943 to some degree continued to enjoy the privileges, but ceased to be the de facto colonial masters and outright oppressors (sometimes even experiencing a certain hostility from the new colonial masters during the years of British administration until 1951). For those who had been very young children during the late colonial period, or been born shortly after it, their structural position as postcolonials seemed to free them in their own perception of a sense of responsibility or even guilt as representatives of the former colonial power and oppressor. Yet in fact, in terms of ethos, worldview, and more general cultural and political outlook they are colonials and to a certain degree keep the ideology of their forebears—like other “white” former settlers from European colonies, theirs is an expression of “sentimental imperialism” (Cooper 2003: 180). In their appreciation of Italian colonialism the contribution of Italian engineers, hospitals, and agriculture to the infrastructure and development of the country more generally is highlighted, and the brutal repression of the indigenous populations in the 1920s and 30s downplayed, or not mentioned at all. If anything, their own victimhood (cf. also Eldridge 2013, 2016 on pieds noirs) as being confronted by hostilities of the British after 1943, or after the 1969 coup by Gaddafi and their subsequent expulsion are highlighted, paralleled by similar perceptions of history as “accomplishment” and “suffering” by other European post-colonials (Cooper 2003: 169). In some cases, but not all, this is connected to the fact that their parents had only arrived in the late 1930s when colonization and the “pacification” of Libya were already a fait accompli.

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Twice returned: displaced memories and return travels, and the non-recognition of “places” After a certain rapprochement and warming of relations between Italy and Libya during the last two Berlusconi governments (2001–6, 2008–11), a number of former settlers took the opportunity to visit Libya. For many of them this was for the first time in more than thirty years. The return in the late 2000s confirmed their impression that Libya had gambled away the achievements of the Italians, and all vestiges of Italian “civilization” and colonization had been abandoned, reduced to rudimentary functions, or become outright ruins. The encounters related by our interview subjects tell of meetings with Libyan Arabs on an individual level and contrast sharply with other accounts which portray Italians as more highly skilled and more eager to work in contrast with other Libyans, especially Arabs, to whom they felt superior. Italo-Libyans then have twice returned memories, once after their early returns in the 1960s and their eventual expulsion in 1970 relating to their former life in Libya, the expulsion being a “return” of sorts, some having never been to Italy (here again are structural similarities with the French pieds noirs and Portuguese retornados) and they now had to match idealized projections of Italy (itself partly based on memories of their forebears and others) against a new and changed Italian reality. Thus after 1970 another shock was in store for the “returnees” at “home,” in Italy. Having enjoyed a secure and protected life within an ethnic community, they found themselves now not exactly welcome, and were at times ostracized similar to South Italian labor migrants (terroni), with strange accents which could not be classified in Northern Italian cities, and having to accept precarious living conditions. As one new arrival put it, “We had been more respected by the Arabs than by the Italians” (Più rispettato dagli arabi che dagli italiani). The second return was the return journeys in the early 2000s, and was made possible by the thawing of relations between the Libyan and Italian governments (then respectively led by Gaddafi and Berlusconi). Here again, an idealized image of their Libyan settler past is held up and confronted with a changed reality. Asked about their impressions, feelings, and experiences, some of them mention that they did not recognize anything, that everything had changed. Indeed, “We didn’t find anything,” and “We didn’t recognize anything” were frequent expressions heard when the interviewees described these travels. Thus some of the most interesting encounters occurred during their return visits, encountering and re-encountering what they have lost what inevitably has changed, sometimes beyond recognition, especially in its material and architectural substance. For instance, courtyards had changed beyond recognition but also the current Libyan inhabitants were surprised at the childhood photo of the courtyard shown to them, and could not believe what their place had once looked like. For the Italo-Libyan visitors, however, the photo has become a representation of memory, “evidence” of a past state, now unobtainable. The trope of non-recognition (an almost dreamlike non-recognition of places) during the return trips during the 2000s is intricately linked to the non-fulfillment,

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indeed incompletion, of the original “fantasy” of colonization, and also more specifically of a post-colonial settler colony cut short in its own destiny by Gaddafi’s coup in 1970. This “fantasy” or myth of colonization includes notions of peaceful and unproblematic cohabitation with other ethnicities, especially with Libyans, who— despite the rhetoric—were in subaltern positions. A general statement (on the surface) in the accounts, referring to their early days in Libya, is often that the ethnic groups were all “brothers” (fratelli); that there was lots of brotherhood (fratellanza), and that they grew up together (siamo cresciuti assieme). In general terms, these assertions were also applied to other immigrant settlers, especially Greeks, Maltese, and to some degree, Jews and, finally, Arabs. However, on second questioning during our interviews, it became clear that this general statement did not apply uniformly to all ethnic groups and least to the host populations, but that the Italians interviewed regarded only the Greeks and Maltese as their equal (“they are like us,” sono come noi), Jews as different (and occasionally prejudiced against on religious grounds), and Libyan Arabs as inferiors (in terms of skills and customs, especially religious and gender roles). The former settlers stressed repeatedly what they saw as the significant contribution of Italians to the “development” of Libya: in terms of infrastructure, hospitals, roads, schools, and agriculture, and a functioning administration and institutions. They contended that even after the eclipse of colonialism these supposed achievements of colonialism were maintained and to some extent continued by skilled and talented Italian personnel, which the interview group represented. However, notions of Italianinduced and maintained development were strongly contrasted with the post-1970 takeover by the Libyans, and its effects on Italian property and infrastructure, and alleged general mismanagement. This negative evaluation of the post-1970 Libyan government surfaces also in accounts of the actual expulsion, and arbitrariness and comportment toward the Italian population, the climate of insecurity, the harsh and erratic treatment, occasional abuse and harassment, especially at customs, regarding leaving procedures and formalities. The negative perception also referred to what happened to Libya after 1970: the abandonment of Italian villages, agriculture, the lack of skilled workers to maintain industrial, and especially oil installations. All the interview subjects had nostalgic views of their past in Libya, encapsulating a timeless image in their memories apparently largely untouched by external events or problems. The stories show a clear pattern of an unusually happy childhood as part of a relatively privileged settler society which had lost the war, but under British rule, and the subsequent King Idris regime could do business and stay on in a superior position in respect to the Arab majority population. However, such accounts, with few exceptions, also gloss over internal differentiation and stratification within the community, including attempts during the colony to “civilize and sedentarize” South Italians, often from precarious situations as landless workers, but also later class differences between those working in Tripoli, in oil companies for example, and those performing agricultural work in the countryside (cf. Ballinger 2015: 822–5). More research needs to be done, but material objects brought back by the ItaloLibyans are imbued with memory, and they evoke memory in a particular way, reflecting what Patrick Laviolette (2013: 30) has called “the solidity of things and

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ephemerality of stories.” The strongest evocation of memory involves the few objects from Libya the refugees could take during their expulsion in 1970, including specifically personal photos, but also panoramic views of Tripoli, tourist leaflets, and also practical implements, such as the special pots to prepare couscous. Most refugees could only take very little on the journey, whether going by ship or air. Consequently, the few items and artifacts they did bring are rather small and portable—kitchen utensils, souvenirs, small decorative items—whereas those who had left before 1970 could also bring larger items such as furniture (some of which was shown in our exhibition; see next chapter by Leone Contini).

Conclusion: the challenges and limits of art-intervention, or the ethnographic field as artistic laboratory Our project was one of art-intervention (cf. Schneider 2016) where we would erupt into the museum’s process of uncovering, reassessing, and projecting toward the future the collection of the former Italian colonial museum. As we have seen in this chapter, this process was not without surprises, detours (even setbacks), and indeed serendipitous encounters. The positionality of the research team was also important. In particular, the artist Leone Contini, a descendant of Italian settlers in Libya, found himself often uncannily and uncomfortably close to the Italo-Libyans we interviewed, with whom he shared some family memories and food practices but not their overall view of colonialism and nostalgic remembrance. Particular challenges arose from our roles and position in the field and specific research agendas. Whilst museum staff were familiar with the anthropologist in a more restricted sense assuming a role of researching the artifacts, archives, and the library (similar to a museum curator), the ethnographic part including interviews and fieldwork in the museum had to be carefully explained and set in context. Similarly, whilst the museum had collaborated with contemporary artists before (for instance, the collaboration of the artist H.H. Lim within the SWICH project;12 see Lim, Paderni, and di Lella 2018: 8–29), the idea and practice that an artist would work and do intensive research on the collections was probably new, and not always fully appreciated and understood, and not only by technical staff. In our often ad hoc manner of working, there were certainly bouts of creativity, imagination, making unforeseen connections (as in the photos of Leone drawing in Gianfranco’s office), developing future research scenarios (for more research paths) and the final exhibition, the subject of the following chapter by Leone Contini. This contrasted with the cataloging, and detailed description of the collection from the former IsIAO now in the Pigorini Museum the curators were involved in. This mismatch of perceptions came to the fore when on one occasion one of the curators questioned our role at the museum. This happened when, in a cursory manner, Leone Contini and I were inspecting items from the collections, and a curator and a technician who were busy cataloging items could not make sense of our more serendipitous procedure, and the curator asked rather provocatively and acerbically: “What are you doing here? You cannot just come here and look around at everything

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indiscriminately—here we are doing serious research,” in effect questioning our motives. To which we replied, “We are doing research, too, and are respecting your work, so you have to respect ours!” and Leone exclaimed: “As an artist I have my way of working!” implying that as an artist he was working serendipitously and exploring many research avenues contemporaneously. Certainly, research and making the exhibition had been a learning process for us. The museum had become both an ethnographic field and an artistic laboratory where we could test our ideas, but also had to tread carefully not to endanger the whole research process, and to upset a delicate balance of powers between our serendipitous process and the limitations set by the museum context. The museum, too, had evolved during the period, and partly through the process of our research. What in 2016 had been a hidden collection in the corridors and vaults of the museum, now under new directorship and new curators is planned to become a proper research collection and exhibit for a critical appreciation of Italy’s colonial past and post-colonial present.

Notes 1

2

3 4

The full title of the museum is Museo Preistorico Etnografico “Lugi Pigorini,” and it is now part of the Museo delle Civiltà (which also comprises the Museo Arti e Tradizioni Popolari “Lamberto Loria,” the Museo d’Arte Orientale “G. Tucci,” and the Museo dell’Alto Medioevo). In the current text the shorthand “Pigorini Museum” will be adopted. For a historical note on the museum, see http://www.museocivilta. beniculturali.it/sezioni/museo-preistorico-etnografico-pigorini.html#storia (accessed March 13, 2019). Fieldwork consisted of two short exploratory field trips to Rome in May and October/November 2016, and extensive fieldwork of almost six months from the end of January through to the beginning of July 2017 that culminated in a final exhibition entitled “Bel Suol d’Amore—The Scattered Colonial Body” (June 25 to July 9, 2017). Fieldwork was part of TRACES (www.tracesproject.eu), which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 693857. The views expressed in this chapter are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Commission. I thank all museum staff for their collaboration, especially successive directors, Leandro Ventura and Filippo Maria Gambari, and curators Loretta Paderni and Rossana di Lella. Thanks are also due to the Italo-Libyan settlers interviewed for this research (eleven interviews between 2017 and 2018, transcribed by Giulia Livi), and hospitality at a number of community events. Not everybody can be named, but special thanks are due to the Calandra family and Giancarlo Consolandi. It would still be worthwhile to work with a precarious and transitory Filipino migrant community and set them in relation to the museum, independent of whether they have objects in the collection or not. In particular, their food stalls could become regular, legal businesses, and perhaps also provide a catering option for the nearby museums. See http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/giacomo-caputo/ (accessed July 9, 2018) and https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giacomo_Caputo_(archeologo) (accessed July 9, 2018). “Militari della P.A.I. in motocicletta” (after 1936) by Giuseppe Rondini (Palermo 1895—Grottaferrata, Roma 1955). P.A.I. is the acronym for “Polizia dell’Africa

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Italiana.” Inv. 10146 (1938), Museo delle Civiltà—Collezioni dell’ex Museo coloniale di Roma. 5 Cf. Margozzi (2005: 18), Gandolfo (2014: 125–216), also Wikipedia entry “Museo africano,” https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museo_africano (accessed December 12, 2018). 6 Our research, in the first half of 2017, arrived at a particularly delicate moment. The executor of the estate of the IsIAO, an official of ambassadorial rank at the Foreign Ministry (whom we also interviewed), was awaiting an estimate on the nominal value of the collection, and was in contact with various institutions as to the future allocation of the collections. In addition, some museums, especially military museums, were closed for renovation and we had to get special clearance from the high command of the military district of Rome. 7 Cf. internal catalog entries at Pigorini Museum, inventories from 1938, 1964, 1987, and 1998. 8 Cf. internal catalog entries at Pigorini Museum, inventories from 1938, 1964, 1987 and 1998. 9 To be precise, the Ex allievi delle Scuole Cristiane La Salle Tripoli-Bengasi. 10 Mukhtar was hanged by the Italians in 1931 and immortalized in the 1981 film Lion of the Desert by Moustapha Akkad where Mukhtar was played by Anthony Quinn. The film was financed by Gaddafi, banned in Italy in 1982, and only shown on pay TV in 2009. His glasses and other Italian war booty, long believed to have been lost or hidden, and repeatedly demanded back by successive Libyan governments, were recently rediscovered in the collections of the IsIAO held in the Pigorini Museum. 11 As of 2018 there were also plans to show this exhibition at the Pigorini Museum, contextualized with a critical view of exhibits from the former IsIAO and further testimonies from the Italo-Libyans. 12 See http://www.swich-project.eu/nocache/programme/detail/article/hh-lim/ (accessed August 22, 2018).

References AIRL (2016a). Gli italiani in Libia: il contributo allo sviluppo del paese. Bologna: Comune di Bologna (exhibition catalog). AIRL (2016b). Gli italiani in Libia: il contributo allo sviluppo del paese. Bologna: Comune di Bologna (leaflet), no page numbering. Ballinger, Pamela (2015). “Colonial twilight: Italian settlers and the long decolonization of Libya,” Journal of Contemporary History, 51(4), 813–38. Cappelletto, Francesca (2003). “Long-term memory of extreme events: from autobiography to history,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 9(2), 241–60. Cooper, Frederick (2003). “Postcolonial peoples: a commentary”, in Andrea L. Smith (ed.), Europe’s Invisible Migrants. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Crapanzano, Vincent (2011). The Harkis: The Wound that Never Heals. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. David, Isabel (2015). “The retornados: trauma and displacement in post-revolution Portugal,” Ethnicity Studies, 2: 114–30. Del Boca, Angelo (2010) [¹1994]. Gli italiani in Libia: dal fascismo a Gheddafi. Milan: Mondadori.

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Del Boca, Angelo (2014) [¹2005]. Italiani, brava gente? Un mito duro da morire. Trebaseleghe (Padova): BEAT. Del Boca, Angelo (2015) [¹1993]. Gli italiani in Libia: Tripoli bel suol d’amore. Milan: Mondadori. Eldridge, Claire (2013). “Returning to the ‘Return’: pied-noir memories of 1962,” Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales, 29(3), 121–40. Eldridge, Claire (2016). From Empire to Exile: History and Exile within the Pied-noir and Harki Communities, 1962–2012. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Evans-Pritchard, E.E. (1949). The Sanussi of Cyrenaica. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Fiorletta, Serena (2012/13). “Il museo che non c’è: Il non luogo della memoria tra narrazione nazionale e postcolonialismo.” Università degli Studi Roma “La Sapienza,” Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia, Dipartimento di Storia Culture Religioni, Scuola di Specializzazione in Beni Demoetnoantropologici (unpublished thesis). Gandolfo, Francesca (2014). Il Museo Coloniale di Roma (1904–1971): Fra le Zebre nel Paese dell’Olio di Ricino. Rome: Gangemi Editore. Labanca, Nicola (2002). Oltremare: Storia dell’espansione colonial italiana. Bologna: Il Mulino. Labanca, Nicola (2012). La guerra italiana per la Libia 1911–1931. Bologna: Il Mulino. Landi, Mariangela and Jacopo Moggi Cecchi (2014). “Colonial anthropology: ‘From the peoples of the world to the Fascist man’: Nello Puccioni, Lido Cipriani,” in Jacopo Moggi Cecchi, Roscoe Stanyon (eds.), The Museum of Natural History of the University of Florence: Volume V: The Anthropological and Ethnological Collections, Florence: Firenze University Press. Laviolette, Patrick (2013). “Introduction: Storing and storying the serendipity of objects,” in A. Kannike and P. Laviolette (eds,), Things in Culture, Cutlure in Things. Tartu: Tartu University Press. Lim, H.H., Loretta Paderni, and Rossana di Lella (2018). “H.H. Lim at the Museo Nazionale Preistorico Etnografico ‘Luigi Pigorini’,” in Georg Noack and Inés de Castro (eds), Co-Creation Labs: Illuminating Guests, Artists and New Voices in European Museums of World Culture. Stuttgart: Sandstein Verlag/Linden-Museum Stuttgart. Lubkemann, Stephen C. (2003). “Race, class, and kin in the negotiation of ‘internal strangerhood’ among Portuguese retornados, 1975–2000,” in Andrea L. Smith (ed.), Europe’s Invisible Migrants. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Marcus, George (2002). “Beyond Malinowski and after writing culture: on the future of cultural anthropology and the predicament of ethnography,” The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 13(2): 191–9. Margozzi, Mariastella (ed.), (2005). Dipinti, sculture, e grafica delle collezioni del Museo Africano: Catalogo Generale. Rome: Instituto Italiano per l’Afica e l’Oriente. Munapé, Kublai (ed.), (2012). [S]ogetti migrani: dietro le cose le persone/people behind the things. Rome: Espera. Puccioni, Nello (1934a). Antropometria delle genti della Cirenaica. (Vol. I). Florence: Felice Le Monnier. Puccioni, Nello (1934b) II. Antropometria delle genti della Cirenaica. Vol. II. Tabelle e Tavole. Florence: Felice Le Monnier. Rivoal, Isabelle and Noel Salazar (2013). “Contemporary ethnographic practice and the value of serendipity,” Social Anthropology, 21(2): 178–85. Schneider, Arnd (2016). “Art/anthropology interventions,” in Samuel Bianchini and Erik Verhagen (eds.), Practicable: From Participation to Interaction in Contemporary Art. Cambridge, MA : MIT Press.

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Surdich, Francesco (2016). “Nello Puccioni,” Dizionario Biografico degli Italiania, Treccani, vol. 85, http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/nello-puccioni_%28DizionarioBiografico%29/ (accessed August 21, 2018). Sysling, Fenneke (2016). Racial Science and Human Diversity in Colonial Indonesia. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press.

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The Palm, the Couscous, the Face Leone Contini

Interview with my grandmother Ersilia, 2002 and 2009 (edited in 2017) My grandmother’s family moved to the colony of Libya in the early 1930s, from Cammarata, a little village nestled on a mountain in west-central Sicily. The lawyer Catarella, my great-grandfather, was a socialist mayor and the rise of fascism, together with dramatic private events, made the choice for him and his wife Rosalia. Their existential and political “retreat” in Tarhuna, Tripolitania, is paradoxical and somehow unclear to me, but it turned Ersilia, their daughter and my grandmother, into a bare witness of the colonial violence, as her gaze was not filtered by fascist ideology. She was therefore able to see and, many years later, to remember what generally sank to the bottom of the Italian amnesia concerning colonialism. In 2002, I interviewed her: after seventy years her first impressions of the colony were still vivid and soaked with brutality. I was shocked by the tale of a ruthless collaborator of General Graziani (whom she described as a sicario, translatable as a hired killer), driving through the streets of her (new) hometown Tarhuna, with the severed head of an Arab rebel mounted on a pitchfork. In 2009, during a second interview, she also remembered his name: Piscopello. A fragment re-emerged from a submerged world, as the forensic evidence of a crime. This young and sensitive woman, with a socialist family background, was dropped into the darkness of the colony and there, while cohabiting with the horror, she created a family with the archaeologist Giacomo Caputo. My mother was born in Libya in 1948. Some of Ersilia’s tales are bright, relating to family anecdotes or specific events such as the gardens of Tripoli, flourishing all through the year, and the Muslim and Christian fishermen praying together in front of the Sabratha ruins, just after the landing and before the sharing of the catch.1 But the majority of her recollections are uncanny: ruthless repression and arrogance of the colonizers during the Fascist period, death and destruction during the war, anti-Arab racial segregation (performed by Italians) and an anti-Jewish pogrom (performed by Arabs but instigated by the British, according to her) in the post-war period. Her accounts are able to touch many facets of the colonial complexity, including the character of a physical anthropologist obsessed 37

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with measurements of Fezzanese people skulls in the 1930s, the anecdote of “The Beach,” an enclosed seashore forbidden to the Arabs in the 1950s, or the bloody hunting memories of hyenas and gazelles killed as a leisure activity by the Italians (specifically her father). What impressed me the most was not the violence in itself, but her proximity to it, as if this familiarity was inescapable. The intense fieldwork with the Libyan–Italian community in Rome, in collaboration with Arnd Schneider, and the pressure to formalize an exhibition pushed me to search in the chaos of my archives, to finally find the Hi8 and HDV tapes from 2002 and 2009. The editing process put me in a daily, living dialogue with my grandmother, seven years after she passed away. Her sharp humor contrasted with the fairytale told by the Libyan–Italians we interviewed, mainly focused on progress, infrastructures, and modernization, with several intercultural anecdotes as a dressing, mainly related with Arab–Italian friendship. The ironic narration of Ersilia accompanied and guided me during the months I spent in Rome. Her memories were made public during the final exhibition: I chose a little monitor, to contrast with the huge “Hall of the Sciences” at the Pigorini Museum, with only one chair in front of it, so as create a one-to-one, intimate relationship between my grandmother and the visitor. While sitting there it was possible to see and dominate the whole “scattered colonial body,” from Ersilia’s perspective.

The couscous and the palm Beside the tales of Ersilia what I inherited from my mother’s family past are several “couscous” recipes. The couscous, and its use in the context of the fieldwork in Rome,

Figure 3.1 General view of the exhibition, from Ersilia’s perspective, “Bel Suol d’Amore— The Scattered Colonial Body,” Museum L. Pigorini, Rome, June 2017. Photo: Leone Contini.

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Figure 3.2 Detail of the installation “Inner Libya,” “Bel Suol d’Amore—The Scattered Colonial Body,” Museum L. Pigorini, Rome, June 2017. Photo: Leone Contini.

progressively revealed to us factors of ambiguity, while disclosing culinary pleasures. The couscous activated emotions and talks, created connections, and opened new paths of investigation, but at the same time created a dangerous empathy zone with the Italian– Libyans, where a delicious toxicity soaked the flour of the handmade granules of semolina. The couscous shaped the research from the very beginning, revealing to us that Tina, an employee of the Pigorini Museum, was the daughter of Gaudino, a collaborator of my grandfather in Libya. The thin threads of private memories revived while Tina and I together repaired a little metal palm commissioned to her father by my grandmother, fifty years before, for a nativity scene. This action was filmed and became a chapter of “A Tripoli,” a video played during the opening on a large monitor. Is this innocent and touching gesture also a metaphorical restoration of a symbol of exoticism and colonialism? As for the couscous, a subtle toxicity permeated each of my attempts to touch the colonial scattered fragments, as if the inner fabric of my own existence was compromised ab origine, maybe since the pivotal encounter of my descendants in the colony. At the same time, it is only from this unbearable position that I can carry a reflexive criticism, taking into account the full complexity of the real, where collusion and counter-narrations seemed intertwined. The palm appears as a polyvalent key, able to access and put on scene the contradictory domains of “my” Libyan aporia: a palm is the public icon of the Fascist Empire and at the same time the medium of an intimate reconnection across time and space, with my grandmother and lost family friends. A palm is also the mirage of a lost empire: among the objects displayed in the exhibition there is a little exotically decorated table bought in Tripoli by my great-grandmother; while installing it I discovered that it was “made in India.” The defeated loaned the palms of the British Empire to decorate the hallucinatory bubble of their post-war privilege, as if

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Figure 3.3 Our Palm, Rome 2018. Still from video “A Tripoli,” Leone Contini. Photo: Leone Contini.

they still ruled Libya, deaf and blind to the signs of a new era that was approaching. The majority realized the truth too late when they were expelled from Libya toward the motherland Italy, for many of them a foreign country. They were allowed to take with them only their bare lives and a suitcase: this is how the former colonizers were turned into a displaced community, in a fist of months. Another palm, eradicated and transplanted inside a vessel, is the tragic logo of the Italian–Libyan community in Rome. During the “excavations” in my family archives, a very unexpected palm also popped out: it was the symbol of the “Associazione per il Progresso della Libia” (Association for the Progress of Libya), an interconfessional and leftist league of Italians, Libyan Jews, and Maltese allied with the Arabs to oppose the new rulers of Libya—the British. This document, a sort of short political manifesto, appeared to me as almost fictional. This completely forgotten chapter of the Italian presence in Libya reveals again the intrinsic complexity and ambivalence of the colonial experience—and by following this almost invisible thread, I ended up in Ersilia’s close circle: “Unione e Progresso” was in fact dismantled when the British carried out the first expulsion of Italians from Libya, among them Valentino Parlato, the future founder of the Italian leftist magazine Il Manifesto and a close friend of my grandmother. He passed away in Rome on May 2, 2017, during our fieldwork, before I had the chance to meet him. Another palm is related with the art world: an obsessively recurrent image in the paintings and sculptures of the Italian pop artist Mario Schifano, also born in Libya and whose father was the guardian of the museum of Leptis Magna, an archaeological site excavated by my grandfather, and therefore very close to my family. Ersilia always made jokes that Schifano copied her nativity palms that he saw many times in his childhood at her place: the sculpture series “Per costruzione di oasi” (translatable as “to build an oasis”), consisting of two-meter-tall metallic palms, built in the same way as

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the Ersilia–Gaudino “prototypes.” This anecdote triggered me to create paper palms, named “Anemic Palms,” conceived as being perishable, versus the hubris of the imperial hallucinatory edification and the grandeur of the Sala delle Scienze (Hall of Sciences). Several among the mentioned palms, together with other Libya-related objects coming from private collections of Italian–Libyan families, ended up in “Inner Libya,” a cabinet of the Museum, turned into a Wunderkammer of contradictions.

Figure 3.4 Emblem of the Italian–Libyan association “Associazione politica per il progresso della Libia” (“Political Association for the Progress of Libya”), exhibited at “Bel Suol d’Amore—The Scattered Colonial Body,” Museum L. Pigorini, Rome, June 2017. Image print on booklet Associazione Politica per il progresso della Libia—Statuto, from Contini’s family archive.

Figure 3.5 Detail of showcase, exhibition “Bel Suol d’Amore—The Scattered Colonial Body,” Leone Contini, video still from documentation video. Museum L. Pigorini, Rome, June 2017. Photo: Leone Contini.

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Re-stolen On January 21, 2016, together with Arnd Schneider, I visited the Ethnographic Museum of Florence. We were still in a very explorative stage of our collaboration, considering also the option of a Tuscan fieldwork. The Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology (part of the Natural History Museum) of Florence is known for being a sort of museum of a museum, which has rarely changed its displays in decades, to the point that some cabinets are still labeled as “Abissinia.” However, this was not the case for a surprisingly recent re-arrangement: a wooden wall structure that frames several plaster facial masks paired with photographic portraits taken during anthropological expeditions. Three mirrors invite the visitor to place himself among the simulacra, to literally reflect on the beauty of human kind differences: a big text is in fact stating, “Diversity is a value” and “Different . . . like you.” Two of the three mirrors are distortive, enabling the visitor to perceive himself as slightly different from usual. The painful expressions of some of the faces contrast with these playful mirrors, and with the optimistic, bold message. Something crucial (the violence) is missing here, to such an extent as to border on mystification. On October 31, 2017, I encountered the faces again, in a storage room of the Pigorini Museum, together with other remains of the former African Museum: they lie on metal shelves, wrapped in transparent plastic sheets. The violence is now very much present, even though Loretta (the curator) is unfolding them with care and, I think, compassion. Orphans of a museum which ceased its existence, the plaster faces are confined in a limbo between institutions. In the same days we realize how the whole collection of the former museum is dispersed in different locations around the Capital: military, ethnographic, and natural history museums, libraries and art institutions: the unbearable mass of the colonial heritage was dismembered in its components, as if to reduce its weight and encumbrance. The collection itself appears as a body, chopped into pieces and buried here and there, to get rid of the traces of what, suddenly, was perceived as problematic. At this early stage of our research my priority is to physically re-assemble this body, starting from the face of a young man: the epistemological violence inscribed in the anthropological practices across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries coagulated in his expression of pain, impressed in the fresh plaster during the cast. We don’t know if he feared suffocation, if he was forced or consensual and, if consensual, under what unbalanced power relation. We can only follow the traces impressed in the cast, able to deliver, across time, the violent heritage of racist anthropology, in a solid, tangible form. But the simulacrum is not accessible to the public: in this phase of institutional orphanage his narrative and political potential is frozen. The idea of reproducing the features of this man originated in the urge to bring his “agency” out from the cellars of the museum, to the surface of the public discourse. At the same time, I start to imagine the colonial body of the former museum as a unity:

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The arms are those of Ethiopian soldiers, drawn by an Italian artist who followed a military expedition in East Africa. The simulacra of these warriors are stored in the basements of the Modern Art Gallery in Rome. Apart from the plaster head there is a jaw, supposedly Italian, found on the battlefield of a famous Italian defeat in Ethiopia. The mother of the dead soldier gave it to Mussolini, as a tribute. It’s wrapped with an Italian flag, inside a wooden box, buried in a cabinet of the Infantry Museum, not open to the public. These tragic remains are also part of our body, together with the mannequins of colonial troops, such as the Ascari and the Zaptié, the colonial Carabinieri, standing in a dusty, dark corridor. The body turns plural and contradictory, like his garments: elegant female shoes, manufactured by Italian designers in the colonies with local materials like camel or reptile skin. Conceived to be admired while stepping out on the colonial domains, they lie in a cartoon box, wrapped in plastic sheets, in one of the storage rooms of the Pigorini Museum (a different one from the masks): in the same room, but temporarily lost in this multitude of objects, are the glasses that once belonged to Omar al-Mukhtār, the leader of the anti-Italian resistance in Cyrenaica, brutally hanged by Graziani, whose bronze bust transited from the former location of the African Museum in via Aldrovandi to the Pigorini cellars during our fieldwork in Rome. The glasses of the rebel and the bust of the war criminal are organs that belong to the same physical structure. To visualize my fantasy I create a collage out of such undigested remains, but I’m horrified in front of this tangle of bodies and garments, where victims and perpetrators are con-fused together. I decide not to make this image public, somehow entering an “iconoclast” mood, where the colonial objects shouldn’t be re-presented, nor re-stageshowed, in order not to re-perpetrate the violence. But it is too late: the 3D printing was ordered in the meantime, turning my first plan into something irreversible. Since this moment I’m forced to cohabit with the edification and later with the material existence of this object (which now appears on the cover of this book), despite my ethicalaesthetical dilemmas. Re-enacting the appropriation of the face turned myself into both the perpetrator and the critical witness of a racial (re-)construction: I documented the process of the 3D scanning (in Rome) and printing (in Naples), while tracking my feelings and thoughts, including shame. The disgust for the original violence inscribed in the mask was easy to bear, being performed by others (the racist and fascist physical anthropologists), but during the re-appropriation process I experienced very contradictory feelings that included compassion and (one-way?) intimacy with the simulacrum (the features of this person entered my dreams several times), but also guilt—especially in front of the formal beauty of the finally printed face, a potentially charming art piece indeed. The whole production of “Re-stolen” started with my criticism toward the display in Florence, where the Otherness was turned into a value (the value of difference) by denying the violent procedures of scientific racism; I decided to evoke the dormant agency of the colonial subject by re-enacting the original sin of appropriation, and I re-stole the features of this face (stolen from the person but also from its current owner: the Italian State).2 The 3D performative mise en place (scanning and printing) took place under the analytical eye of the video camera, and so revealed the inner procedures

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Figure 3.6 Still from video “Restolen,” Leone Contini. Photo: Leone Contini.

of appropriation, even if only in terms of digital technologies. The critical reconstruction opened up dilemmas, but possibly pointed out strategies to de-construct the Other from within the Western perspective—nevertheless race is an original European construction, whose ideological vice seems to be still active in our societies in different and often virulent, destructive ways. At this point, while writing, the re-stolen head and its unsolved aporia are still part of an ongoing process, and completely independent from the Museum agency, free to travel across space and meanings, and to mutate again.

Figure 3.7 Unveiling Sabratha. Still from video “A Tripoli,” Leone Contini. Photo: Leone Contini.

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Notes 1

2

Sabratha, founded by Phoenicians around 500 BC, rose to prominence during the reign of Roman Emperor Septimus Severus (AD 193–211). The famous amphitheater of Sabratha was built either during his or the preceding reign of Commodus (180–192). Giacomo Caputo (husband of Ersilia, and grandfather to Leone Contini) followed other Italian archaeologists and directed and concluded excavations at the site in 1937; see https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teatro_di_Sabratha (accessed November 16, 2018), and also Giacomo Caputo, Il Teatro di Sabratha e l’architettura teatrale Africana, Rome: Brettschneider, 1959. In a way, the face of the visitor was also “stolen”. While approaching the 3D replica, a reflex camera was activated by a sensor to photograph the visitor without his/her consent, making the unmistakable clicking sound of the shutter. However, the camera was not charged and in effect no pictures were taken.

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4

Research on Research on Research On Reflexive Relationality Matei Bellu

Every dog has like me the impulse to question, and I have like every dog the impulse not to answer. Everyone has the impulse to question. How otherwise could my questions have affected my hearers in the slightest—and they were often affected, to my ecstatic delight, an exaggerated delight, I must confess—and how otherwise could I have been prevented from achieving much more than I have done? And that I have the compulsion to remain silent needs unfortunately no particular proof. Franz Kafka, “Investigations of a Dog” This chapter starts with a confession and a deviation. Having been commissioned to write an ethnography of a multidisciplinary collaboration on cultural heritage as part of an EU-funded research project, I found myself enmeshed in a bundle of diverse relations—to the institutional framework, to the research project, to my colleagues, to my research subjects and matters—both cheerful and distressing at times. These relations in turn induced circumstances of research in which my positioning as ethnographer was marked by shifting positionalities; each of these relations mobilized different circulations of affects (Ahmed 2004), which generated particular limits of speech and silence. In Mediaş, the multidisciplinary research group of TRACES collaborated with a local self-organized cultural center for the research project “Absence as Heritage” on questions regarding the local history of the city’s today absent Jewish community. The research group worked on questions concerning the role and meaning of the Jewish heritage for Mediaş and its current population. Mediaş is a small town in southern Transylvania. For many centuries the German-speaking Saxon population was the dominant community. Nevertheless, throughout its history Mediaş was and still is marked by a patchwork of languages, religions, and communities—Romanian, Hungarian, German, Romani, and Jewish. My ethnographic research on the multidisciplinary research group seemed propelled by some sort of tacit resistance. A drag of unease and anxiety seemed to block my reflections recurrently. By this means, the focus of my analysis shifted towards 47

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these moments of alleged blockade. Far from being disruptive or destructive, these moments were revealed to be epistemically productive in their own terms. Shifting the perspective from the research group to my positioning as ethnographer inside different fieldwork relations enabled me to reflect my entangled positioning into different meshes of power and politics (Haraway 1988). The drag of unease and anxiety encountered at different moments turned into a driving force, which connected different layers of my research. This text connects these instances alongside the idea of “assemblage,” inspired by a concept of Deleuze and Guattari (1986), adopted and put to work by anthropological theory. “[A]ssemblages are contingent and shifting interrelations among ‘segments’—institutions, powers, practices, desires—that constantly, simultaneously construct, entrench, and disaggregate their own constraints and oppressions” (Biehl and Locke 2010: 323). Following feminist theory, this text conceives reflexivity and writing as situated acts from a refracted, fragmentary, partial perspective (Nencel 2014: 76). The text is thus the result of the material circumstances of fieldwork research and writing, and is intrinsically tied to the subjective and affective conditions of its production. The text is structured in three parts; each of these parts follows a different trajectory of drawing boundaries in research relations. They trace these processes until the moment when the relations were obstructed by a drag of anxiety and unease. The first part starts by looking at the larger institutional framework of the research project. It delineates a nesting pattern of interest in cultural heritage for emerging collective identities, which can be encountered on different layers of the research project. The section follows a recurrent figure of speech, the call and search for good practice, and questions the function of ethnographic reflexivity in this setting. The second part explores my positioning as ethnographer in relation to the multidisciplinary research group on site. This section shows how professional relations progressively slipped into affective relationships, and reflects on the ethical implications and tensions which came along with this shift. The third part describes the intricate research relationship with a local real-estate developer. Over the period of the research project, relations mutually turned more and more suspicious and reluctant. The text offers a twofold way of reading: firstly, it is structured around different asymmetries of power in research and fieldwork relations. Secondly, the very same order can be read as two distinct arguments; the first two parts encircle the material conditions of work and research defined and confined by the internal structure of the research project. The third part looks at the research project’s collateral effects on site and its unintended intermingling with local real estate development and commodification. From this perspective, the chapter turns the background and the margins of the research project into the focus of its enquiry.

Interlude: the mosquito dream As I started to work on this research paper gathering my impressions, observations, and field notes, desperately looking for some order within the real, one night I dreamt about presenting my research at a workshop. My dream was rather a static, atmospheric

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image, more than a narrative story. At that time, I was living in Florence on an artist grant and since the beginning of summer, all nights were accompanied by almost obsessive activities trying to protect myself from swarms of very aggressive mosquitos. I built a net around my bed, as sleeping would have been impossible otherwise. At the beginning it felt quite strange to sleep in this sort of a tent, as the net also saps any current of air; still it is transparent and creates a strange sensation of being inside and outside at the same time. In my dream, however, I was presenting this paper. This situation was constantly superimposed by the feeling of being inside the mosquito net. But something was uncannily deferred: I was not alone under the net, as a swarm of mosquitos was there with me too. We were penned up together under the confining mesh, and none of us could get out. This impression superimposed back and forth to being at the presentation; the dream continued oscillating between these two states without seemingly ceasing throughout the whole night. I woke up soaked. The next morning, I tried to make sense of this dream. The dream seemed to contain my unarticulated sensation of uncertainty while thinking through my research material: A feeling of ambiguity haunted my reflections; as moving through a borderscape, marked by the effect of being at the same time both inside and outside, while trying to define a threshold where one condition skins into the other. My dream offered some recurrent pattern of analysis: questions of visibility and invisibility, as well as of inclusion and exclusion resonated both in the institutional context of my research as well as in the relations with the interdisciplinary collaboration on site.

Part 1. Nesting frictions: unshelling knowledge into institutional policy Since its foundation, the European Union has been in a constant process of unification, integration, and harmonization; this process of “Europeanization” (Borneman and Fowler 1997) is shaped either by institutions and administration from above or by unintended effects from below, termed reflexive Europeanization (Römhild 2009). Despite institutional belief that the rather legal and technical procedures of Europeanization would automatically result in a more emotional identification with the EU and its institutions, these processes did not create a transnational European public (Shore 2000: 18f.). The EU is to some extent still considered to be a virtual, deterritorialized political entity (Abélès 2000; Bellier and Wilson 2000). “Constructing Europe requires the creation of ‘Europeans’, not simply as an objectified category of EU passport-holders and ‘citizens’ but, more fundamentally, as a category of subjectivity.” (Shore 2000: 30, emphasis in the original). In reaction to this, the EU policy has adopted concepts such as “culture” and “identity” as metaphors for building “European culture,” “European identity,” and “European consciousness” (Shore 2000: 25). The focus on “heritage” can be considered as an extension of this policy. The EU Commission recently introduced such initiatives as the “European Heritage Label,” which was launched as the EU’s “new flagship initiative” in 2011, and the “European Year of Cultural Heritage,” which took place in 2018. The EU policy on culture, identity, and heritage comes with its own language,

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discourses, as well as practices and needs to be viewed as part of a much larger European memory–heritage–identity complex (Macdonald 2013). This EU discourse often makes use of an emotional and affective language including even a “poetic dimension” (Lähdesmäki 2017: 710). The naming of other multidisciplinary research projects funded by the European Commission might continue this line of thought: CoHRERE (Critical Heritage—performing and representing identities in Europe), COURAGE (Cultural Oppositions—Understanding the Cultural Heritage of Dissent in the Former Socialist Countries), and UNREST (Unsettling Remembering and Social Cohesion in Transnational Europe). Together with the different EU initiatives and projects, these research programs seek to promote the idea of a shared European heritage and respond to the European Union’s crisis of legitimation and identity. As political entity the EU still grapples with a deficit of legitimacy. It supposedly lacks a common culture and consciousness that would serve as a denominator for a European identity in analogy to the “imagined communities” (Anderson 1991) of the nation-states. Announcing TRACES in 2015, the EU Commission stated, “Cultural heritage and values are at the heart of our capability of overcoming the current EU crisis” (European Commission 2015).

Interlaced identities: nation building, building Europe With this emphasis in mind, I started to look at the research project from a wider angle. For understanding the preconditions of the collaborative research on heritage in Mediaș, the activities on site needed to be framed as being an integral part of a much larger context of EU heritage policy. Trying to figure out what was happening in Mediaș meant not only observing the research group’s practice on site, but it also implied a need to relink these activities to the greater research project of TRACES. Zooming further out, it seemed important to relate this research project to the heritage policy of the funding body Horizon 2020, which allocated nearly €80 billion in the field of cultural heritage preservation, restoration, and valorization and was directly implemented by the European Commission from 2014 to 2020. On all these levels, the institutional policy and the research agenda coincided in their common aim to search for solutions to overcome the boundaries of national identities, which remain a powerful impediment in creating a European counterpart, especially considering the fact that “[m]ost European nation-states have used the larger part of this century to ‘nationalise’ the popular masses, construct national fictions and moral evaluations of the world along national lines” (Hedetoft 1992: 273). However, even the notion of a European collective identity still tends to remain deeply entrenched in mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion as identity constructions necessarily rely on the delimitation from the “Other.” “The current difficulty, or incapacity, of Europeans . . . to accept what they (confusedly) see as ‘non-European’ (or ‘anti-European’) is also a symptom of their incapacity to understand, acknowledge, and transform their own ‘domestic’ multiplicity” (Balibar 2009: 210). In their collaboration concerning the absent Jewish community in Mediaș, “Absence as Heritage” challenged the dominant historical discourse in Romania, as the forming of the Romanian nation-state in the late nineteenth century had already happened in

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opposition to an existing multiplicity of different minorities living on the state’s territory, including Germans, Hungarians, Romani, and Jews, to mention only the largest of these groups. In Romania, the cultural hegemony of the Romanian Orthodox population was steadily fostered and reinforced throughout the twentieth century, and also socialist politics remained deeply imbued in nationalist discourses on history and ethnicity (Verdery 1991). The dominant historiography in Romania is mainly centered around the legitimation of an assumed homogenous ethnic Romanian nation-state and its Christian Orthodox origins, thereby marginalizing the multi-ethnical and hybrid history of both its population and territories. At this very moment, emphasizing precisely this claim, the Romanian People’s Salvation Cathedral is being built right in front of the parliament building in Bucharest. The Municipal Museum in Mediaș further illustrates this politics. Its historical section occupies an important educational function, as during the regular school curriculum every local student visits the exhibition at least once. The exhibition was inaugurated in early 1989 shortly before the downfall of the Socialist regime, and has remained unchanged ever since. It dedicates nine out of eleven rooms to archaeology. Their narrative confirms the nationalist hypotheses that the Romanian-speaking population directly descends from the Roman colonists and from local Dacian tribes. This genealogy exclusively asserts that the Romanian population was the first to live there; hence, all other minorities migrated at a later point in time, and therefore have to be considered as alien to the state’s territory. Besides, the museum offers a dizzying example of how the alleged Roman legacy is incorporated linguistically into Romanian language and history. All panels in the museum are written in capital letters and therefore diacritical signs are missing. Thus, Roman (roman) and Romanian (român) turn into the very same word.

Ethnographic reflexivity for “making better science and citizens together” The EU Commission, as well as the research project, seemingly followed an interlaced agenda. Both viewed cultural heritage as containing a promise for a European identity. This interference between institutional policy and research agenda echoed in my observations and thoughts and created an ambiguous situation as ethnographic writing always comes along—in one way or another—with the introduction of a reflexive perspective, which provides a meta-description of the practices it enquires (Strathern 2004a, 2004b). Furthermore, the EU Commission as sponsor anticipated applicable results from TRACES: “These [research] activities are expected to offer practical advice, best practices and a set of proposals regarding European cultural and educational institutions that could promote European cultural heritage and its use in Europe and internationally . . .” (European Commission 2015). The call for “best practice” and applicable knowledge releases tensions inherent to the production of social knowledge. For anthropology this call comes with its own shortcomings. As a social science it creates social knowledge, which at the same time is also already available as knowledge for social use. Ethnographic reflexivity incorporates

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a potential doubling: on the one hand, ethnographic meta-descriptions provide selfreflexive knowledge; and on the other hand, it may serve as “expert knowledge” ready to be put to work by social institutions. This translation from academic knowledge into policy advice doesn’t leave knowledge unaltered as “expert knowledge” transforms and supplies a kind of institutional and “bureaucratic reflexivity” (Strathern 2000: 284). Under this setting, my ethnographic observations and meta-descriptions would not only be introduced into the greater research project—this already came with its own difficulties as there were hardly any means to render the research group anonymous or make any further abstractions—but it also meant directly providing these reflections back to the funding institution. This feedback loop seemed troubling as the boundaries between reflexivity, self-monitoring, and accountability tended to blur into each other (Shore and Wright 2000). This amalgamation risked turning the ethnographic metadescriptions of the practices of the research group into a quest for the institutional call for best practice. This ambiguity raised the question of my positionality as brought up in my dream—as an ethnographer was I still interfering from without or already from within the EU institution?

Part 2. The decoys of friendships in research Writing an ethnography of the collective practices necessarily implied both considering the terms and conditions of doing research as “external ethnographer” as well as thinking through the effects of my ethnographic fieldwork on the social relations in the field. Anthropologists often tend to underrate the effects on research, which derive from terms and conditions of work as well as working relations (Krautwurst 2013: 217; see also Sangren 2007). However, conditions of work necessarily revert into epistemic matter—this is especially the case in anthropology, as knowledge is produced out of and from the very fragile social fabrics in which the ethnographer is enlaced.

How far is outside? What initially seemed a clear research assignment, writing an ethnography on the multidisciplinary collaboration on site, turned out to come along with much larger social, methodological, and ethical questions, as I was increasingly becoming an integral part of the research environment I was supposed to study. My project description assigned me the position of an “external ethnographer.” This was the case in at least three ways: as an “external ethnographer” I was not directly employed by TRACES, but was working as an independent ethnographer on a feebased contract. For my fieldwork in Mediaş only a couple of days were scheduled each year, while the research group met for the considerably longer period of two months over three consecutive summers (2016–18), when all of the collaborative work took place. Lastly, the research design of the project included a historian and an artist, but not an ethnographer as integral parts of the Creative Co-Production unit on site—the term that officially designates the research group. These conditions retained my external positioning and had epistemic effects.

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Even though it seemed barely noticeable, the different positioning in terms of employment created a sensation of ambiguity, both for me and for the research group. Because of the fact that I was only able to be on site for a short, defined period each year I couldn’t be fully integrated into the research work on site. During my research I was bound to permanently slip in and out of the group. This oscillating movement between an inside and an outside reinforced my ambiguous position: the more the process continued the more it seemed impossible to maintain an “external” perspective, while it also seemed inapt to claim that I would write from within.

What’s inside? It became more and more apparent that despite the fact that the research design accredited me with the position of an “external ethnographer,” I was unable to delineate a boundary between the research group and myself. Everyday life and conversations progressively blurred the lines between research and personal thoughts—interviews quickly slipped into informal conversation, and working relations progressively turned into amicable relationships. This process of quickly getting familiar with each other was invigorated by the fact that all the researchers came from places outside of Mediaş; this already marked us to a certain extent as “outsiders.” First and foremost, we all shared similar social backgrounds and ages, as well as interests, preoccupations, and qualifications—this doesn’t come as a big surprise in the given academic setting. Against the backdrop of Mediaş, however, what made us most salient was the fact that all of us were living in a kind of enhanced mobility. Altogether, our lives were scattered between as well as connecting different places: Angoulême, Austin, Cluj, Berlin, Bucharest, Florence, Paris, Los Angeles, Munich, New York, Tel Aviv, Vienna. Taking myself as a more concrete example: during the time of the project I lived in Florence on an artist grant, but was still based in Berlin. I was researching in Mediaş, I went for a workshop to Oslo, and for an art project to Divnogorje, my parents were in Bucharest, and my girlfriend was in Paris. I was almost obsessively crossing borders, both for work and to keep my social life alive—and, I have to admit, it did not work particularly well, as the privilege of moving comes with its own precariousness. These kinds of—sometimes even obsessive—movements converged with other forms of mobility in Mediaş termed “working migration.” It often means that people feel constrained to leave to work as cheap labor in underqualified positions most of the time, often on the verge of illegality. Even though these two distinct movements may be differently valued, they are the outcome of the very same EU mobility regime. In Mediaş, these different sorts of EU mobility regimes collided, not without uncovering the power asymmetries implied by these different mobilities. On one side was the “enhanced mobility” related to the people linked to TRACES—as the project was as much about criss-crossing disciplinary boundaries as it was about artists and researchers criss-crossing European borders—this being part of the inherent process of Europeanization backed by EU policy, I assumed. On the other side, people in Mediaş were fully aware of the almost omnipresent social effects of enforced working

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migration, and the different economical positions this represented. This bias remained tacitly tangible in most of the social interactions. Since 1989, Mediaş’ population has shrunk by around 35 percent. Today, the city center is marked by Western Union signs, secondhand shops selling garments from Germany and Great Britain, and recruitment agencies which offer either care work in Austria, Germany, and France or seasonal farm labor in Italy and Spain. Often, everyday discussions with local people would coincidentally divert to people who had left Mediaş for working somewhere in the “West,” or, as people in Mediaş would most often phrase it, in the “Occident.” A graphic designer I had met during one of my stays, for instance, then moved to near London for work in the kitchen of a restaurant, a couple of days before I arrived again to Mediaş a year later. And one sunny afternoon, on a terrace of one of the few bars on the city’s central square, a casual conversation with a young man took a diversion when I asked about his qualifications. He replied, “I graduated in geographic information science and cartography. NASA wanted to hire me to work in Florida, but I preferred to stay and keep Schrader’s storehouse in order.” Schrader is a German automotive engineering company which moved part of its production to Mediaş in 2007, one year after Romania joined the EU. He stopped talking and looked me in the eyes and then he continued with a slightly bitter smile, “The NASA part was a joke, of course!”

The intricacies of friendship My positioning as an ethnographer was marked by this constant shifting and reconfiguration of boundaries, which determined at times insideness, at other times outsideness in relation to the research group. Concerning my ethnographic research of their practices, this blurring of inside–outside boundaries as well as the close personal relationship to the members of the research group flattened the differences between my public function as ethnographer and acting as a friend in private. This criss-crossing of boundaries came along with recurrent questions of complicity, trust, and confidence, and above all with methodological questions regarding relations of power in fieldwork (see Marcus 1997; Pels 2000). The converging of research-related and informal conversations, enhanced by the fact of being equals, was embedded in reciprocal relations of conviviality and empathy, going beyond usual working relations. Therefore, the text proposes to conceptualize my research experience in terms of what Nader has called “studying sideways” (1969/99: 292; see also Gusterson 1997; Plesner 2011); in my particular case, however, with a twist: “studying sideways among friends.” “Studying sideways” inherently holds the attendant potentials of turning research relations into friendships (Krautwurst 2013: 277). Besides its promises of multiplying perspectives as well as understanding, and of introducing new forms of communication, collaboration, and research, this affective relationship, however, also implies an enlarged responsibility for the ethnographer towards the researched subjects—even if not necessarily in terms of a professional ethics, but from the perspective of an ethics and politics of care (cf. Haraway 1988: 583). Even inside this equivalent relationship, the ethnographic gaze cannot fully escape producing asymmetries of power, based on the assumed authority to observe, describe, reflect, and finally to represent. I felt caught by intricate constraints as my positioning

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was balancing on the border between being in and out of the research group at the same time. This ambiguity triggered the fear of disclosing and exposing; I was afraid of being unable to escape the risks of turning the classical—even though no less problematic—fieldwork relation of ethnographer–informant upside down. My research was driven by the anxiety of turning into an informant myself, as my ethnographic observations comprised the potential to accidentally provide an accountability of the collaboration on site for an imagined or real outside—the public, the greater research project, the institutional funding body.

Interlude: a walk on the hill of cemeteries On a Sunday afternoon, between two spells of heavy rain the sky cleared up and the streets immediately dried, so I decided to look for the Jewish cemetery in Mediaş, which as I was told is somewhere on the hill south of the old city center. All Mediaş’ cemeteries are located on this hill: the Roman Catholic, the Lutheran, the Reformist, the Baptist, the Orthodox, and the Greco-Catholic as well as the Jewish cemetery. As soon as I crossed the bridge over the railway tracks I stopped at a kiosk on a street corner; there I bought a small bottle of water, against the now unfurling heat. After handing over the money I asked the saleswoman where to look for the Jewish cemetery, and she responded slightly surprised. “I have no clue where it might be, I never went there.” Then she added to seemingly strengthen her argument, “I am Orthodox.” After I insisted, telling her that I heard it must also be on the hill, as all Mediaş’ cemeteries are, she softened her voice and told me to just go up the street and to ask somebody else on the way. The second person I asked crossed my way at the entrance to the Lutheran cemetery. The carefully dressed, middle-aged woman replied in a very friendly manner, “You have to follow this street until its very end. You pass the Orthodox cemetery and then you continue to go further up, and you will find the Jewish cemetery to your right.” Her confidence reassured me. So I continued to walk up the street, and at the end of the fence of the Lutheran cemetery I came across three older women dressed in black. As I asked for the Jewish cemetery, they first started looking at one another. I wondered who would begin to talk. The most confident woman started to mumble to her neighbor—and very probably the mumbling was directed to me as well—whether the cemetery was not the one at the very top of the hill. The other woman seemed to nod, and then they continued their way down. I passed the main entrance to the Orthodox cemetery and continued to climb up the hill. A couple of meters behind the entrance I met two men. Addressing the same question to them, one of them stopped, while the other man just looked at me slightly shaking his head with an almost annoyed look, and continued walking. The man who stopped mused for a short while—I watched his bulky hands kneading one another— and then told me to continue further up the road, and at the very end I would just run into it. So by now I had a couple of corresponding answers, and felt slightly more assured that despite all the approximations I really was approaching the Jewish cemetery. I

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continued my way uphill, left the Orthodox cemetery behind, and crossed the entrance to the small Baptist cemetery. Just in front of the entrance there was a young couple with their child. They were standing next to their bikes, preparing to ride down the hill. I asked them where to find the Jewish cemetery. The man told me that he was not very sure, but that he thought that I should go down the hill again, and that the Jewish cemetery might be somewhere at the end of the alley between the Lutheran and the Orthodox ones. But as he seemed quite unsure, and I had already walked all the way up, I decided to wait until they had left so I could continue my search without appearing to ignore their advice. I continued further along the road until I encountered an older woman dressed all in black, who was descending towards me. She told me to follow her, as she would just pass in front of the Jewish cemetery. So I did; only she brought me straight back to the entrance of the Baptist cemetery. In spite of all my objections she insisted that this was the cemetery I was looking for and then she continued her way down. I had to realize that all the persons I had asked so far had mistaken the small Baptist cemetery for the Jewish one—I started to feel a bit tired. I waited for a little while, but as nobody came I decided to go back to the main entrance of the Orthodox cemetery, as it was the most crowded place I had found so far, and after all I could also try to follow the directions of the young man. As I was back in front of the main entrance, I saw a taxi waiting for customers. I tapped at his window and asked for the way to the Jewish cemetery. He hesitated for a moment, and then told me to go up the hill again. According to him, it should be the last cemetery. As he seemed quite sure of himself, despite the fact that I was just returning from where he was sending me, I decided to follow his advice. However, after a couple of steps he wound the window down again and shouted after me, “Sorry, I was wrong, it’s not up the hill but at the end of this small alley.” He pointed towards the small street that divides the Orthodox from the Lutheran cemetery. This new indication made me feel confident. Besides all confusion, didn’t his direction correspond to what the young man on the bike had just told me? I crossed the square in front of the main entrance to the Orthodox cemetery again. A large group of people were sitting and waiting in the shadow of the small building next to the main entrance as I walked down the little street supposedly separating the Orthodox from the Lutheran cemetery. Across the wall to my left, where I had expected the Orthodox cemetery to start, I wondered about the much too scruffy field of tombstones. Taking a closer look, I realized there were not any religious symbols either and with a second look I managed to decipher some Hebrew letters. So finally there I was. But how could I possibly enter? I continued to follow the wall downhill as the taxi driver had said that the entrance would be at the back; however, I could not find it. I returned to where I first saw the Hebrew letters, and decided to jump over the wall. As I started climbing, I spotted a dog lying in the sun, and wondered if it would be still calmly lying there once I jumped over into the knee-high grass. After musing for a while, sitting on the top of the wall, enjoying the late afternoon sun and relishing my tiny success, I decided to rather ask for the actual entrance. I climbed down the wall and went back to the square in front of the main entrance to the Orthodox cemetery. The group of around thirty people was still standing

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together and waiting. The older ones were sitting on wooden benches in the shadow, while some young men were leaning on a car. The women were colorfully dressed— some wore red dresses and headscarves with floral motifs—it was a group of Romani waiting outside the cemetery for an Orthodox funeral to begin. In search of the cemetery administrator, I passed the main entrance. Ringing at the door, I heard a male voice from the kitchen asking what I was looking for. He stepped out and came towards the garden gate. He first looked at me, then he was puzzled and seemed to be looking for someone else. Slightly confused he told me that nobody had informed him that a group of visitors was coming that day—but it was just me looking for the entrance to the Jewish cemetery. Slightly irritated he offered to show me the entrance. We crossed the square again, passed the group of people waiting and took a tiny trail, which was hidden between the main entrance and the small building. Surprisingly, I found myself standing next to the dog I had seen from the other side of the wall; he was still lying in the sun. But my presence must have bothered him, and he slowly stood up, stretched, and strolled away. I had finally found the entrance to the Jewish cemetery. The entrance was not as I had been told “somewhere in the back.” Quite the contrary was the case: it was directly located and accessible from the very square in front of the entrance to the Orthodox cemetery, which I had already passed at least a couple of times. Outside, in its shadow the Romani people were still waiting for the funeral to begin. These spatial correlations and intersections seemed to echo the intricate relation of visibility and invisibility, which I had observed but hadn’t yet understood. The absence of the Jewish community and the presence of the Romani community were tacitly overlapping each other on the very site of the former Jewish school from where I had started my excursion.

Part 3. Elusive conflict: The Jewish Bath Business Center The three-story former Jewish school is the largest building on the compound of the Jewish community. Dating from the 1920s, the school is the newest building, constructed at a time when the Jewish community in Mediaş was still growing in size. It was the first and only Jewish school in town; in one part of its ground floor, a mikveh was opened—a Jewish bath for ritual cleansing. At the beginning of my research, the school’s ground floor was privately owned, while the rest of the school building belonged to the National Jewish Federation. The first time I came to Mediaş, I spontaneously met the current owner of the ground floor in his newly opened office. He ran a construction business and was also a local real-estate developer. At that time, he had renovated almost half of the ground floor. The rest still remained in a ruinous condition, but, as he told me, he planned to expand during the summer. Only a day before I arrived to Mediaş, he had named his new enterprise. He seemed excited to present me the newly glued adhesive letters applied onto the glass front door: “Jewish Bath Business Centre.” The blue letters were accompanied by a blue Star of David. Nobody from TRACES had known about his intentions, and everybody was very surprised to learn about the name—as was I. The

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decision to name the business center in this way set the agenda for our conversations. Along the years, the atmosphere of our conversations remained open and friendly; however, it turned more and more reserved each time I addressed matters of business and real estate in a more direct way.

The naming of the center At our first meeting, we sat down at the table in the meeting room and his secretary kindly brought us a cup of coffee—this was repeated every time we met in the following two years. He first explained that he had chosen this name for the business center because it was part of the building’s history, and that to sell an idea successfully you always need to tell a story; this was simply the story he wanted to tell. He was very confident that this name would not have any negative influence, and he even seemed surprised at my question. However, he remained very ambiguous when he explained which clients the “Jewish Bath Business Centre” might address. The following year, he acknowledged that the name was foremost directed towards potential foreign investors and businesspeople and not aimed at local entrepreneurs. The name was supposed to address businesspeople from Israel as well as Jewish visitors and tourists in particular. Actually, he said, in Mediaş he didn’t use the name at all. The only company which rented office space so far—a recruitment agency for placing local work force to the Western part of Europe—did not use the name of the center. Besides, he explained to me with a lurking smile on his lips, the name of the business center was only written in English, and therefore most of the local people wouldn’t even understand what it meant. He then jokingly suggested that I should advertise Mediaş among “the Jews,” as it was too sad that there was such a beautiful synagogue in Mediaş, but not enough Jewish men to hold a proper religious service. He continued by saying that I should convince some “Jews” to move to Mediaş, as he himself could not imagine living in such a conflictual country as “Israel.” In contrast, Mediaş was such a quiet place, known for its high quality of air. However, they should not start to buy up land, and then proclaim their own country. He laughed—but to me these jokes did not sound very funny at all. After the second summer of the project, he decorated the entrance hall with images of Mediaş, which depicted the city during the Second World War. He had seen these pictures at one of the exhibitions organized by the research group, and had asked for copies. The only problem was that the pictures he had chosen for decoration showed fascist parades during the early 1940s. The research group was appalled at the use of these images and asked him to take them down. He didn’t find anything offensive, however, as for him the pictures only made the “Jewish Bath Business Centre” look more authentic, and he left them hanging on the walls.

The invisible tenants During the Socialist period, the ground floor and the Jewish bath were turned into a public bath and remained in use as such until the early 1990s. The remaining parts of the former school building were transformed into apartments. Today, these apartments are in very poor condition and rented out cheaply.

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Most of the five families who still lived under these precarious conditions were Romani. At the beginning of the project they were paying a tiny rent to the Jewish Federation. The real-estate developer, however, considered them an obstacle to his future investment plans. From the beginning, he intended to evict the families once he owned the entire building. When he took over the ground floor, a Romani family was still living in one of the two “lousy apartments.” He gave them a notice period of thirty days to leave and extended the period by another week later. When the tenants did not return, he threw anything they had left behind onto the street. He was aware that it was a delicate matter how to refer to the Romani families— especially in front of me. During our conversations, he often switched denominations. He hesitated almost every time; one time he called them “people of Romani ethnicity,” another time “minoritarians” or simply “Gypsies.” Later he continued to name them “minoritarians,” which I thought was a sadly wry term, given the subject of the research group. The naming of Romani people has an ironic twist in Romania. As mentioned before, in Romania the link to Ancient Rome and the Romans constitutes very much a historical place of desire. This started with the Transylvanian School in the eighteenth century, which strongly influenced the idea—or rather created the national myth—that Romanians are the direct descendants of the Roman colonists who conquered these regions in the second century AD. Romani, in contrast, is an endonym and means “man” or “husband” in different Romani languages. To avoid any semantic slip between Romanian, Roman, and Romani, most national newspapers write Romani with a double consonant—“Rromani”— although Romanian spelling doesn’t use any double consonants at all.

An unexpected closure For my final stay in Mediaş, I had planned to meet the real-estate developer again, in order to talk with him about his future plans, given the fact that he had bought the whole school building a couple of months earlier. I imagined that this meeting would be very important for my research. However, as I arrived, I didn’t feel like contacting him immediately, so I postponed the phone call for a couple of days. As the weekend approached I convinced myself to finally call him. I was relieved that he didn’t return my call over the weekend, but also felt a growing pressure as I was leaving Mediaş right after the weekend—it seemed possible that I would miss the interview, which I considered one of the main reasons for my last field trip. Finally, the next morning he called back and invited me to his office half an hour later. However, I had also promised to the children who took part in a workshop at the synagogue that day that I would bring fresh donuts from the bakery in the morning. Suddenly, this promise seemed much more important; so I postponed the meeting, even though I anticipated the possibility that this might jeopardize meeting the realestate developer. Later, I called him numerous times without getting hold of him. Half an hour before my train left, he finally called back. I, however, felt very relieved to have missed interviewing him for one last time. We talked a bit and he told me that he would come to Berlin soon and added that he would visit me, and this time it would be his

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turn to do ethnographic research on me—a study about how an ethnographer lives in Berlin these days.

Conclusion: the defaults of boundaries 1 The text delineated the trajectories of three different relations of research, which at a certain moment were obstructed by a drag of anxiety and unease. These ambivalent moments also marked instants when my positioning as ethnographer crossed boundaries, which delimited an inside from an outside. Borders and boundaries are essentially ambiguous, as they at the same time create both divisions and connections, and they are also an epistemological device, as they are constitutive to any definition. “Borders, then, are essential to cognitive processes, because they allow both the establishment of taxonomies and conceptual hierarchies that structure the movement of thought” (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013: 16). However, crossing borders and boundaries suspends the clear distinctions they seem to provide and enhances the disorienting potentials of ambiguity. In my research and fieldwork, crossing these inside–outside boundaries released different affects of complicity—embarrassment, sympathy, rejection, and shame. However, the circulation of these affects didn’t solely obstruct my research, as they also rendered tangible particular fields of power, which were enmeshed in the different research relations.

2 Looking at cultural heritage from the perspective of inside–outside boundaries, the notion of “contentious heritage” seems a pleonasm as all heritage then is necessarily contentious. Walter Benjamin writes in “Theses on the Philosophy of History,”“There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another” (Benjamin 2007: 256). Even a slightly softened reading of Benjamin’s argument would have to come to terms with the contingencies that the notion of heritage is as much concealing as it is revealing. In the case of the heritage of the Jewish community in Mediaş that might imply questions about Jewish subjectivities, which were not included as being part of the local Jewish community—because they were migrant, hybrid, fragmented, secular, communist. However, these unarticulated presences constituted another Jewish experience in Medias, which is overwritten from the very inside of the notion and the material presence of a reified Jewish heritage. The notion of Heritage itself tends to recreate homogenous “imagined communities.” In this particular case this rather happens as a dichotomous counterpart from below in relation to Anderson’s term of “imagined communities”—his term denotes an essential functioning of collective identity constructions which simultaneously produce and are the product of the nation-state.

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There is an absence which is at work from the margins of the notion of heritage itself. The research project “Absence as heritage” engaged with the material heritage of the now absent Jewish community and its role for the local understanding of Mediaş’ history. However, what remained silenced by this perspective was the invisibility of another marginalized community today. Similar social boundaries, which are directly addressed by the project on Jewish heritage, at the same time are at work at the margins of the project itself and render invisible the Romani people who are currently living in the very same place, in the former Jewish school, under the constant threat of being evicted.

3 During my fieldwork I had not met any of the Romani people who lived on the compound of the former Jewish community. From the very beginning, however, their absent presence had breached my attention—sometimes during the hot summer evenings music spilled over the roof of the school building, indicating their close physical presence. The absence of interaction was aided by the spatial structure. The entrance to their apartments was located on the diametrically opposed side of the entrance to the cultural center. Even though I had been on this other side of the school building a couple of times I must have unconsciously ignored this additional entrance as it never attracted my attention. Besides, none of their apartment windows looked on to the courtyard of the cultural center, where I spent most of my time during fieldwork. Seemingly because of this given built environment, the Romani people remained an absent presence for my research. The school building seemed not only to have constituted a barrier for vision, but also a boundary for my reflections. The material constellation of invisibility, however, cannot solely explain their absence in this text. My thoughts were apparently obstructed by the effects of an a priori existing drag of unease and discomfort that this text has so far tried to explore. Not dissimilar to a Kafkaesque situation, facing this drag allowed me to avoid facing the obvious relations of power against my own assumed intentions. This cognitive strategy of unknowing and wittingly forgetting could be considered as a form of “white male stupidity” (Halberstam 2011: 58), which secures and reproduces one’s own comfort, power positions, and privileges. In this case, this drag had turned into a means of avoiding understanding the very obvious relations of marginalization. Thereby it helped to reproduce the silence, which renders Romani people socially marginal in Romania as well as in Europe today.

References Abélès, Marc (2000). “Virtual Europe”. In Irene Bellier and Thomas M. Wilson (eds), An Anthropology of the European Union: Building, Imagining and Experiencing the New Europe. Oxford and New York: Berg, pp. 31–52. Ahmed, Sara (2004). “Affective Economies,” Social Text, 22(2): 118–39.

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Anderson, Benedict (1991). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Balibar, Etienne (2009). “Europe as Borderland,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 27: 190–215. Bellier, Irène and Thomas M. Wilson (2000). “Building, Imagining and experiencing the new Europe,” in Irène Bellier and Thomas M. Wilson (eds.), An Anthropology of the European Union: Building, Imagining and Experiencing the New Europe. Oxford and New York: Berg, pp. 1–27. Benjamin, Walter (2007). “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations. Schocken: New York, pp. 253–64. Biehl, João and Peter Locke (2010). “Deleuze and the anthropology of becoming,” Current Anthropology, 51(3): 317–51. Borneman, John and Nick Fowler (1997). “Europeanization,” Annual Review of Anthropology, 26: 487–514. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1986). Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature. Minneapolis, MN : University of Minnesota Press. European Commission (2015). “REFLECTIVE-2-2015—Emergence and transmission of European cultural heritage and Europeanisation,” http://cordis.europa.eu/programme/ rcn/664966_en.html (accessed November 23, 2018). Gusterson, Hugh (1997). “Studying up revisited,” PoLAR , 20 (1): 114–19. Halberstam, Judith (2011). The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Haraway, Donna (1988). “Situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective,” Feminist Studies, 13(3): 575–99. Hedetoft, Ulf (1992). “Euro-nationalism: or how the EC affects the nation-state as a repository of identity,” History of European Ideas, 15(1–3): 271–7. Krautwurst, Udo (2013). “Why we need ethnographies in and of the academy: reflexivity, time, and the academic anthropologist at work,” Anthropologica, 55(2): 261–75. Lähdesmäki, Tuuli (2017). “Politics of affect in the EU heritage policy discourse: an analysis of promotional videos of sites awarded with European Heritage Label,” International Journal of Heritage Studies, 23(8): 709–22. Macdonald, Sharon (2013). Memorylands: Heritage and Identity in Europe Today. London and New York: Routledge. Marcus, George (1997). “The uses of complicity in the changing mise-en-scène of anthropological fieldwork,” Representations, 59: 85–108. Mezzadra, Sando and Brett Neilson (2013). Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Nader, Laura (1969/99). “Up the anthropologist: perspective gained from studying up,” in Dell Hymes (ed.), Reinventing Anthropology. Ann Arbor, MI : Ann Arbor Paperback Editions, pp. 284–311. Nencel, Lorraine (2014). “Situating reflexivity: voices, positionalities and representations in feminist ethnographic texts,” Women’s Studies International, 43: 74–83. Pels, Peter (2000). “The trickster’s dilemma: ethics and the technologies of the anthropological self,” in Marylin Strathern (ed.), Audit Culture: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 135–72. Plesner, Ursula (2011). “Studying sideways: displacing the problem of power in research interviews with sociologists and journalists,” Qualitative Inquiry, 17(6): 471–82.

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Römhild, Regina (2009). “Reflexive Europäisierung. Tourismus, Migration und die Mediteranisierung Europas,” in Gisela Welz and Annina Lottermann (eds.), Projekte der Europäisierung: Kulturanthropolgische Forschungsperspektiven. Frankfurt: Institut für Kulturanthropologie und Europäische Ethnologie, pp. 261–76. Sangren, P. Steven (2007). “Anthropology of anthropology? Further reflections on reflexivity,” Anthropology Today, 23(4): 13–16. Shore, Cris (2000). Building Europe: The Cultural Politics of European Integration. London and New York: Routledge. Shore, Cris and Susan Wright (2000). “Coercive accountability. The rise of audit culture in higher education,” in Marylin Strathern (ed.), Audit Culture. Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 57–89. Strathern, Marilyn (2000). “Accountability . . . and ethnography,” in Marylin Strathern (ed.), Audit Culture. Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 279–304. Strathern, Marilyn (2004a). “In crisis mode: a comment on interculturality,” in Marilyn Strathern, Commons and Borderlands: Working Papers on Interdisciplinarity, Accountability and the Flow of Knowledge. Wantage: Sean Kingston Publishing, pp. 1–14. Strathern, Marilyn (2004b). “Accountability across disciplines,” in Marilyn Strathern, Commons and Borderlands: Working Papers on Interdisciplinarity, Accountability and the Flow of Knowledge. Wantage: Sean Kingston Publishing, pp. 68–86. Verdery, Katherin (1991). National Ideology under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceausescu’s Romania. Berkeley, CA : University of California Press.

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Framing Faces A Conversation Between Răzvan Anton and Julie Dawson Led by Matei Bellu Răzvan Anton, Julie Dawson, and Matei Bellu

CCP1 Creative-Co-Production 1 (CCP1) is based in Mediaș, Romania, a small town in southern Transylvania. The members of CCP1 are Răzvan Anton (Cluj), visual artist and lecturer at Cluj University of Art and Design and artist at the contemporary arts space Fabrica de Pensule; Julie Dawson (Vienna), researcher for the Leo Baeck Institute for German–Jewish History; and Alexandra Toma (Mediaș), on-site administrator and project manager. The work of CCP1 takes place at the Casa de lângă Sinagogă, the house next to the synagogue, a multifunctional space comprising the Jewish community archives, library, tapestries collection, offices, atelier and gallery spaces, the synagogue and spacious park-like courtyard. The objective of CCP1 was to explore the built heritage of the synagogue and local Jewish spaces and the documentary heritage of the archives, library, and other community objects by developing participatory art projects and exhibition materials and in this way to encourage the local population to engage with its Jewish history and heritage. Though the Jewish community was subject to violence and antisemitic legislation during the Second World War, there were no mass deportations or killings in Mediaș. The vast majority of the Jewish community emigrated during the 1950s and 1960s; there has been no active community for many decades. Within the cityscape Jewish spaces appear abandoned or invisible, and in collective memory the Jewish role in local history is neglected, downplayed, or simply ignored. The primary work of CCP1 was carried out over the course of joint researcher/artist summer residencies, from 2016 to 2018. Each residency period concluded with a public exhibition and accompanying event, which included workshops, tours of the synagogue and/or archives and library, and concerts of Yiddish song or hazzenut (cantorial music). Summer 2016 concluded with the exhibition “Fading Studies” by Răzvan Anton of works based on archival images from the Jewish archives of Mediaș and Cluj, 65

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Figure 5.1 The house next to the synagogue, with the former Jewish school and courtyard behind the street buildings. Photo: Răzvan Anton.

sun-printed in the courtyard, as well as a multimedia installation, “Mediaș Jewish Jukebox,” combining archival images with music and video recordings of secular sheet music found in the synagogue. Summer 2017 concluded with the opening of the exhibition “Liminal Portraits: Stories from the Margins,” which combined a community narrative from the Second World War, recorded by the daughter of the community butcher who dwelled in the very house in which we worked, with sun-prints created by Anton during that residency; the sun-prints focused on doodles and notes made in the margins of community prayer books. Finally, the joint-residency period of 2018 concluded with an oral histories exhibition, “ ‘. . . but we brought it back. . .’: Objects, Paths, Stories” and the display of the collective group of artwork created by Anton from images in the archives, library, and tapestries collection, over the course of the three years. Beyond the exhibitions, workshops using archival images and sun-printing were held each summer with groups ranging from under-privileged children to Romanian art students and German university students. The discussion was led by CCP1 ethnographer, Matei Bellu (Berlin, Bucharest), in the courtyard of the Casa de lângă Sinagogă on 13 July 2018, and later transcribed by Magnus Godvik Ekeland, assistant to TRACES workpackage 2. Matei Bellu (M): Could you talk about how you frame your collaboration, which is so much process-based?

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Răzvan Anton (R): One of the challenges of this project, and of the overall project of TRACES, is the place of visual arts within research-based practices, because when we talk about history or ethnography or anthropology as a scientific discipline they are based on a specific methodology. When you talk about visual arts, approaches may be more intuitive or less defined and more complicated. I think organic and intuitive is the way we worked. It was mostly a dialogue that in some way inspired or motivated the other. Julie Dawson (J): I don’t think you can separate the collaboration from the fact that we have joint two-month residencies during which we work together daily, and have been working with this material, during these annual residencies, over three years. In my opinion, this time frame, at once intense as well as extended, is one of the biggest reasons why our Mediaș projects, our collaboration, the exhibitions, have worked so well. We’re sitting next to each other every day for these months, and we come with ideas and then throw them out and return with new ones. Our ideas and concepts go through a gradual process of development. On the other hand, even if the exhibition space is small, two months is a very short period to develop an entire exhibition narrative or arc and all the texts and visuals that accompany that. So it is also a very intense time of working together, very different than working with a permanent colleague in an office, since we know that at the end of these two months, we will produce something for the public. What ended up happening last year was completely different from what I was thinking in the beginning, of course, but then again that’s the process of developing any type of project. We have an almost unlimited amount of raw material to work with and we don’t necessarily know what’s coming out of it. I think both of us are relatively flexible—we do come in with ideas, that we are going to work with a certain topic, focus on a specific perspective, or apply a certain artistic practice or method, but we don’t arrive with any type of fixed “this is what must happen” attitude. R: Yes, that’s about right, I think. Also, we take several roles. As far as I’m concerned, working on the exhibition display itself was mostly visual communication, for instance, or exhibition design. But there are also artistic processes and visual research involved. So it involves certain roles, different roles, more than one. And you move from one to another depending on what’s needed. M: Can you give specific examples of your collaboration, perhaps based on the exhibition last year? One of the pieces created by Răzvan and used in the narrative exhibition was based on an image from a book in the library. Could you say something about why you chose exactly this image, and how you worked with it? R: The title of the exhibition was “Liminal Portraits: Stories from the Margins.” We looked at stories that don’t fall into the main narrative of what history is or is considered to be. We looked at individual stories or notes written on the covers of books or notebooks, fragments that could take the center stage. In this part of the exhibition— and maybe Julie can say more about the story—there was a narrative story which was the main focus. And along the way, while looking at the story, reading the story about

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Figure 5.2 Sketch in prayer book. Photo: Julie Dawson.

this girl, in parallel we were looking at the sketches and notes written on the inside covers of the books from our library here. J: We were working with a story which someone from the Mediaș diaspora had once given me and were filling in the gaps using documents from the archives. The story was written by a girl who in 1940, the time the story takes place, was sixteen years old. She recorded the story in the 1990s. It’s her memories, a wartime story, a story of the community, with a happy ending, and several unexpected twists as far as World War II goes. We wanted to work with this story, but at the same time we wanted to work with the books from the library, the Jewish library, the old prayer books. So we had two focuses. We wanted to provide visuals for the story, while also including images and handwritten notes from the books. I had always found the markings in the books very interesting: owners had written family names and places where they lived, death dates and sometimes birth dates, there were children’s doodles and drawings. These were merely the ephemeral scribbles of bored children—or that’s all they once were. I was curious about what can be remembered about a community or gathered from life before the war from such apparently transient and even trivial markings. Regarding specifically the portrait of the girl used in the exhibition—one of the books had a pencil sketch of an empty frame. Someone had drawn a frame, like a picture frame, and inside it the outline of a face and hair, but no features. We realized—this was at the very end, right before finishing the exhibition—that we didn’t have an image for the very first panel of the story in which the

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narrator makes a formal statement along the lines of “I, the undersigned, am now recalling a memory of mine . . .” I should add that in the course of researching the story we discovered that we didn’t in fact know the name of this narrator, the “undersigned,” first because the final page of the story, where she would have signed her name, is missing. Whether that was intentional or not is a mystery and in the end becomes itself part of the story. Secondly, the girl apparently got married during the war years, after the story took place but before 1945, because the list of names from the community that we have from the archives is from 1945, and she is not listed there with her family. So in the course of these four years she must have married. In other words, this woman is anonymous to us. Răzvan had already made the sun-printed image with the empty girl’s face from the book, so as we were looking at his work and thinking about how to create a visual image for this very first panel, it suddenly became obvious that this faceless frame could be for the first panel, when our anonymous narrator introduces herself. R: That was about it. We were putting things together, like a puzzle, and trying to link what Julie was researching, looking into the story, with what I was doing with the prints over the summer. This is one of the points where we made this link and it really worked with this image. The concept of the sun-printing process is to record images from the archive using stencils as transparent films that are then left out in the sun, in the courtyard of the synagogue, for several weeks at a time on top of normal paper or photographic paper. Any material will react to sunlight if exposed long enough. In the case of regular paper or of other pigments the process is rather slow, but if we use photographic darkroom paper the surface changes much more quickly, in front of our very eyes. During the workshops we generally used photographic paper so that the students could see the results right away, but also, because we decided not to make the images permanent, they do not go through a permanent development process; that is, the process of exposure continues if they remain in the light and the images created will eventually disappear. M: You said earlier that the idea behind the exhibitions is to create a space where something is to take place . . . R: And to activate this archive and to make it visible. Even just to focus on something, maybe small, but that highlights the context of this place, the history of this place and the community. I didn’t know at the beginning exactly what I was going to do. What does an artist do in relation to a scientist or a researcher that is not necessarily from an artistic field? I knew the frame of the project would be quite broad. That was good, but it still didn’t give me many landmarks. So I thought I’m going to look at things. Looking is the first step you do as a visual artist when you work with material, but eventually I discovered that the sun-printing workshops I was doing with students were the most successful I’ve done over the course of the last few years. We tested the things that I discovered for instance, with the students, alongside. We looked at documentary materials from the archives, but then we developed it through several visual processes with them, and through that process a collective discovery was made and that was actually tangible and visible within the group, and that happened several times along the way.

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Figure 5.3 Art camp students during workshop with archival images and sun-printing. Photo: Julie Dawson.

M: I think this is an interesting point—there is some collaboration happening, but it’s a mediated collaboration between the both of you. One is more discursive, an exchange, a kind of laboratory of ideas which intermingles your two positions. And then you organize participatory events and workshops. It seems like your different practices merge together in the process of mediating. How do both of you view this process? J: For me as a researcher and someone interested in history and methods for conveying the past—and as someone especially aware that today’s younger generation doesn’t normally come into contact with archives and more specifically with Jewish archives— taking these documents, images, and objects out of the archives and putting them into their hands is already the first and maybe most important step to de-alienate the material, the content, the history. Encountering unknown letters, symbols, and images can be disconcerting, you wonder what it means; the unknown and foreign is often immediately enigmatic, suspect, it can even arouse hostility—or also curiosity or fascination. So it is important to try to remove or at least minimize this feeling of strangeness or mystery and I feel like Răzvan’s methods of doing that is what makes the workshops function so well. Because I can take a group of students into the archives and open drawers and show them objects, open a folder and show them a yellowing piece of paper and they can touch it, but by creating something themselves using images from

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Figure 5.4 First panel of 2017 exhibition “Liminal Portraits: Stories from the Margins.” Photo: Răzvan Anton.

the archives and creating something in such an evocative way as a sun-print, then they are engaging with the material on a different level, thinking about the visual aspect, perhaps discussing the meaning of the words or trying to understand the text and image combination. They are also encountering for themselves on a personal level the transitory nature of a creation, since whatever they have made will fade, sooner or later. This is what engages students or visitors on a different level, something I wouldn’t have had the means to do. I would not have known how to do that, I see it more drily. R: That’s why it was important for all of us to be here. I wouldn’t have been able to present the context of the archive. I can’t even read most of what is in the archives; parts of it are in Hebrew, other parts in German, which I don’t know enough of to be able to read.1 So for some of the context, I was equally as unaware as the students who took part in the workshop. So in a way it was a collective discovery of the material, and through this process of developing images, using the light, using the sun, using time, and through the making of these prints, in some form they appropriate this material, somehow they make it theirs, they become aware of its relevance. For example, last year at the end of the workshop, we were in a little village with the Minitremu art camp. They had all made sun-prints from images from our archives and library and at the end they pasted the prints into a photo album that was made together with Adorjáni Márta, an artist and book-binder. They knew the prints weren’t permanent so they would fade away if kept exposed to the light and so as soon as they pasted everything they closed the book, because they wanted to preserve it. Suddenly they were aware of the possibility of disappearance—of memories, of documents, of

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Figure 5.5 Still image from video of book created by art camp students. Photo: Minitremu / Minitremu Art Camp #2.

images, of a community—since now it was their contribution and they wanted to preserve their contribution. I think that was a moment of collective discovery that I didn’t expect; they didn’t expect it either. M: So would you say that visual art fosters a nondiscursive sensibility to addressing certain issues? Or how would you describe the role the artistic practice assumes? J: I think that the arts open up participatory processes to be one of non-conclusiveness, with room for many different interpretations. I’m thinking specifically about the quote we were just talking about, from Performing the Archive by Simone Osthoff where she writes, “In a participatory paradigm . . . completeness is no longer possible, desirable, or taken for granted.”2 Participatory art practices allow for questions, it’s a very productive way of working, specifically here, and I think it’s a very different way of learning or working, especially in Romania, where there is still an expectation of rote learning. R: I think you framed it right, Matei, it is a nondiscursive sensibility that art brings to this. In some way it is intuitive and it is very simple, it can work really well. With the workshops we did it worked, for both sides. That also brings us to the question of art, what is art about. We have not talked about this much during the three years of the TRACES project. It is as contentious as everything else. There isn’t a clear definition; this is not a science, and doesn’t even have a definition of a science. You can activate in areas of arts that are completely parallel, separate, and if we bring the question of art into the local context it is even more complicated. Because the image of art here in Romania is influenced by the National Union of Romanian Artists, by the image of classical painting, it’s considered to be classical forms of art, before the nineteenth century anyway. I think also for the participants the workshop, engaging with documentary materials in the context of artistic or visual practices, was surprising and

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this is why I didn’t even talk about artistic practices, I talked about visual practices, so I wouldn’t create this heavy umbrella of art or arts, which would force us to define it before we could actually start working. I usually avoid talking about artistic practices; I talk about visual practices, and we’ll see what that leads to. M: I would like to take up your remark about the art itself being contentious and about the difficulty in defining art as such. The uncertainty which resonates in the question “Is it art?” introduces itself a contentious moment into the project and overlaps with other layers of contentiousness. Do you think this quality of art could also facilitate discussions on what is contentious? Could it allow one to view something contentious not only as negative, but also as something which contains a positive potential? Can you talk about the contentious aspect or aspects of your project and how art itself interferes with these aspects? R: It sounds promising. I think that would be a shift from how contentiousness is perceived in the frame of TRACES. I do agree that there has to be something not necessarily positive, but intriguing and motivating enough to steer debate or create the sort of energy that leads to discussions. Art could have been one of these topics. But I think the debate about the role of visual art within the broader project has not been explored enough, and this probably constitutes an almost missed opportunity. As an artist I am not so much interested in the final product itself. And I think it’s not that easy to claim whether an artist is just a visual communicator or somebody who develops some kind of knowledge, some kind of poetic substance. I am myself much more interested in developing artistic and creative processes that lead to different sorts of knowledge. J: As you said, there are multiple layers of potential contentiousness to this space, to our work. We could talk about the content itself, the Jewish history of the area, the absence of the community, the fact that they left. There are mixed feelings about the fact that the Jews and the Saxons emigrated: on the one side there is some resentment, like jealousy—“they left when we had to stay.” I don’t know that people would really voice it, but it’s there. At the same time, there is the feeling, “Why did they leave, is it not good enough for them?” I feel both of these sentiments, not just for Jews; also for Saxons, and even some Hungarians too. So those layers of mixed emotions and attitudes are one aspect of some underlying discomfort, you could call it. Exploring attitudes towards “belonging” would be another intriguing project. Then you have the antisemitic beliefs, which are very ingrained in society here and too complex to go into now. You could talk about the financial contentiousness of these properties: the caretakers of both the Saxon and Jewish properties do not have the means to maintain them since there are no or only very small local communities. The buildings are crumbling and yet they are regional heritage, so should the Romanian state pay for them or the Diaspora? What happened during the war is another aspect that can be contentious, and what happened after the war, under communism, who was punished for what. These are all examples of what I would call latent contentiousness—there are no riots in the streets but there is nevertheless an unease. Then, specifically concerning the art, it is true that what we

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do here, for some people, the way we work and what we are talking about, I don’t know if you would call it contentious, but it is not necessarily expected. It’s a little bit strange for people who want something classic. Some of the older generation—and not just them—may come here and ask why don’t you have some cases with objects in them and a little sign saying what it is. Which is specifically what we don’t want to do, make a typical exhibition. Embracing this idea is important for us, that we are creating a space where we talk about Jewish history and culture in this region, but we are not going to do it in the way everyone else does it and we are not going to present a history in the way that some would expect. We have to embrace this, even if some people will walk in and walk out again, which happens. R: Yes, there are many layers of contentiousness, some historic and therefore fixed in time, studied or collectively accepted, but also contentious aspects that are less visible, yet very present. One of the main reasons for wanting to join this project was the chance to address the issue of the overwhelming discrimination of Roma communities or of the poorer social groups in general in Romania. History is taught in school and so people know now the general narratives. Yet some of the very important local realities are often being ignored. When we first discussed the content of our project, Julie said that this was not just about historic Jewish Mediaș but also an opportunity to look at today’s world and use the archive material in order to make relevant connections today. And so I thought there was a clear connection between the antisemitism of the 1930s and the public image of Roma people today.

Notes 1

2

The Mediaș Jewish community was multilingual, officially German-speaking according to their statutes, but certainly most members before the Second World War also spoke Hungarian and some Romanian and Yiddish. The prayer books are in Hebrew, German, Hungarian, and Yiddish. Romanian plays a part only gradually during the interwar years and becomes the primary administrative language only after the Second World War. Simone Osthoff, Performing the Archive: The Transformation of the Archive in Contemporary Art from Repository of Documents to Art Medium. New York: Atropos Press, 2009, p. 22.

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An Ethnography of Process Following the Realization of the Awkward Objects of Genocide Project Katarzyna Maniak

Introduction When I was joining the project entitled “Transmitting Contentious Cultural Heritages with the Arts: From Intervention to Co-Production” as an ethnographer accompanying a group of researchers, I started wondering about all the difficulties associated with fulfilling my task and then I remembered a fictional story of Marcel Appenzell described by Georges Perec in his book Life, a User’s Manual (Perec 1987). Appenzell set off on an expedition to Sumatra in 1932 with a mission to reach the unknown people of Kubu. He was traveling for five years trying to find that illustrious tribe and every time he found an inhabited village and set up camp within it, he woke up to an abandoned space after a few days there. He had been trying to understand this constant chase when he finally found out that he himself had been its cause. The Kubu tribe had been trying to escape him, an anthropologist wanting to research their customs. The subject of my ethnographic research was the process of analysis, interpretation, and presentation of difficult heritage, and to be precise vernacular or folk art pieces revolving around the Holocaust, created in post-war Poland. This process was conducted by a team of researchers, theorists, practitioners, and an artist. It was undertaken under the title of “Awkward Objects of Genocide: The Holocaust and Vernacular Arts in and beyond Polish Ethnographic Museums.” A process which is a sequence of consecutive events happens on many levels and develops in a way that can be seen as serendipity. In the analyzed case it encompassed research attitudes of particular members of the team, relations within the group, interactions developed during the research (with artists, collectors, museum workers, directors of various institutions, theorists, students, and research assistants), and the effects of various actions as well as initiatives instigated by the project but going beyond it. Diverse forms of activity were realized within the project, among them searching for amateur art pieces thematically connected to the Holocaust, tracing the stories of their creators, fieldwork, archival and ethnographic research, photographing the objects, 75

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seminars with students, writing articles, preparing conference speeches and the exhibition, and more. All of these investigations unfolded over time, were conducted in different locations, engaged an ever-growing group of people interested in the project, and encompassed various forms of communication and forms of social media. Overt participant observation was the method I followed in all the processes. I defined my ethnographic research methodology after only a few weeks after being first involved in the TRACES program, as I found it difficult to conceptualize my role in between the superordinate, who was far away, and the group I had known before the program began. When the team members introduced me by emphasizing the outside position, or half-jokingly described me as a “secret agent,” I understood that I should enthusiastically “change sides” and engage in the research. I realized that this sense of alienation, with the simultaneous desire to be within the group, would accompany me through the whole process. In order not to focus on attempts to subvert this aspiration, as well as to prove my good intentions and my own “innocence,” I decided to select a method that uses the above-mentioned tension of being both in and outside. However, at the beginning this role was frustrating. It demanded that I should refrain from participating in the discussion and expressing personal opinions. It was particularly difficult due to the convergence of the research theme of the group with my own interests, which are strategies for presenting cultural heritage and the relationship between anthropology and art (Maniak 2017). In the course of the process I have noticed that my relations with the team members should be described in a more collaborative term than a correlation between the observer and the ones who are observed. I do not mean here that the collaboration should be seen as a “constitutive condition nor a deliberate strategy informed by political or ethical commitment,” but rather as a form of mutually constructed ethnographic endeavor and a common production of knowledge (Estalella and Sánchez Criado 2018: 6–11).

Participants in the project The project “Awkward Objects of Genocide” was conducted by a team including Roma Sendyka (the leader of the project), Erica Lehrer, Wojciech Wilczyk, and Magdalena Zych. Roma Sendyka is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Anthropology of Literature and Culture Studies at the Jagiellonian University, Krakow, and head of the Research Centre for Memory Studies. She works on the relations between images, sites, and memory, and continues her research on non-sites of memory, as well as modes of commemorating genocide. Erica Lehrer is an Associate Professor of History and Sociology/Anthropology at Concordia University, where she also held the Canada Research Chair in Museum and Heritage Studies (2007–17). She observes the ways of presenting this difficult heritage not only from a theoretical point of view, but also as a curator and an author of exhibitions and interventions, in which she critically analyzes museum collections and displays (Lehrer 2014). While considering the project “Awkward Objects,” the exhibition “Souvenir, Talisman, Toy: Poland’s Jewish Figurines” (Ethnographic Museum in Krakow, 2013), which presented figurines of Jews and the relations between Polish and Jewish people, must be mentioned. Wojciech Wilczyk is

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an artist working in the media of photography and literature, who creates socially and anthropologically oriented series of images. Magdalena Zych works at the Ethnographic Museum in Krakow, where she conducts the projects dedicated to various phenomena in current Poland. Her main field of research, and also the theme of her ongoing PhD thesis, examines strategies of collecting objects in ethnographic museums. The preliminary hypothesis of the project was verbalized in the initiating text, in which we find the following statement: “in the field of Holocaust artistic production, local, ‘’naïve’ artists may have been the most prolific group attempting to represent the events they witnessed.” (Lehrer et al. 2016). According to that hypothesis, vernacular art depicting the events connected with the Holocaust might be read as a testimony of the local experience of genocide and the subsequent reverberations produced by its violent acts. The aim of the group’s research and curatorial work was “to re-frame and draw new attention to this fascinating, under-recognized category of objects in order to: 1) broaden what we understand as ‘Holocaust art’; 2) expand the field of Holocaust memory studies to include a range of ‘bystander’ perspectives; 3) challenge traditional approaches to folk art and ethnographic museology more broadly” (ibid.). During a preliminary workshop conference, organized in order to explore methodological approaches and the preliminary hypotheses of the research project with invited guests from different disciplines, team members revealed the predilections of their own fields of study, as well as the questions they find most compelling.1 Roma Sendyka expressed the hope that the artwork under study might show traces of the reaction of Polish people to the events of the Holocaust. She was also attracted by a completely different research perspective, which was a focus not on historical contexts but on contemporary interpretations of the works. Another of Roma Sendyka’s fields of interest was affect theory, which could be used to glean suggestions of affect present in the process of creating artwork by the artists, as well as their contemporary reception. Erica Lehrer concentrated on exploring the objects’ biographies, the background and circumstances, that conditioned their creation, such as commissions by collectors, competitions announced by national institutions, or market demand. This approach sought to answer the question of whose memory (if anyone’s) the researched objects reflect. Wojciech Wilczyk created photographic interpretations of pieces of art. Through the lens of a camera he directs the eyes of the viewers to faces, which he rescales using close-ups, drawing attention to elements unseen before. He meticulously traces references to and mediations from the area of popular culture, finding them in various socially circulating sculptures, paintings, and performances. I will describe his approach in detail further on. Magdalena Zych focused on examining the existing depictions of folk art, scrutinizing them and searching for new methodological suggestions. Magdalena’s position, which involves having to mediate between fulfilling her duties at a full-time job at the Ethnographic Museum in Krakow and her critical attitude towards the workplace, should be emphasized here. In her activity I recognize an opportunity to realize the idea of critical museology, conducted from within, through gradual transformations which are not imposed but worked out together with other employees of the museum. The beginning of the research cannot be easily indicated, as it started at a different moment for each participant and had developed even before the TRACES project

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emerged, as we can assume by tracing the biographies of the team members. It is also difficult to specify the end of the process, considering the group’s activity, fruitfully proliferating in directions beyond the scope of the project. For instance, the group began cooperating with the Cultural Center in Libiąż, in order to suggest a form of presenting objects obtained by the Center from the Auschwitz–Birkenau Museum. Together with students from the Faculty of Polish Studies of the Jagiellonian University, they also staged an intervention entitled “My museum, a museum about me: or, who owns the legacy of the Polish village? Curatorial Dreams for the Ethnographic Museum in Krakow,” which concentrated on criticism of the main exhibition and making suggestions on how to modify it. They also began to work on creating a virtual database combining all the researched pieces of art.

The course of process: what did they see? “What did they see?” was a question posed by Roma Sendyka when she uncovered the existence of folk art related to the Holocaust, and which regarded inhabitants of Polish villages. She asked this a few years before she decided to follow the query within the TRACES project. Investigating what they saw was also an issue that determined the scope of my research. In this case, the reference point was participants of the group, who aimed at interpreting vernacular objects of art. The first stage of the project focused on assessing the scale of the phenomenon, as well as specifying the categories of research objects, to take in those in possession of ethnographic museums and selected private collectors, including foreign ones. The identification of the “awkward” objects required visiting numerous institutions, conducting interviews with artists, Polish and German collectors, as well as with researchers and curators of folk art. Hence it demanded multiple journeys. The group spent numerous hours “on the way,” mostly in Wojciech Wilczyk’s car. The initial research hypothesis preconceived compassionate and empathetic attitudes of creators of objects towards their Jewish neighbors. Its verification posited a detective-like examination of the biographies of the art pieces, the practices and context of gathering the objects, their status within institutions, and exhibiting history. As a result, further factors that influenced the creation of objects were revealed. I will explain them below. What was underlined was the need to determine the influence of collectors (especially those of German descent) who had a hand in the creation of researched objects thanks to their interest and commissions. Another factor shaping the demand for the “awkward” objects was competitions organized during Poland’s communist era, devoted to pacifist or memorial art organized by various institutions, including national ones. Hence, identifying the motivation of the artists and finding the answer to the key question whether they were driven by a need for expressing their experiences, or by financial aspects of being paid for commissioned pieces of art and potential gains from winning competitions, was crucial and—in most cases—impossible to settle. The interpretation of the artworks was complicated also by the fusion of images. In many objects what might be noticed is the imposition of a Catholic idiom on the form of the

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Figure 6.1 Interview with Antoni Kroh. Nowy Sącz, July 2017. Photo: Katarzyna Maniak.

visual depiction of Jewish suffering, as well as its “polonization.” Images of Pietà, images of Maximilian Kolbe2 and Janusz Korczak3 are thus frequently repeated, as are elements drawn from popular culture, such as visual materials from the Second World War broadly circulated in the post-war era. Conducting the project resulted not only in a proliferation of research questions, but also in the discovery of new ways of approaching the topic. One of these involved concentrating on the category of an artist as a “witness” and defining the creative act as a way of revealing experiences or stories heard. Using the term “post-bystander” as a definition of one who did not directly witness events but lived in their shadow (Popescu and Schult 2015) may contribute to undermining the accepted distinction between a victim, a perpetrator, and a bystander. Life stories of artists and interviews with them and their family members indicate that some of the selected pieces of art may be treated as visual attempts at channeling the tragedy of the Holocaust. The analysis of the post-war political reality and its official discourse played another significant role in the research on the phenomenon. Until the 1960s, discourse about

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Figure 6.2 Interview with German collector Walter Graetz. Berlin, September 2017. Photo: Katarzyna Maniak.

the Second World War was dominated by the language of the victors and heroes, which in the following years gave way to the stories of the suffering of victims. Only then did the topic of the Holocaust appear in folk art. Another issue concentrated around individual and social memory. As Roma Sendyka suggests, the frequency with which inspiration was taken from popular visual and textual media circulating at that time might imply the lack of an organic language with which to express unprecedented events. The absence of pre-existing tools in folk art vocabulary forced artists to reach for the available models as a source of metaphor. Furthermore, as Wojciech Wilczyk has claimed, a similar thematic deficiency can be found in folk art with reference to other phenomena traumatic for peasants, such as feudal subjugation or relations with the landed gentry. Magdalena Zych pointed out yet another interpretative approach, one that goes beyond the topic of the project, and implies looking for traces of reactions to the Holocaust in language and spoken folklore such as folk poetry. The group also asked questions concerning Polish–Jewish relations, which could be inferred from the objects of research, including traces of anti-Semitism and the stereotypical way the Jewish people were pictured in these “awkward” objects. The difficulty of finding definitive answers is visible in the example of Adam Czarnecki’s

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painting depicting scenes in a small town in which Jewish people are holding shovels and German soldiers are ordering them to work. Vexed discussions were sparked by the title of the painting, Jews [get] down to work, concerning the question of antiSemitism in the painting. It is difficult to say whether the title is just documenting, or ironically commenting on the orders shouted by the Nazis, or whether it is even a direct expression of the author’s negative feeling towards Jewish people—that finally they are being forced to do some real work.4 The next interpretative frame focused on the disciplines of ethnography and art history, which the research team considered for their value in understanding folk art and amateur art. Regarding objects labeled as “folk,” “naive,” or “vernacular,” Ewa Klekot claims that folk art “is, in fact, less a creation of the folk (in this case the peasants) than of the elites, including the folklorists and ethnographers, as the sense-giving process has been dominated by them” (Klekot 2010: 72). Among the elements that constitute the term “folk” she mentions the timelessness with which the nineteenth-century ethnographers treated the social group to which the artists belonged. Klekot draws on theories developed by Johannes Fabian (2014), who emphasized that while ethnographers were present in their “here and now,” they placed their subjects’ lives in a different “there and then.” The temporal immutability in which they were presumed to live included their crafts and artistic productions. Contemporary theories critically deconstruct this presupposition. The present project follows in this vein by showing that vernacular art is relevant to concrete historical events. Moreover, works defined as “folk” have been considered “authentic,” spontaneous, non-commodified. Investigation on the references and mediations flowing from popular culture, as well as the repetition of motifs, undermine the notion that these works are instinctive in nature. Works created by non-professional artists were not included in the field of Art History, and have remained on the peripheries of scholarly interest. Detailed research into these objects and their creators could awaken a new appreciation of this marginalized genre. The project also rejects, de facto, the complaint made by Jürgen Kaumkotter, art historian, researcher, and curator of Holocaust art: “Pieces of art which as a subject matter choose historic socialism, emigration, persecution, terror, and being enslaved in a camp, do not play an important role in history of art, in the knowledge on camps, or in art market or in galleries” (Kaumkotter 2015: 26). The negligible presence of the researched folk art in the institutional and academic framework has also provoked questions concerning the official, elitist forms of representation of the Holocaust and the comparison of both fields of art. Folk art is naturalistic, grotesque, kitschy, sometimes obscene, or, to summarize: not sophisticated enough. Hence, it contrasts with frugal expressions or their abstract form inherent for the elitist Holocaust art. The analysis of a yet unexplored set of objects led to the problematization regarding the issue of whether the marginal status of the objects arose from the fact that they were considered inappropriate for the commemoration process. Although the theoretical approaches discussed above may at first glance seem mutually exclusive, they build a multifaceted picture of (research on) the phenomenon of the Holocaust vernacular art. The inceptive perception of folk art acknowledging its empathetic component, along with the research process was replaced by subsequent

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concepts revealing the multidimensional nature of the motivations that drove the artists. Folk art related to the Holocaust consists of many layers of awkwardness, as Roma Sendyka once suggested. It is the effect of the disturbance of artists; it is also difficult for institutions and contentious for the public, as the current political situation in Poland (maintained under the rule of the rightist Law and Justice party since 2015) may have its say in the intensification of the above-mentioned contentiousness. The wartime Polish–Jewish relations were often the subject of difficult and ardent discussions; they evoke extreme emotions, and often polarize society.5 These circumstances are currently even more intricate, as they are being accelerated by the context of an aggressive defense of the unambiguously positive image of Polish history, used as a strategy of the ruling government. That can be best exemplified by one the regulations implemented by the government in 2018: the enactment from January 26 concerning changes in laws on the Institute of National Remembrance.6 The crucial part of Article 55a stated: Anyone attributing, in public and against facts, responsibility or co-responsibility to the Polish Nation or to the Polish State for the Nazi crimes committed by the Third German Reich . . . or for other offenses constituting crimes against peace, humanity or war crimes or otherwise grossly reducing the responsibility of the actual perpetrators of these crimes shall be subject to a fine or imprisonment of up to three years.

The third section, stating that one doesn’t commit a crime if this act is a part of an artistic or scientific activity, did not mitigate the general tone of the new law, which raised concern about the possibilities of forcing an official view and limiting critical thinking in terms of Polish history. After strong protests from many Polish commentators and the position taken by the governments of the United States and Israel, the Law and Justice government introduced an amendment to the Act in June 2018, abolishing the threat of penalization. However, this does not diminish the significance of introducing such a law, unequivocally suggesting the direction of the desired historical policy. It also precisely outlines the tensions, increased vigilance, and possible (auto)censorship that characterizes the field of researchers’ work.

Translated into an exhibition The transposition of the research process and its outcomes into the medium of an exhibition was a natural consequence of the inclination to make the Holocaust folk art publicly available and thus to raise a discussion around the subject. Challenges accompanying the displaying of multidimensional phenomena can be metonymically illustrated by the process of selecting the title of the exhibition. The Polish translation of the project caption, “Awkward Objects of Genocide,” did not adequately reflect its complexity. To keep the identity of both language versions, the group members decided on the title “Terribly Close: Polish Vernacular Artists Face the Holocaust.” The chosen

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title, “Widok zza bliska” in Polish, is difficult to pronounce; it draws attention to speech disorders. Seeing from too close radically changes the perspective, but it also entails an uncomfortable position, characterized by the loss of safety and convenience. Struggling with words to find their most appropriate resonance, the group was additionally hindered by the requirement to consult on the content with the museum director, who agreed to host the exhibition in the Ethnographic Museum in Krakow. It was particularly demanding, considering the fact that the institution has certain policies, one of which appeared to be the avoidance of the term “folk art” as it constrains the concept of art itself. Hence, the team members faced the challenge of how to omit the notion of folk art in an exhibition that was actually focused on this category. The exhibition began by indicating the marginal status of the objects in question within institutions, through a visual documentation of museum storage space in which the objects are kept. Works related to the Holocaust presented in the pictures of the “folk art realm” disrupt the lines of sacral objects, landscapes, and genre scenes; they exist, although they have remained somehow unnoticed. The following room introduced the “main characters” of the narration, such as the works of artists who witnessed the Holocaust, excerpts from sculptures including figurines of victims (Jewish and those whose nationality remains difficult to classify) and perpetrators, faces of Kolbe and Korczak as indexes of visual mediations and references from popular culture, as well as individuals from the team through the frames of phenomenon. On entering the subsequent part of the exhibition the visitor encountered examples proving that the objects depicted the following phases of the Holocaust, such as pogroms, deportation, concentration camps, the murders of those in hiding, and more; which was an unexpected unveiling of the team’s work. Likewise, the fact that the creation of such objects and their commissions by collectors is still subsisting, which is indicated by the work of art made in 2017. The group decided as well to introduce the thread of reaction of Poles towards the Holocaust expressed through the medium of verbal folklore, via the excerpt from “A Ballad about the Jews from the Parish of Ślęzaki” by Ludwik Kłos. The information provided thickened in the next part of the exhibition, simultaneously with the transformation of the formula of how it can be experienced. Here, the outcomes of processual work, such as intersectional and overlapping threads, found their complete expression. The room entitled “Workshop” was composed of six objects staged at the tables and surrounded by various contextual materials illustrating a complex structure of influences affecting the creation of objects: “The biographies of makers, collectors, commissioners, sellers: Poles, Germans, Jews. Communist politics and propaganda. Catholicism. Popular cultural clichés. Afterimages and echoes of other works. Museums, exhibitions, competitions. The folk art industry. Kitsch, violence, and obscenity.”7 Traces of all of them were open to individual study and they were open to being added to or commented on by the exhibition visitors. This mode of display of knowledge, which is multilayered and implicitly incomplete, will be best exemplified by the case of the aforementioned work of Adam Czarnecki, Jews [get] down to work. From the notes accompanying the painting one can learn the formal details of the work described in the inventory card and the biography of the artist. Czarnecki was

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born near Pierzchnica, a city inhabited by about 300 Jews in the late nineteenth century and the point of assembly of about 500 Jews from nearby villages from which a transport to the ghetto in Chmielnik and later to the extermination camp in Treblinka took place. Czarnecki witnessed the persecution, extermination, and deportation of Jews inhabiting his homeland. He was also forced to dig graves for the executed victims. As we can read in fragments of his testimony: “It stuck in my memory. I came to Pierzchnica, it was so bad for me somehow . . . I started painting it. I have a souvenir now.”8 This seemingly unambiguous expression of compassion, and the desire to commemorate it, is complicated by quoting Dorota Głowacka’s opinion: “At the same time, he [the artist] evokes the anti-Semitic stereotype of a Jew who never does any ‘real work’ (although he lives in the best tenement house in the market). The portrayal of forced labor is, therefore, a kind of symbolic revenge and settling old scores.”9 Other materials provided only add to the difficulties focused on the other part of the title, the Polish version of Jews, the offensive term “Żydy.” The notes included a dictionary definition of the insulting term, but also its subversive and ironic usage by contemporary artist Stanisław Żywolewski, who placed the word “Żydy” on an image of the Holy Family. The room closing the exhibition, entitled “Emotions,” clearly revealed the attitudes of team members: “The few works in this room sparked our deepest debates. We looked for gestures of empathy, examples of ethical witnessing. Artists’ intentions are never singular, or knowable. Yet these objects seem to ask us to take the point of view of the victims, to draw near to their fates. They are rare, exceptional works.”10 The research and the exhibition summarizing it, therefore, were framed by the theme of emotions and empathetic reaction embodied in the objects. The process of work of the team recalled a gradual distillation, the distinction of influences complicating the idea of ethical witnessing implanted in the objects. If we refer to the numbers: the team found 400 objects on the war, including almost sixty referring to violence against Jews. Eight works were included in the exhibition as those which had the strongest affective component. The exhibition did not make any claims as to whether this was a lot or not enough. Neither did it provide a definite and ultimate clarification of the phenomenon of vernacular art related to the Holocaust, as it was impossible to be grasped. The exhibition rather reported the state of research as well as the attitudes of researchers, allowing space for individual encounters with the objects. This is best demonstrated in the “Workshop” room and through the strategy of posing open questions that have neither univocal nor unchallenging answers. What do they [the researched objects] actually depict? How should we look at them today? Can we treat them as witnesses to murder? Is this “the Holocaust for sale”? Or is it a belated conversation between perpetrators and witnesses? And where do the victims fit in? What do these visual documents say about the Holocaust and the people who witnessed it? About its lingering social and cultural effects? What does it mean to inherit the bystander’s gaze on the Holocaust? Who are we—and who do we become—when confronted with these uncanny documents today?11

Finally, I will analyze what kind of confrontation with the objects is arranged through the (omni)presence of their reshaped version in the photographs by Wojciech Wilczyk.

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Affective violence in art Wojciech Wilczyk, an artist, photographer, and poet, has been involved in numerous projects devoted to the contemporary (non)existence of Jews in Poland, the material heritage of Jewish people, and Polish–Jewish relations. A series of photos, “There is no Such Thing as an Innocent Eye” (2006–8), illustrates the current state of more than 300 synagogues and prayer houses scattered throughout Poland. The other project, entitled “Holy War” (2009–14) revolves around graffiti, including anti-Semitic slurs, painted by Polish football fans. Both projects draw people’s attention to public space and the familiar environment of the Polish majority. They point out what our gaze avoids, what in some peculiar way is unnoticeable, and as a consequence is erased from consciousness. To quote the artist: “objects or motifs in the field of vision are seemingly transparent to the average observer. A simple operation of registering their shapes in a consistent manner and using the images obtained to create a sort of visual typology (somewhat like the rhetorical device of hyperbole) can lessen their transparency, making them into lucid symbols” (Wilczyk 2015: 29). He set himself a similar goal in the project “Awkward Objects of Genocide.” I will take a closer look at the strategies he adopts, and use the concept of affective violence put forward by Luiza Nader to understand them. Luiza Nader analyzes a series of collages by Władysław Strzemiński entitled “To My Friends the Jews” (1945–7) through the category of affective violence. She explains affect as the power of influence and being open to influences; a space of potentiality in which relations between the subject and the world can come into being; a process of the subject’s journey beyond itself, during which the boundary between it and the world, as well as the one between mind and body, disappears. Affect is present in the freedom afforded by a piece of art (Nader 2013: 67). When citing the definition of violence Nader concentrates on meanings that come close to those of affect. She includes categories like influence, effect, effusion, and passion. She connects the two terms via forces common to both, namely influencing a subject without her/his consent, and a certain kind of intrusion. Affective violence, understood as the power enacted by an artist’s creations, holds the potential to shake people out of their indifference. It also profoundly influences viewers’ awareness, breaking their habits of seeing and feeling and provoking them to comprehension. “It is the potential space for social and political change: interpretative work, which may completely change self-understanding of subjects and of entire societies. Affective violence . . . is an action against perceptual habits, ontological and epistemological points of view: those that break and breach indifference, habit, numbness and domestication, cultural and biographical wounds, and fixation on cultural self-victimization” (Nader 2013: 72). The category described above is remarkably useful in interpreting the strategy adopted by Wojciech Wilczyk, whose artistic method involved taking photos of folk art connected to the Holocaust. He focused on photographing abstract art pieces against a plain background. Although he recorded every angle of those objects, including their front and back, his main interest was directed towards images of their faces. He held his

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Figure 6.3 Wojciech Wilczyk taking a photograph of an object during the research conducted in the Ethnographic Museum in Rzeszów, September 2016. Photo: Katarzyna Maniak.

camera at a distance of five to six centimeters away from an object. I observed him one day when he was working. While trying to take a photo he flexed his body into many different positions, and while pointing his camera at a sculpture of a Nazi he suddenly said, “In your face!” At that moment I felt viscerally Susan Sontag’s observation of the sublimation of gunfire into photography camera, and the “something predatory” in the latter (Sontag 1990: 14). If we were to follow Sontag’s deliberations in her publication On Photography, photography itself could be considered an act of violence. She claims: “To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and, therefore, like power” (ibid.: 4). In other words, photographing an object is equal to taking control of it. The control is expressed by the way the subject of the photograph is captured and presented. Looking at photos we are following the gaze of the photographer. What is this perspective that is imposed on us? Wilczyk makes us look attentively and consciously. He confronts a situation in which a viewer might take a brief, superficial look at the objects in question, only skimming them, oblivious to details because of their minute size. He zooms literally, and uses tight but generous frames and close-ups. He attracts our sight. The effect achieved is impressive. Displaying the photographs of carved and painted faces is not a simple repetition or multiplication of objects but rather a transformation of their status. It is a gesture aimed at regaining the agency of works which have been pressed into limiting categories.

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Figure 6.4 View of a part of the exhibition, Ethnographic Museum in Krakow, December 2018. Photo: Wojciech Wilczyk.

Figure 6.5 View of a part of the exhibition, Ethnographic Museum in Krakow, December 2018. Photo: Wojciech Wilczyk.

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The imperative of not looking away and the need to confront the subject at hand is another example of Nader’s affective violence present in Wilczyk’s pieces. Photos taken by the artist bring the Holocaust-related objects closer to us. What is created, in turn, is the potential of affect, openness to psychological reactions and sensations provoking autonomous and engaged reflection. Wojciech Nowicki, a photography critic, describes Wilczyk’s approach with extraordinary accuracy: “Although the form of a photo remains important, it is always only a means; not to salvation, but to inflict wounds on the self-satisfied, as a reminder of those things that no one really, at any cost, wants to think about.” (Nowicki 2015:33).

Conclusion Concluding the multilayering interpretation of objects representing genocide, I will turn to emotions, which are an indispensable and integral element of the experience one has with difficult heritage. I propose the term “haunt-emotionology” as a concept that can be traced from both methods and outcomes reached by the team and that may be successfully used as a strategy of approaching contentious heritage. “Hauntemotionology” is a combination of the philosophical theory of “hauntology” postulated by Jacques Derrida and the subdiscipline of historical studies, “emotionology.” The latter was advanced by Peter and Carol Stearns in 1985. Emotionology, as defined by the authors, indicates its subject in emotional standards being historically, culturally, and socially transformed. It undertakes the analysis of norms that regulate the manner in which the feelings are expressed, as well as focusing on assessing which affects are socially neutralized, desirable, or avoided. The proposal is debatable, as its elaborations contain generalizations and assumptions, among others, on class and gender; these cannot be accepted. The proposal also does not take into consideration that a heterogeneous society may incline conflicting or hierarchical relations between various emotional standards, which might result in imposing some norms on others. However, emotionology is useful in providing the distinction between the social context regarding the manifestation of emotions and the actual emotional experience. Stepping aside from the concerns and critical perspective, I will focus precisely on the division the authors put forward. I would like to submit the thesis that the realization of the “Awkward Objects of Genocide” was set in between emotions and norms regulating their expression. The team members declared their willingness to reach the emotional experience transmitted to folk art by the artists. To accomplish this task they tried to minimize the distance that separated them from the subjects of the investigation. For instance, they used the artistic strategy of close-up and haptically encountering the objects. They were affectively moved by particular art pieces, and carefully studied the biographies of their creators. Although it is almost beyond the boundary of possibility to grasp the feelings of deceased artists, the group managed to fish out economic motivations and the complex nature of relations between artists and collectors, as well as other influences, which dissolve the image of emphatic reactions to scenes of genocide of those who might have witnessed them. Team members searched for an answer to the

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question whether folk art conveys compassionate feelings towards the Holocaust victims, or rather traces of morbid curiosity or sublimation of guiltiness (Lehrer and Sendyka 2019 forthcoming). An important result was raising the subject of emotional standards concerning the Holocaust representations. The study of folk art aesthetics and the assertion of its marginal status within an academic and institutional framework brought forth a discussion around the question whether the fact that there was embedded in the objects “ ‘undesired’ or ‘improper’ affect, epistemology or ethics in relation to the event” gave a reason to ignore them. Holocaust folk art is simplifying, schematic, too literal; it “can be accused of voyeurism” or “kitschiness.” “When it portrays ‘lost neighbors’ . . . it might be suspected of sentimentality and nostalgia. When it draws on symbolic codes from local ideologies (Catholicism, communism) it risks distortion, erasure, and moral flattening (for instance not acknowledging difficult wartime Polish–Jewish relations)” (Lehrer and Sendyka 2019 forthcoming). Thus, encountering the Holocaust folk art entails the “risks” of “giving in to voyeuristic, ‘dark’ inclinations or shallow sentimentality, nostalgia, or bathos” (ibid.). These emotions are unquestionably considered as inappropriate by the official discourse. Apart from that, the objects which may carry and provoke these kind of feelings do exist. One can ask whether this inadequacy can exemplify the individual negotiations between the emotions and their socially standardized conceptualization, which Stearns mentioned, or rather the exclusion of emotional standards that do not correspond with dominant narration. In order to put an emphasis on the nature of emotions tied with the “awkward” objects of genocide, I prelude the described research proposal with the prefix “haunt,” which refers to the philosophical idea of Jacques Derrida, explicated in his book Specters of Marx (1994). “Hauntology” is a portmanteau of two French words, the verb “haunt” and the philosophical term “ontology.” It describes the structure of reality as incoherent or cracked, constantly haunted by the specters of the past, that persistently return and undermine the sense of stability. However, it is difficult to define the status of a specter due to its ambiguity. A specter is suspended between the presence and lack, it is blurred and mystifying, it appears as a phantom. Derrida encourages us to accept this spectral dimension of reality, which means to give voice to what is repressed and silenced. “Hauntology” is a popular interpretative tool in contemporary humanities (including Holocaust studies). The proposal was advanced by psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok and elaborated on the book Le Verbier de l’Homme aux loups (published in 1976 with an introduction by Derrida; English translation 1986). Abraham and Torok devised a conception of “cryptology” as a method of deciphering an illegible and incomprehensible narration, which conceals unconscious and traumatic content. The idea differs from “hauntologists,” among other things by reason of considering the final purpose of the method used. According to psychoanalysts the process of cryptology may find its end in working through the traumatic story and healing the subjects involved. It is too far-reaching a conclusion in the context of the “Awkward Objects of Genocide” project. However, I have to mention the cryptonymic approach due to its diagnosis, which associates the spectral hauntings with

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transgenerational transmission of trauma, and the inheritance of the unconscious and pinching burden. To conclude, I consider the process of interpretation of the Holocaust folk art as a conjure of spectral emotions, which among others sparks the question of what the objects signify today.

Notes 1

Held at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, October 3–5, 2016. Participants: Tal Adler, Łukasz Baksik, Michał Bilewicz, Katarzyna Bojarska, Alina Cała, Dorota Głowacka, Aleksandra Janus, Uta Karrer, Ewa Klekot, Luiza Nader, Renata Piątkowska, Amudena Rutkowska, Magdalena Waligórska, Joanna Wawrzyniak, and Artur Tanikowski. 2 Maximilian Kolbe (1894–1941) was a Polish Franciscan friar. He died at the Nazi German death camp of Auschwitz, when he volunteered to replace another inmate convicted to death by starvation. Kolbe was beatified in 1971 and canonized as a saint in 1982 by Pope John Paul II. 3 Janusz Korczak (1878–1942, born Henryk Goldszmit) was a Polish–Jewish doctor, an educator, a pedagogue, a writer, and a social worker. In the Warsaw ghetto, he refused the offer to be freed by a Polish underground organization, instead choosing to follow the children from his orphanage when they were deported to the Treblinka death camp. 4 A long-standing stereotype about Jews among Polish peasants is that they did not do real (read: agricultural) work, but rather amassed money immorally, off of other people’s labor. 5 As can be exemplified by the controversy arising around the publications by Jan Tomasz Gross, such as Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (New York and London: Penguin Books, 2000); Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz (London and Princeton, NJ: Random House and Princeton University Press, 2000); or more recently by the publication Night without an End: The Fate of Jews in Selected Counties of Occupied Poland, ed. Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski (Warsaw: Polish Center for Holocaust Research 2018). 6 The act on the Institute of National Remembrance—Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation, law on graves and military cemeteries, law on museums, and law on the liability of collective entities for acts prohibited under penalty. https://ipn.gov.pl/pl/o-ipn/ustawa/24216,Ustawa.html (accessed August 12, 2018). 7–11 Extracts from texts used at the exhibition.

References Abraham, Nicolas and Maria Torok (1986). The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy. Minneapolis, MN : University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, Jacques (1994). Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. New York: Routledge. Estalella, Adolfo and Tomás Sánchez Criado (2018). Experimental Collaborations: Ethnography through Fieldwork Devices. New York: Berghahn.

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Fabian, Johannes (2014). Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Lehrer, Erica (2014). Lucky Jews. Krakow: Korporacja Ha!Art. Lehrer, Erica and Roma Sendyka (2019 forthcoming). “Arts of witness? Vernacular art as a source base for ‘bystander’ Holocaust memory in Poland,” Holocaust Studies: Disputed Holocaust Memory in Poland (special issue). Lehrer, Erica, Roma Sendyka, Magdalena Zych, and Wojciech Wilczyk (2016). “Awkward Objects of Genocide: The Holocaust and vernacular arts in and beyond Polish ethnographic museums,” Traces Journal, October 6, http://www.traces.polimi. it/2016/10/06/awkward-objects-of-genocide-the-holocaust-and-vernacular-arts-inand-beyond-polish-ethnographic-museums/ (accessed March 14, 2019). Kaumkotter, Jürgen (2015). Śmierć nie ma ostatniego słowa: Sztuka w tragicznych latach 1933-1945 (Death Does Not Have the Last Word. Art Amidst the Catastrophe 1933– 1945). Krakow: MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow. Klekot, Ewa (2010). “The seventh life of Polish folk art and craft,” Etnoloska tribina, 40(30): 71–85. Maniak, Katarzyna (2017). “Contemporary ethnographic museology: curatorial model of creating collections, exhibitions and institutional programs—a case study based on selected museums in Poland and Europe at the turn of 20th and 21st century,” unpublished thesis defended at the Jagiellonian University, Krakow. Nader, Luiza (2013). “Afektywna przemoc. Moim przyjaciołom Żydom Władysława Strzemińskiego” (“Affective Violence. To My Friends the Jews by Władysław Strzemiński”), Teksty Drugie, 4: 142. Nowicki, Wojciech (2015). “Palimpsests,” in Artur Tanikowski (ed.), Wojciech Wilczyk: (In) visible. Warsaw: POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews., pp. 32–45. Perec, Georges (1987). Life, a User’s Manual, London: Collins Harvill. Popescu, Diana and Tanja Schult (eds.) (2015). Revisiting Holocaust Representation in the Post-witness Era. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Sontag, Susan (1990). On Photography. New York: Anchor Doubleday. Stearns, Peter and Carol Stearns (1985). “Emotionology: clarifying the history of emotions and emotional standards,” The American Historical Review, 90(4): 813–36. Wilczyk, Wojciech (2015). “(Non)transparency,” in Artur Tanikowski (ed.), Wojciech Wilczyk: (In)visible Warsaw : POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, pp. 21–31.

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Awkward Objects of Genocide Project—Difficult Encounters with Holocaust Folk Art A Hybrid Record of Research and Exhibition Planning Roma Sendyka, Erica Lehrer, Wojciech Wilczyk, and Magdalena Zych

In Poland a number of artistic responses were produced to the traumatic memory of the murder of the local Jewish population during the Second World War. Research by our TRACES team revealed the extent to which local, “naive” artists attempted to represent the events they witnessed. Their works, however, remain scattered in folk and ethnographic museum collections, often awkwardly categorized due to disciplinary taxonomies that treat folk art as “timeless” rather than historical, and the reluctance of curators to touch on uncomfortable subjects. A Krakow-based team consisting of an anthropologist, a memory studies scholar, an ethnographer, and an artist has focused on researching Poland’s institutional and private collections to assess the scope of the phenomenon of vernacular representation of the Shoah. How many such works existed? Who created them, and under what circumstances? Who collected them, and why? Were the works ever exhibited? If yes, how were they curated? Taking a closer look: what do these objects represent? What motivations and sentiments do they convey? How did local bystanders respond to the violent events that took place in their proximity? Can we access the affects of the makers, interpret the works’ uncanny aesthetics, at first glance so “unfitting” for the tragic subjects they depict? And more conceptually: how might this body of work speak to discussions of Holocaust representation? Why have curators, scholars, and theorists seemed to have shunned these creations? In short: why is it so difficult to approach the war-related material collecting dust in the archives of ethnographic collections? What is difficult to confront about this heritage?

Paths towards a collaboration The members of our team have all worked at some point with vernacular art, traces of the Holocaust in Poland’s cultural fabric, and the representation of violence. In the 93

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series of snapshots below, we map out the inspirations and experiences that catalyzed individual team members along their paths towards joining the project Awkward Objects of Genocide.

Roma Sendyka (memory studies scholar) In 2011 the Krakow Ethnographic Museum celebrated its centenary with an exhibition, “Passages and Repassages.”1 The core idea of the exhibition was to present objects usually lost in the vast archives of the museum but offering stunningly contemporary, uncanny, or provocative messages. I visited the exhibition together with the participants of the course “(In)visible Loss: The Holocaust and the Everyday Visual Experience in Contemporary Poland and Central Europe” to see sculptures by Jan Staszak.2 Curator Grzegorz Graff (Graff 2013) explained that they were made from materials obtained in the woods formerly belonging to the Birkenau camp. The sculptures were stunning: the scorched wood was disquieting, but the form was typical for folk art, presenting fantastic beasts and human-like figures. The information on the sculptor gathered by the curator suggested there were more such works, and that a wider collection could be seen in the holdings of the Auschwitz–Birkenau State Museum. My inquiry into that collection led me to Harmęże, the home village of Staszak, close to Birkenau. In the archives I found postcards published by the artist and his son, an ethnographer. The works pictured on the cards were different from those I saw in Krakow: they recalled expressionist art, closer in their aesthetics to contemporary sculpture. Ambiguous as they were in their form, they were presented in the most explicit way: photographed inside the Birkenau camp. I was told that the sculptures had been recently donated to the Libiąż Cultural Center. I finally managed to see them in 2014: a figure weeping, an old Jew, a spasmodic body in pain, a petrified woman. Almost human-size, the sculptures were unlike anything I had seen in ethnographic museums. I was surprised by the bold aesthetics they used. Many questions arose. When did such vernacular art referring to the Shoah emerge? Can we look at it as testimony? Might it provide new insight into how the Holocaust was remembered in the provinces? I began looking for collaborators to help me learn more.

Erica Lehrer (cultural anthropologist) “Awkward Objects of Genocide” was in some sense born from my exhibition, “Souvenir, Talisman, Toy: Poland’s Jewish Figurines,” which took place at Krakow’s Ethnographic Museum in summer 2013.3 Roma Sendyka approached me at the exhibition to discuss works she had recently found, by folk artist Jan Staszak. Staszak used wood collected from the ashy ground on the perimeter of the Auschwitz death camp, in this way literally embodying rather than only representing Jewish death in his works. Magdalena Zych, a young curator who joined the staff of the Ethnographic Museum in 2009, saw the exhibition, and worked with Roma to survey the museum’s collection for more Holocaust-related objects. Magda found the works of Jan Skocz, who depicted prisoners

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from Auschwitz, where Skocz had been imprisioned. Magda became interested in the broader institutional history of these objects. Photographer Wojciech Wilczyk, well known for his work on Poland’s abandoned synagogues “There is No Such Thing as an Innocent Eye” (2009), wrote a critical review of “Souvenir, Talisman, Toy,” suggesting it was too “balanced” in its approach, and that it focused insufficiently on the Holocaust as an explanatory principle (Wilczyk 2015). Based on Roma’s instinct, she assembled the “Awkward Objects” team for the TRACES project, and the four of us have evolved into a delightfully complementary critical, interdisciplinary, multicultural, and multinational research and curatorial team.

Magdalena Zych (ethnographer, curator at the Krakow Ethnographic Museum) During ethnographic research on various topics in Poland, my oldest respondents often spontaneously brought up their wartime experiences, including the Shoah. These references included never-before-expressed traumatic memories by the bystanders, as well as anti-Semitic allusions. In Baranów Sandomierski in 2001, one respondent told me how she deliberately misled people who asked where the plots of land owned by Jews had been, when she indicated the borders among fields. A decade later, when I was already working at the Krakow Ethnographic Museum, I was running a project on the culture of allotment gardens (McSweeney and Kavanagh 2016). It was in these garden plots that my eldest respondents found a haven during the decades after the war, healing their souls from wartime trauma (Szczurek and Zych 2012). Here I heard eyewitness accounts: of a teenager who saw the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto, and a prisoner of war in Minsk who sorted the clothes of Jews from the liquidated ghetto and helped prepare the ground for mass graves. Both were elderly when we met, and they shared their stories of those events with me, those scenes unfolding again, now among flowers and fruit trees. Such meetings give insight into the past, whose traces wind through today’s reality, as though some part of the war never ended. Ethnographic findings provoke questions about memory and oblivion, pointing to other, non-mainstream circulations and expressions of experience. Among the eyewitnesses was also Aniela Wójtowicz (1920–2014), my grandmother. She returned now and again to wartime events. She shared with me in detail the story of the execution of a Jewish family who had been in hiding. During the TRACES project, I came across a ballad by Ludwig Kłos, a folk poet from my grandmother’s home region. In this text, I found her stories: Eight Jewish families lived here ’fore the war, Six of them in Dąbrowica, two on farmsteads had their homes. Their names I record, lest progeny forget, Different was their faith and on Saturday they prayed. ... They drove them like cattle to Baranów, where,

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Art, Anthropology, and Contested Heritage At the graveyard, each had to dig his own grave there. Dąbrowica has no Jews today, not one of them was saved. Ludwik Kłos, “A Ballad about the Jews from the Parish of Ślęzaki” (fragments), translated by Magdalena Waligórska

The team was completed when an artist joined in: Wojciech Wilczyk. His awardwinning and much-discussed photographic work on former synagogues and prayer houses from Poland (Wilczyk 2009) was a perfect example of an art-based research approach.

Wojciech Wilczyk (artist, photographer, and curator) Working on my documentary series “There’s No Such Thing as an Innocent Eye,” on synagogues and prayer houses in Poland which no longer function as places of worship, I opted for a topographic approach. Unlike typical photo albums, the book that presents my project takes the form of a lexicon, where photographs of the objects are accompanied by descriptions of their history.

Research process, field notes Below are observations drawn from our field notes that point to episodes of spontaneous understanding or inspiration, and especially moments of affective force. Our knowledge and understanding of the phenomenon under study developed during our two years of research. We traveled many times across Poland, visited fifteen museum archives, returning to some of them multiple times, interviewed collectors, curators, ethnographers, artists, and their families. We convened a three-day workshop with interdisciplinary specialists to unpack and debate the broadest range of possible meanings of the works; we presented some of the key objects and our emerging conclusions at conferences. We met, planned, and envisioned how we might best access the potential for the objects to raise questions and spur dialogue in an exhibition.

Erica Lehrer Figurines of Jews have been constant companions during my travels in Poland, since my first trip in April of 1990 when I saw a caricatured “praying Jew” figurine rocking back and forth on its springed legs at a market stall in Zakopane, Poland, surrounded by Nazi memorabilia. I was horrified. In 1992, while studying in Germany, I found a small book featuring German journalist and Polonophile Ludwig Zimmerer’s collection of Polish folk art. Among the images was Włacław Czerwiński’s sculpture titled Last Embrace Before Parting, showing a Jewish man weeping while holding his daughter, “before being sent to the gas chamber where they would never see each other again.” I was moved, haunted, and curious. What were these figurines? How and why

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did Poles depict Jews in wooden form, and in such different ways? I was determined to find out. Over the course of our research for TRACES other encounters have shaped my thinking: the Yad Vashem “Righteous Among the Nations” certificate pasted to the back of a rather kitschy painting of a Jewish family, noting that the artist had saved the depicted children from a pogrom. The collector I passed on a Krakow street who asked if I’d like to see the carving “Nazis with a prostitute” at her home. The nationalist curator outside Warsaw who dismissed our work as “your Jewish exhibit.” A wooden figurine, it turns out, is almost never only that.

Magdalena Zych That day, as planned, we worked at the National Ethnographic Museum in Warsaw. It was a stifling summer day, but the heat didn’t reach into the building. I took sculptures from one of the storerooms, which smelled strongly of wood, dust, and chemicals, and carried them in my gloved hands to the mezzanine, where Wojciech photographed them in an impromptu studio he had set up. Some were heavy, others unwieldy. We had chosen them based on the catalog cards. The first encounter with Zygmunt Skrętowicz’s works was very hard for me. I was supposed to take from the shelf one of his five-piece cycle of bas-reliefs, Auschwitz—which included gassing, cremation, and more—and carry it out into the hall, but I couldn’t move. A wave of sadness? Helplessness at the devastating realization of the materials we were working with? Forcing myself, I carried out the rest of the cycle, but I’d had enough. I was frightened by the explicitness of representation, the form given by the artist to the theme, and the resulting flashback of all the Shoah stories I’d heard. Museum storerooms accumulate the energies of the objects they house. Many of these pieces are highly expressive; the sheer number of symbols and religious scenes can be overwhelming. Seeing Skrętowicz’s cycle among the rows of crucifixes and sorrowful Christ motifs, and the intimate interaction with the works is ingrained in my memory as one of the most difficult and interesting moments of our research, briefly revealing meanings which usually remain inaccessible. Such an “auto-ethnographic” observation of the situation allowed me to recognize an important domain of the interpretation of art objects and the relations created by them.

Wojciech Wilczyk Taking pictures of Józef Piłat’s piece titled A Jewish Shop at the National Museum in Kielce, I was struck by the way the artist depicted the human figures. Although the sculpture was created on the suggestion of the former director of that museum, its execution reveals the artist’s own affect. The figures of Orthodox Jews, a woman and two men (one older and one younger), have been carved with utmost care (for example, one can see that the woman is wearing a wig, which is a rare representation in naive art). Looking at this piece, I decided to use a macro lens set as close as possible to their faces. I wanted to enlarge them, and in this way make the artist’s emotions visible. After this experiment, I decided to take the same approach with all the objects I photographed for TRACES.

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Roma Sendyka Ghosts Back in 2014 I first saw Staszak’s Holocaust sculptures in a temporary warehouse where their new owner had stored them after their relocation from the Auschwitz–Birkenau archives. They were covered with white cloth sacks sewn to match their shapes. They looked like bodies covered in shrouds. Standing in front of me, human-scale, they resembled ghosts. Taking off the bags required caution and patience. I felt as if I were salvaging something, restoring some unknown part of the past.

Archives Ever since, when entering archives holding vernacular art, I feel the thrill of entering a paradoxical realm. It is less Derridian archive fever then Musil’s possibilitarianism: vernacular art archives may represent the terrible, oppressive hierarchies recognized by experts. But simultaneously the things shelved there have been rejected by mainstream art. Thus they are both renowned and marginalized at the same time. As proposed in The Man without Qualities: we might see them as they are, but also as they could be but are not (Musil 2011: 10–11).

Close-ups Folk art is traditionally photographed using ethnographic lenses: the object is presented frontally, objectively, in full. Viewers are rarely presented with the opportunity to examine a detail. I wanted to study the hand movements of a sculptor who once dug into a log with his chisel: when carving a figure of a human suffering, such a gesture is not innocent. Only after Wojciech Wilczyk took his close-up images did I realize I finally had full access to these embodied vibrations from the past. His approach to representing ethnographic art allowed me to observe, to study, to analyze, to extend my gaze.

Curatorial researching, documenting, dreaming, and planning: visual log Below we offer a glimpse into our process of research and exhibition design by means of images from our archive of auto-ethnographic photographic documentation. Our preliminary observations were only completed with the opening of exhibition “Terribly Close: Polish Vernacular Artists Face the Holocaust” in November 2018 in Krakow.4

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Figure 7.1 Erica Lehrer, interview with Zofia Winnicka, Przysietnica, Rzeszów region, southern Poland. Photo: Wojciech Wilczyk.

Figure 7.2 Erica Lehrer and Magdalena Zych, interview with Louis Galinski, Berlin. Photo: Wojciech Wilczyk.

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Figure 7.3 Roma Sendyka and Magdalena Zych, interview with Władysław Naumiuk, Kaniuki, Białystok region, northern Poland Photo: Wojciech Wilczyk.

Figure 7.4 Roma Sendyka and Wojciech Wilczyk, at work in the archives of the National Museum in Kielce, photographing documents regarding Józef Piłat’s Jewish Shop. Photo: Erica Lehrer.

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Figure 7.5 Erica Lehrer and Wojciech Wilczyk, at work in the photo studio of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. Photo: Roma Sendyka.

A temporary stopping place The objects we found are uncanny: at times deeply moving, at others grotesque, they can also be disturbing for the ways they upend accepted roles of victim, perpetrator, and bystander; impose Catholic idioms on Jewish suffering via symbolic forms like a Pietà or a Nazi crematorium recalling a nativity crèche; as well as for the erroneous mythologies that may be projected onto them as memorial objects in the present. Through a survey of objects in Polish ethnographic museums (as well as other Polish and German public and private collections), the creation of a public database and website, and the development of an exhibition, we aimed to highlight this vernacular art of witness for Polish and international publics. The ultimate goal of the project is to re-frame and draw new attention to this fascinating, under-recognized category of object in order to: broaden what we understand as “Holocaust art,” expand the field of Holocaust memory studies to include a range of “bystander” perspectives, and challenge traditional approaches to folk art and ethnographic museology more broadly.5

Notes 1 2 3

For further information, see http://etnomuzeum.eu/wydawnictwa/przejscia-ipowroty-de (accessed November 13. 2018). Sponsored by Patterns Lectures Program, Erste Foundation, Vienna. The project is better known as “Lucky Jews,” the title of the resulting book and website www.luckyjews.com (accessed March 15, 2019).

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Art, Anthropology, and Contested Heritage “Terribly Close: Polish Vernacular Artists Face the Holocaust.” A temporary exhibition at the Krakow Ethnographic Museum, Esther House, Krakowska Street 46, November 30, 2018 to March 31, 2019. Curators: Roma Sendyka, Erica Lehrer, Magdalena Zych, Wojciech Wilczyk; design: Monika Bielak. http://www.terriblyclose.eu/ In the above texts we cite fragments of an article published in a special edition of Anthropology News (Lehrer et al. 2017).

References Graff, Grzegorz (2013). “Point of communication,” in Małgorzata Szczurek (ed.), Passages and Repassages. Krakow: Muzeum Etnograficzne im. Seweryna Udzieli w Krakowie, pp. 234–43. Lehrer, Erica, Roma Sendyka, Magdalena Zych, and Wojciech Wilczyk (2017). “Awkward Objects of Genocide,” Anthropology News, 58, Special Issue: Futures: 240–6. McSweeney, Kayte and Jen Kavanagh (eds.) (2016). Museum Participation: New Directions for Audience Collaboration. Edinburgh and Boston: Museums Etc. Musil, Robert (2011). The Man without Qualities. Trans. Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike. London: Picador. Szczurek, Małgorzata and Magdalena Zych (2012). Dzieło-Działka. Krakow: Muzeum Etnograficzne im. Seweryna Udzieli w Krakowie. Wilczyk, Wojciech (2009). There’s No Such Thing as an Innocent Eye. Krakow: Ha!Art. Wilczyk, Wojciech (2015). “Pamiątka, Zabawka, Talizman, czyli Żydzi fantomowi,” Studia Litteraria Historica, 3/4: 260–4.

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From Something to Nothing A Peculiar Ethnography of a Peculiar Art Project Blaž Bajič

An expectation to say something Upon entering the Match Gallery, a contemporary art gallery located in very center of Ljubljana, where the “Casting of Death” exhibition took place, one immediately faced the following disclaimer: The exhibition is part of the TRACES project, which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 693857. The views expressed here are the sole responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Commission.

With the disclaimer, which obviously takes it as read that certain views will be expressed, one learned that the exhibition he or she is about to see is potentially at odds with the (cultural, social, political) ideas of the governing body of the European Union. One could also have gathered that the disclaimer was to signal a certain artistic and curatorial autonomy, retained by the exhibition’s creators, over and above the assignments commanded by the project’s official commitments. In relation to the issues dealt with, and goals strived towards, in TRACES and its Creative Co-Productions of which the one whose course is the subject of the present chapter was but one, views may very well be crucial. However, what if no discernible views, no “messages,” are expressed? What if the public is not presented with answers, but rather with questions? What if instead of finding a positive, substantial core, one is faced with (a) nothing? Unlike most other commentators, who focused primarily, or even exclusively, on the eye-catching features of the “Casting of Death” exhibition, namely death masks, or the “eternal” questions of our finitude purportedly raised by the masks themselves, Živa Brglez (2018), an art critic at the Ljubljana-based Radio Študent, noted in her review of the exhibition, that at the gallery the visitor was addressed with a handful of questions. For the visitor, in addition to being a call for answers, these questions simultaneously acted as a peculiar, open

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and a highly unobtrusive dramaturgical narrative. What is a death mask? What is its purpose? Is it a thing of the past or part of a living, yet overlooked practice in sculpture? Who are the people whose faces were cast? How many death masks are kept in public collections across Slovenia? Domestic Research Society did not answer, merely posed questions. Regarding their engagement, we can think only the following: to dig out the phenomenon of death masks from the depots, popularize the idea, suggest a direction of thinking and outline a possible interpretive framework, and hope that because of this in someone’s mind a new, fresh insight will emerge.

The questions posed by the Domestic Research Society (DRS), and their collaborators in the Creative Co-Production (CCP), both to themselves and to the public not only at the exhibition but throughout the research, were—as Brglez correctly observed— posed in order to get Slovene museums, galleries, libraries, and other public cultural institutions to survey their collections and depots to see if any death masks are to be found and, ideally, to reflect on their past and present policies of collecting, archiving, and exhibiting masks. At first glance, the practice of merely posing questions, never answering, as Brglez put it somewhat unduly, appears rather simple, cursory even. On closer inspection, however, this practice of posing questions, never answering them proves to be a more nuanced one, providing plenty of answers, which are almost instantaneously turned into questions. Now, no matter how these questions are grounded and what their presuppositions are, they hardly constitute an identifiable, positive message. In fact, Brglez’s main critique of the exhibition was that it lacked any kind of concretization. In order to see that this absence of an identifiable message, this lack of concretization was “necessary,” we will need to follow DRS through an epistemological “double-twist.” On the one hand, to take DRS’s postulate that the exhibition is part and parcel of their research, not (just) its outcome, seriously, we must, in order to properly understand “Casting of Death,” both as a creative co-production and as an exhibition (insofar as this distinction has in the present case any meaning), return to 2011, when the research started. On the other hand, to do justice to another of DRS’s postulates, which states that the exhibition is an open platform, we will entertain the notion, that even though “empirically” the exhibition is over, that, currently, there are no death masks to be found in the Match Gallery (Figure 8.1), it nonetheless persists in its consequences and effects (present text included, of course). In other words, the research continues. Furthermore, the framework of the TRACES project, with its epistemological, methodological, and indeed political and moral push, within which DRS conducted their work and which became a “part,” even if only a missing one, of the research in its different permutations, needs to be taken into account. If this framework was (ideally, at least) to function as the big Other, providing for meaning, consistency, and legitimacy, the Creative Co-Production was a thoroughly dispersed and improvisatory endeavor.1 On the one hand, the CCP, as a multidisciplinary and heterogeneous group of people, provided for diverging views of the subject matter, while, paradoxically, necessitating that collaborators “tone down” their respective professional specialties for work to proceed, as Alenka Pirman (2018) noticed. On the other hand, co-production remained

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Figure 8.1 The Match Gallery with posters for the “Casting of Death” exhibition. Photo: DRS.

extemporaneous due to the several, passing “sub-projects,” the employment affiliations demanding that collaborators mind interests of different parties, the occasional discord between one’s “intimate” and “official” views of the project, in which he or she was participating.

The pre-history of DRS’s engagement with death masks The Domestic Research Society’s engagement with death masks began, as was often the case in their previous projects, by happenstance, even if the interest had simmered within the group for years.2 In 2011, as the City Museum of Ljubljana was preparing an exhibition of busts, “Many Heads are Better than One: Portraits from the Sculpture Collection of the City Museum of Ljubljana” (to be held in 2012), Katarina Toman Kracina, a conservator at the museum and a frequent collaborator of DRS, pointed out that there were several death masks to be found in the depots of the museum which were going to be left out of the said exhibition. The curators deemed the masks too distinct from the busts. Intrigued with the situation, DRS proposed to the City Museum that they set up a complementary exhibition, focusing solely on the masks. Their informal proposal, however, was rejected. Nonetheless, the museum backed their application for a tender in the field of fine arts of the

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Ljubljana Municipality, which was, likewise, rejected. In its explanation, the tender commission stated that the proposed project had little to do with fine arts and described it as ethnographic in character. In the following years, again through Katarina Toman Kracina, DRS learned that in the process of renewal of two memorial collections—one of the architect Jože Plečnik (1872–1957), the other of the writer Ivan Cankar (1876–1918)—consideration had been given to removing their death masks from the exhibitions.3 From all this, DRS’s members gathered that museums, in their eyes of representatives of society at large, are reluctant to exhibit death masks and deduced that today death masks are in some, as yet unknown, way, contentious.4 Since its inception, DRS has become somewhat specialized in researching, and working with, everyday objects while collaborating with invited experts from relevant fields and anyone else interested in the topics researched. However, despite often pushing objects into the forefront, their focus lies in experimenting with communication channels afforded by or appropriated for art, while recognizing that social effects are inevitable, even if they are not the primary goal. Since the effects cannot be determined in advance, it makes little sense to set explicit objectives, at least as far as the social consequences of their art goes. Recognizing that objects are in people’s perceptions often closely connected with narrations and social situations, DRS’s experimentation, frequently constituted from inventive and unusual juxtapositions of objects, aims to “massage the neuralgic points,” as Jani Pirnat likes to put it. That is to say, to provoke reactions from emerging social situations, which feed back into ongoing work. For this reason, the research never ends. There is never a final product, with which the research would end. Through the research, many other possibilities and concepts, likewise worthy of attention, are formed . . . The community, which forms through the research, has a steady momentum and its [members] mutually inform [each other] about new findings. Pirnat 2013

It was apropos of the 2006–7 project, “Hunting the Stag” (Jelenometrija), that DRS first delineated crucial methodological steps of their way of working. Same basic steps were taken in various subsequent projects, including the one under consideration (Domestic Research Society, chapter in the present volume). While they had, of course, been aware of death masks before their research, it was the “triggers” of not being permitted to exhibit and of learning of the withdrawal of masks from permanent public exhibitions that prompted DRS to consider the masks, and the apparent unease connected with them, more closely. In 2015, two opportunities to investigate death masks arose. One was to participate in TRACES, the other to collaborate in the Pixxelpoint International Festival of Contemporary Art Practices (see Štromajer 2015). The decision to take part in an art festival, where the artists were asked to suggest an item and which was then provided and exhibited by the festivals’ curators, was an easy one and, as Alenka Pirman recalls, because of the near coincidence of the two invitations

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the choice [to present a] death mask was completely “natural.” Since Pixxelpoint’s rules were quite rigid, we were very interested in how they [Pixxelpoint’s curators] would react, how would they go about their search and borrowing, how it would all be integrated, etc. The idea was to take advantage of the unusual context of the intermedia festival, [to see it] as a test—how does this phenomenon from the nineteenth century function in what is for it a completely “unnatural” environment? Pirman 2017

Interestingly enough, when a death mask was actually exhibited at the Pixxelpoint festival (Figure 8.2) it was a death mask of the poet Simon Gregorčič (1844–1906), born in the village of Vrsno, relatively close to Nova Gorica, where the festival took place—no one had a problem with that. Even though the curators initially proposed two other masks for the exhibition, they nonetheless treated the Gregorčič mask as just another object to be displayed and, reportedly, most visitors were, in fact, enthused, since the death mask represented a person they deemed important, while children found the mask to be “cool.” Perhaps the sole person somewhat uneasy with the layout was Damijan Kracina, who was unpleasantly surprised that the mask was placed on the floor. If exhibiting a death mask at Pixxelpoint was a rather offhand test, TRACES, then, was to be a sustained, carefully thought-out research. Such a project would, once engaged, demand, if they were to follow methodological steps described by DRS

Figure 8.2 Death mask of Simon Gregorčič (1844–1906) at Pixxelpoint festival. Photo: DRS.

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themselves, a phase of conceptualization, into which all sorts of information, surrounding the artist, would flow and in which they would “constantly search for, and make sense of, the focus of the research” (Pirnat 2013). All the following steps would be made in accordance with their chosen concept.5 During the fieldwork stage, they would look for items, or, to use DRS’s terms “raw results,” and collaborators, all in some way connected with the concept. Furthermore, they would decide on the material, which, in their view, best conformed to the concept chosen, to be, in the next step, again with the aid the concept, transformed into “products,” typically exhibitions. From the point of view of DRS’s methodology, the concept gradually, by way of making these steps, becomes more focused. From without, however, it seems that it is not so much the concept that is sharpened, but that the inconvenient material is discarded, that it is the initial concept that retains precedence over the empirical, “raw results.” Such a method may easily be described as epistemologically fallacious, due to its somewhat capricious and intuitive character, its violence towards the material considered. Nonetheless, it may also be construed as way of fully assuming the rift between the concept and the material, the fact that the concept cannot be reduced to its “material base,” nor can the “material base” be deduced from the concept. The conceptualization used by DRS is not creation ex nihilo, nor is it a metaphysical search for conceptual affordances of objects (cf. Holbraad and Pedersen 2017: 199–241). Apprehended in this way, we can begin to see how DRS’s methodology establishes a space neither for creation of artworks, nor for direct expression of definitive views, but for cabinets of normalities, for, in a word, experiments, made in collaboration with others, which test art and its communicative potentials. However, in TRACES, DRS did not make, at least not initially and not in its entirety, the crucial methodological step of conceptualizing. Rather, it was made already in advance, prescribed by the notional framework of the project. The central idea(l)s of TRACES were outlined (but not fully developed) by others. Before joining TRACES, members of DRS perceived singular decisions made by a museum as indicating some sort of problem with death masks. When invited to participate in a venture where they could, on the one hand, address institutional restraints and mechanisms—or, in other words, politics—of presenting and representing contentious cultural heritage and, on the other hand, look into, and work with, objects of these disinclinations, DRS, quite naturally, remembered the 2011–12 events. By joining the project, they, of course, also accepted its notional framework and agreed to go, together with collaborating experts, “beyond” (art) intervention, to form a new way of working. How, then, did the research proceed? What kind of problems did the group, once assembled, face when dealing with death masks? To begin to answer these questions we must once again return to the beginning, to the “trigger” of finding a set of masks in the depot of the Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana (MGML).

From contentiousness to cultural sainthood When Katarina Toman Kracina presented the members of DRS with a number of death masks, they could almost instantly recognize some of the faces cast in plaster. The people portrayed were not, despite the incomplete documentation, anonymized,

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deindividualized representatives of the “abnormal,” of the (delinquent, criminal, colonial, racial, etc.) Other. Quite the contrary, they were denominated, highly individualized “Great Men” of the Self, the Nation, and Culture. Restricting oneself to the bourgeois Europe of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, one can identify a number of interconnected reasons for casting death masks. Masks were “concurrently objects of state power, objects of entertainment and objects of science” (Wilson 2002: 51). Moreover, they were objects of remembrance (Knight 2014), of nostalgia and identity construction (Belting 2017: 77–84). However, for masks to gain the importance they did in this period, several critical historical breaks were “necessary.” The Enlightenment, disenchantment with the world, the rise of nationalism and the national state, the shift from the church to the school as the dominant ideological state apparatuses (or, in a word, modernity) brought on the shift, as Jernej Habjan (2016) put it, from culture of saints to saints of culture. Reflecting this shift, death masks became dissociated from the sacred and associated with the secular. Before returning to the notion of cultural sainthood (Dović 2016a, 2016b), which DRS and indeed most of the Creative Co-Production eventually used in conceptualizing death masks, we need to take a look at the masks and the contexts in which they were made. As suggested above, we can identify two provisional types of death masks. On the one hand, there are the masks of those at the margins of society, used principally for scientific purposes; on the other, masks of those at its center, employed predominantly in celebratory and commemorative incentives. These two “strands” of death mask making were nonetheless part of the same “project” and shared the same notional background. (Pseudo)sciences of the day, namely physiognomy, phrenology, and racially oriented physical anthropology all had in common a conviction that a person’s or a people’s “interior” (soul, mind, morality, personality, etc.) was directly correlated with, and recognizable from, the features of the face, contours of the skull, or indeed entire bodies.6 Much the same beliefs underpinned, as Sylvia Mattl-Wurm has noted, the making of masks of “Great Men,” that is to say of poets, painters, sculptors, composers, and other artists, intellectuals, and politicians.7 In a period marked by comparative projects, strengthened also by colonial rule, masks were used in racial science, which not only produced the information about the racially Other, but constructed it in the first place (Jezernik 2009: 58). Inseparable from the construction of the Other, was, and is, of course, its other side, the construction of the Self. Faces and heads of “Great Men” were not exempt from the proceedings of racial science and were used to substantiate the worth of “their” (racial, ethnic, national) groups (see Jezernik 2009). Masks of “Great Men” were to depict the individual genius, discernible already in the faces of people portrayed, and, as objects of remembrance, (re)present this genius through time and space. These masks, usually commissioned by the deceased’s families, colleagues, or state institutions, were to remind the members of the emerging (national) community about the (national) values, recognized in the persons depicted. Thus, on the one hand, a new type of collective imaginary was formed and, on the other hand, through these processes, emerging national elites, as their agents, legitimized themselves. In this, cultural saints, to use the term proposed by the literary historian Marijan Dović and adopted by DRS, were “a powerful weapon,”

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wielded almost exclusively by “individuals with the highest cultural, but also political ambitions” (Dović 2016b: 38).8 For “the saints” to be canonized and for their cults to endure, considerable social and political power, as well as practical engagement are necessary—and death masks were, and perhaps still are, perfectly suited for such a purpose. As mentioned above, among the death masks found in the MGML depot were casts of well-known artists, which is, of course, itself a clear sign of a successful canonization. In any case, it was this kind of death masks, rather than masks of, say, a representative of one “racial type” or another, that sparked DRS’s curiosity. In fact, as the ensuing research showed, apparently only masks of “Great Men” (and very few “Great Women”!) are to be found in museums and other public institutions in Slovenia. For this, several reasons could be valid, but the most important ones seem to be that (what is nowadays) Slovenia was never a colonial power and that institutional development of anthropology was relatively slow.9 When, in the first decades of the twentieth century, Slovene anthropologists, interested in physical characteristics of Slovenes, carried out their research, making casts was considered a less suitable technique, since it is a time-consuming, cumbersome, and manually demanding method. In his report, the anthropologist Božo Škerlj (1904– 61) noted that in 1930 he had acquired suitable instruments for serious anthropometric work, among which we see calipers of different sizes, measuring tapes, specialized compasses, etc., but no plaster or wax (Cerol Paradiž 2015: 63–4).10 Interestingly, though, sometime around 1935 (Križnar 2005: 247) Škerlj had a cast made of his own face and filmed the process of casting. However, in the film it is wrongly narrated that Škerlj was making a death mask, when it is plainly observable that he was very much alive (see Škerlj n.d.). As Škerlj was casting a life mask, DRS, on explicit insistence by Damijan Kracina to keep to their concept, that is to say focus on death masks, decided early on that this lead was not worth pursuing. Whatever the findings that may have been produced, had the co-production nonetheless followed this trace, it is, based on the research carried out, quite safe to say that there are no death or life masks of the Other in Slovene museums (and if there are any, they are thoroughly misplaced). There are, however, plenty of death masks of the Self.11 If the prevalent contemporary attitude is, upon viewing the masks of the Other, to be fascinated by the macabre cruelty of the penal system of the nineteenth century, to be astonished by the inhumane character of scientific procedures, and to feel guilty for the horrors of colonialism, it is easy to see why and how such items might be considered contentious, especially if there is an agent, actively challenging the politics and poetics of their (re)presentation. It is less clear, however, in what precisely the contentiousness of the masks of the Self consists of. Is it in the fact that manipulation of a corpse is necessary for their production? Is it in the physical contact with the corpse and probability of “transmitting” bodily remains (hair, skin, etc.)? Are masks contentious due to their abstract association with “death as such,” due to being unpleasant remainders of our finitude? Does contentiousness originate from the awareness that the individuals portrayed as a rule did not consent to being cast and subsequently canonized? Or are only a certain few masks contentious due to the specific historical roles of the

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individuals portrayed? Is it the mere fact that many masks are amassed in museum depots and somewhat forgotten, rather than exhibited and celebrated publicly? Is it in their almost completely forgotten link to physiognomy? Most of these rather essentialist questions were raised very early on in the research process, but no matter the answers proposed, the questions lingered on as the answers “felt” unsatisfactory. For this, two reasons seem to have been crucial. On the one hand, whenever we began to discuss potential contentiousness, we were faced with the question of this notion’s relation to similar, competing, and already established terms— with, for instance, the notions of contested, undesirable, difficult, dissonant, negative, undesirable heritage—all of which speak volumes about the analyst’s expectations (Samuels 2015: 111).12 On the other hand, no matter how we may have thought about contentiousness, we could not escape the growing (and sobering) realization of the absence of any kind of protest against death masks. By spring 2017, it was even hard to maintain the claim that masks are forgotten since the co-production’s efforts already generated some interest among museum workers and followers of DRS’s work, while media reports were also published. Moreover, MGML, the very institution whose practices were posited as the paradigmatic example disclosing a social problem with death masks, supported the research and, in its constituent institution, the Match Gallery, hosted the “Casting of Death” exhibition.13 For the big Other of TRACES, this lack of contentiousness proved to be somewhat problematic. The Creative Co-Production was thus advised to critically highlight the connection of masks—including those termed here “masks of the Self ”—to pseudoscientific disciplines, importantly included in colonial endeavors, as if this was—much like formation of a respectable collection of death masks was in the past—the only way to establish oneself as a proper progressive, European subject. These discussions were, due to their “artificial” character, a textbook case of the construction of “contentious” cultural heritage and, as such, provided an opportunity to reflect upon it, making it blatantly obvious that the past is being used to address the present. Here, then, Dović’s observation about canonization proved crucial. It provided for the realization that regardless of the approach taken—whether ironic, deconstructive, critical, affirmative, etc.—the CCP’s efforts would inevitably contribute to the ongoing canonization, was, in a way, liberating and revealing of the political character of the endeavor.

Masking a nothing The abovementioned visit to the depot of MGML was to become something of a blueprint for the CCP’s “field trips”: sojourns to different institutions mostly in Ljubljana, but elsewhere in Slovenia as well, to examine the masks kept there and talk with “their” curators (Figure 8.3). While the visits to depots did prove to be opportunities to gather “raw results,” they nonetheless did not constitute the only, or perhaps even the most important part of the research. As indicated above, for DRS, different “external” communicative occasions, such as press conferences, media reports, blogs, and social media, the launching of an online database about death

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Figure 8.3 CCP3’s research in the depot of the City Museum of Ljubljana. Photo: DRS.

masks in Slovene public collections (established in collaboration with the Institute of Contemporary History), and indeed the exhibition, all presented opportunities to probe the public for new material and reactions of any kind. As such, these occasions presented in their eyes an integral part of the research and substance of their tests of art’s communicative potential. However, we should not forget about the “internal” communicative occasions, principally meetings in person or online, since it was there that the central decisions concerning the very substance of the research were made (Figure  8.4). Far from always seeing eye to eye, meetings were the very process of negotiating and (re)constructing the meaning of death masks. By spring 2017, three distinct and mutually contradictory but unacknowledged approaches were forming within the CCP, in relation to the elementary stance of the then still upcoming exhibition. Should we approach the masks critically? Should we affirm, reinvigorate even their function as relics in an ongoing canonization of Slovene cultural saints? Should we simply transform the “raw results” into “products” as neutrally as possible? In other words, primarily the issue was not how to present and/or represent the masks and perhaps some other assorted items, but what could, or should, be the exhibition’s “message” and to whom. By that time, not only had the Co-Production, following the initial conceptualization as closely as possible, amassed different material, but also certain members of the CCP were enthusiastic to contribute, by pursuing their own particular interests, to the exhibition. So much so that an additional exhibition was for a time considered. The arising, yet unacknowledged and unarticulated tensions were

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Figure 8.4 Damijan Kracina, Alenka Pirman, Jani Pirnat, and Janez Polajnar discussing possible layouts for the exhibition. Photo: Blaž Bajič.

alleviated by the prospect of designing two exhibitions. The first would focus solely on the death masks; the second would build upon a set of assorted personal items of Slovene poets and writers, or, “bizarrities,” as Marijan Rupert, who collected them, called them.14 Nonetheless, in these circumstances, members of the CCP were able to better sense (and imagine) the expectations others had of them. Most significantly, DRS felt that some non-artist members of the Co-Production expect them to produce an artwork—an object of some sort—that would represent, interpret, and give meaning to, the masks. As highlighted above, such a mode of working is, from the very beginning of their collaboration, foreign to DRS. Moreover, TRACES’ push towards providing a “service” as Alenka Pirman liked to put it (see also Domestic Research Society, chapter in the present volume), based on an assumption of an ongoing cultural and moral crisis in Europe and in line with the politico-ideological demands of European institutions, was experienced as a limitation to the research and the emerging artistic mediation, which was itself seen as groundlessly attributed to artists’ supposed “special ability.” To remedy this situation, DRS made a number of methodological adjustments: firstly, to try to ignore the perceived expectations concerning their role and their work, secondly, to reduce and delineate the materials gathered, and thirdly, to defer their own positive statements by relocating engagements with the “materials” to members of the Co-Production and the individuals and institutions recognized in the previous months

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as having made a relevant contribution to the social lives of death masks. Perhaps most importantly, the discussion on the issue of contentiousness of the death masks, which for a time fueled much of the group’s activities, was, as already mentioned, seen as increasingly irrelevant to the exhibition-making process and was “outsourced.” The proposal from DRS was for a tripartite exhibition, with each part dedicated to its own sub-theme and its own set of questions, but also with its own “enunciator.” While not explicating this, the parts proposed—Resuscitation, Collecting, and Casting— were set in such a way as to complement and contrast with one another. As one of the early suppositions of the research was that casting of death masks was very much a thing of the past, DRS estimated that it was necessary to present not only the nitty-gritty of the practice, but also to demonstrate that it is still carried out today. To this end, they invited the sculptor and conservator Viktor Gojkovič, who has been casting death masks since 1963, to collaborate in the exhibition. Since Gojkovič is in his own right a prominent artist and provided a considerable portion of the exhibits, the exhibition was credited to him, as well as, of course, DRS. In the Casting part of the exhibition, an interview with Gojkovič was featured, wherein he described his experiences of making casts and shared his views on the function of the mask, lauding them for being rich in information about the individuals depicted, making them an important aid in sculpting busts. More importantly, part of Gojkovič’s atelier was translocated to the gallery, thus showing numerous death masks, including some depicting well-known public figures. As a “counter-weight,” to be featured in Resuscitation, DRS invited the Ljubljana branch of the Slovene Red Cross to present the equipment used to practice resuscitation procedures (Figure 8.5). Notable in the set of medical training devices, was the training mannequin, the so-called Resusci Anne. In 1960, Asmund Laerdal of the eponymous Norwegian provider of training and educational products for medical care modeled Resusci Anne’s face on that of the putative death mask of the L’Inconnue de la Seine. In the early twentieth century, the replica mask of the L’Inconnue was a popular keepsake with the European bourgeoisie, particularly among artists; the masks, and “their girl,” conformed nicely to the concurrent male fantasy of saving an unfortunate, helpless woman both from others and from herself, as evident in numerous artistic appropriations of the L’Inconnue’s story (Jenko 2017). Overlooking the Resuscitation room, where Red Cross volunteers fortnightly conducted first-aid courses, was one of the replicas of the L’Inconnue mask, once owned by the architect Jože Plečnik. In the middle of the gallery, serving as an entry point and connecting the exhibition’s other two parts by way of enlarged hand-drawn comics, made by Katarina Toman Kracina, one representing the steps of the resuscitation process, the other the steps of the casting process, was the part entitled Collecting. There, the basic findings of the past year and a half were presented in the form of charts, grouping the masks according to the professions of the people depicted, highlighting the individuals whose casts were encountered most often, and arranging the masks according to the year of their making. The latter chart split the masks into three groups, each group corresponding to the period of the particular state formations. To this, historian Janez Polajnar’s description (Domestic Research Society 2018: 7) of some of the characteristics of the eras and of how these are reflected in the structure the groups was added.

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Figure 8.5 A public tour of the exhibition with the Resusci Anne manikin. Photo: DRS.

From message to massage How, finally, are we to understand this relatively straightforwardly arranged exhibition as a research method and an open platform? In the first approach, simply as a medium— purportedly an artistic one—within which certain findings were presented and which prompted various individuals or institutions to react (to provide hence unknown details, share their own experiences, etc.). By the same token, it probed the public for more “charged” responses. However, as Marion Hamm (2017) has noted, “the reviews on the exhibition were all positive, which raises the question whether something can be contentious if there is no angry debate in public”—and, perhaps, at the same time, answers it.15 There is, still, another way of understanding “Casting of Death” in its social aspects, beyond the questions of contentiousness, and of nation and identity construction. If DRS “subtracted” the content from their engagement, if the individual parts of the exhibition had their own respective “enunciators,” and if the research/ exhibition was a way of addressing and constituting relations with others—with(in) the national community, Us and Them, the lineage of artists, the Creative CoProduction, the different institutions, the public, the project etc.—then there was effectively no boundary between DRS’s art-research and its “outside.” Yet, only a part of this socio-symbolic network of relations was (un)veiled in the gallery—left there, so to

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speak, to be overlooked. Thus, an expectational allusion of a distinction was retained. Following Badiou (2007: 55–7), we could say that such an allusion offers the support for minimal, but absolute difference, the difference between message and massage. In other words, to enact the minimal difference, it was not a positive statement subjugated to definitive knowledge of subject matter of their research that was needed, but rather a display that the subject matter is itself non-whole, marked by a lack within it. How better to do this than to remain silent, when others expect you to speak, to offer a massage, when a message is demanded, to produce an emancipatory nothing, rather than a binding something?

Notes 1

2

3

4

5

6

The Domestic Research Society (DRS) consists of the artist and art pedagogue Damijan Kracina, artist and heritage researcher Alenka Pirman, and artist and art historian Jani Pirnat. Individually, they have been active in the field of contemporary conceptual art since 1990 and have been engaging with various media, ranging from painting and sculpture to experimental curatorial projects and pioneering open-access collaborative projects on the internet. As DRS, established in 2004, however, they have functioned as an investigative artistic and curatorial collective. For the list of heritage providers and scholars who, together with DRS, constituted the co-production or have collaborated in the research informally and temporarily see Domestic Research Society, Chapter 9 of the present volume. The first mask DRS worked with was a life mask of the “folk artist” Nani Poljanec, who had his face cast pre-emptively, in case he was to die unexpectedly, before the year 2069, when in the ensuing confusion there would be no time to make a proper death mask. The mask made in Poljanec’s project, “2069,” was exhibited in DRS’s joint project with Poljanec, “The Cabinet” (2006). It should be noted that, together with several other galleries, City Museum of Ljubljana, Plečnik House, and Ivan Cankar Memorial Room all form a single institution, namely the Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana (MGML). Moreover, it should also be noted that the Match Gallery, likewise, belongs to MGML. Later DRS learned about the removal of the death mask of the poet Oton Župančič (1878–1949) from the memorial room in the poet’s hometown of Vinica. According to DRS, the removal, like the eventual omission of Plečnik’s mask, was the result of an individual curator’s decision. Interestingly enough, in Vinica the local community expressed a desire, at least for a time, for the mask to be reinstalled. Following the efforts of French epistemology, influential in Slovenia since the 1970s, the word “concept” has come to mean, in the context of social sciences and the humanities, simply put, a scientific notion, designed to distinguish, identify, abstract, summarize, and transmit findings. In the vernacular Slovene language, however, a “concept” is used to denote a “notion,” an “idea,” a “draft,” an “outline,” a “plan,” etc. These two options are mutually exclusive (Vogrinc 2015: 65–7), but DRS’s use of the word “covers” both options and can thus be understood only in the second sense. For these reasons, casts of both the dead and the living, photographs, sketches, measurements, and other materials pertaining to bodily characteristics were made, collected, and studied, wherein criminals and colonized peoples, so-called racial types, within and without Europe, were among the prime targets (see e.g. Schneider,

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9

10

11

12 13

14

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Chapter 2 of the present volume; Feldman 2006; Zimmerman 2015; Sysling 2016: 73–99). I rely here on the summary of Sylvia Mattl-Wurm’s paper (2002) provided in Polajnar (2017). Additionally, I thank Alenka Pirman for translating some key passages. The notion of “cultural saints” is used to describe “artists and intellectuals who, as embodiments of certain social ideals, became figures of cultural memory of their national (or regional) cultures, and, in doing so, took on the roles traditionally reserved for rulers and saints” (Dović 2016b: 11). As Dović’s terminology suggests, his “methodological aid for systematic research of commemoration and posthumous worship of artists and intellectuals” (ibid.: 23) can be adequately understood and used if we theorize nationalism as a secular religion (Dović 2016a: 7; see e.g., Gellner 2006). Whether any masks were cast in the area of Slovenia by researchers from other countries remains an unanswered question, as does the question of where they ended up if so. If casts were indeed made for research purposes, one can only guess whether they were used to represent the (Slavic) Other. Writing about the anthropologist Niko Zupanič (1876–1961), Božidar Jezernik (2009: 58–9) noted that Zupanič’s scientific racism was a polemic with German scientific racism, which did not lead him to “desire colonial expansion, but emancipation of colonized Slavic peoples” (Jezernik 2009: 59). Implying an interesting parallel, one can—because of the lack of masks of Germanspeaking individuals and incomplete documentation on masks in general in Slovene public collections—only speculate if, and how, “German” death masks of the Self were used in national-political struggles of the early twentieth century in Slovenia (see Polajnar 2017). Škerlj made most of his anthropometric measurements among schoolchildren, sportspeople, and female prostitutes. In his Zur Anthropologie der Prostituirten, Škerlj offered detailed drawings and photographs depicting facial and bodily features of “typical prostitutes” as opposed to “normal women,” represented by gymnasts. Such a juxtaposition, of course, served to construct and discipline the Other and the Self. The sum total of all death masks, copies included, found is 106, depicting sixty-four different individuals. Throughout the inquiry, 127 institutions throughout Slovenia were contacted, but only thirty-two of the 118 that responded actually hold death masks. Most are exhibited in, or kept in the depots of, museums, galleries, and memorial rooms (Kocjančič 2018). The majority of the heritage providers were surprised by creative co-productions requests; one, however, contended the very idea of the contentiousness of death masks. See Pirman’s paper (2016) for a discussion on this point. Granted, in the meantime, Jani Pirnat became the curator of the aforementioned gallery and the prestige and the financial funds brought in by a Horizons 2020 project is by no means to be taken out of the equation. Nevertheless, in June 2018, independently, of course, from TRACES, an exhibition dedicated to the centennial of Ivan Cankar’s death opened in MGML. There, one could see, as Janez Polajnar put it, Cankar’s death mask “encased in a niche, [where it] functions as a central object in a shrine” (Polajnar 2018). The additional exhibition was eventually called off due to scheduling issues. As for the possible conflict between representatives of different approaches that may have arisen apropos this exhibition, the artists actually welcomed it, as they had estimated that it might prove productive. Nevertheless, a specific instance of contention, addressed directly to Viktor Gojkovič, did occur (DRS learned of it only several months after the “Casting of Death”

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Art, Anthropology, and Contested Heritage exhibition). A relative of one of the individuals, whose cast was displayed, questioned who is entitled to commission, store, and exhibit death masks. According to DRS, the contention also had a political dimension, due to sustained efforts of right-wing parties to appropriate the notable person in question.

References Badiou, Alain (2007). The Century. Cambridge and Malden, MA : Polity. Belting, Hans (2017). Face and Mask: A Double History. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Brglez, Živa (2018). Ovekovečenje posameznosti, Radio Študent, January 3. Available at: https://radiostudent.si/kultura/fine-umetnosti/ovekovečenje-posameznosti (accessed May 28, 2018). Cerol Paradiž, Ana (2015). Evgenika na Slovenskem. Ljubljana: Sophia. Domestic Research Society (ed.) (2018). Casting of Death: Domestic Research Society in collaboration with Viktor Gojkovič. Match Gallery, Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana November 11—December 24, 2017. Exhibition catalog. Ljubljana: Domestic Research Society. Available at: http://www.traces.polimi.it/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/ TR_CCP3-Casting-of-Death-exhibition-catalogue-2017-18.pdf (accessed March 22, 2019). Dović, Marijan (2016a). “O kulturnih svetnikih in kanonizaciji: uvod,” in Marijan Dović (ed.), Kulturni svetniki in kanonizacija. Ljubljana: Založba ZRC , pp. 7–20. Dović, Marijan (2016b). “Kanonizacija kulturnih svetnikov: analitični model,” in Marijan Dović (ed.), Kulturni svetniki in kanonizacija. Ljubljana: Založba ZRC , pp. 23–44. Feldman, Jeffery David (2006). “Contact Points: Museums and the Lost Body Problem,” in Elisabeth Edwards, Chis Gosden, and Ruth B. Philips (eds.), Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture. Oxford and New York: Berg, pp. 245–67. Gellner, Ernest (2006). Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Habjan, Jernej (2016). “Od kulture svetnikov do svetnikov culture: svetnik in literat med življenjem in delom,” in Marijan Dović (ed.), Kulturni svetniki in kanonizacija. Ljubljana: Založba ZRC , pp. 45–56. Hamm, Marion (2017). “The Casting of Death exhibition, a Quick Impression,” Domestic Research Society (Društvo za domače raziskave). Available at: http://ddr.si/en/ the-casting-of-death-exhibition-a-quick-impression/ (accessed May 28, 2018). Holbraad, Martin and Axel Mort Pedersen (2017). The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jenko, Marko (2017). “True Lies,” Domestic Research Society (Društvo za domače raziskave). Available at: http://ddr.si/en/true-lies/ (accessed May 28, 2018). Jezernik, Božidar (2009). “Antropolog, ki je ljudem meril glave,” in Rajko Muršič and Mihaela Hudelja (eds.), Niko Zupanič, njegovo delo, čas in proctor: Spominski zbornik ob 130. obletnici rojstva dr. Nika Zupaniča. Ljubljana: Znanstvena založba Filozofske fakultete, pp. 23–73. Knight, Emily (2014). “Casting presence: the death mask of Sir Thomas Lawrence as a site of remembrance,” Journal of the LUCAS Graduate Conference, 2: 29–42. Kocjančič, Maruša (2018). “Ob zaključku poizvedovanja o posmrtnih maskah v javnih zbirkah,” Domestic Research Society (Društvo za domače raziskave). Available at: http://ddr.si/sl/ob-zakljucku-poizvedovanja-o-posmrtnih-maskah-v-javnih-zbirkah/ (accessed May 29, 2018).

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Križnar, Naško (2005). “Filmi Boža Škerlja,” Traditiones 34(2): 241–54. Mattl-Wurm, Sylvia (2002). “Wahrhaftige Gesichter? Die Totenmaskensammlung des Historischen Museums der Stadt Wien,” in Jan Gerchow (ed.), Ausstellungskatalog Ebenbilder: Kopien von Körper-Modellen des Menschen. Essen: Ruhrlandmuseum, pp. 139–46. Pirman, Alenka (2016). “Vzpostavljanje sporne dediščine,” unpublished manuscript. Ljubljana: Oddelek za etnologijo in kulturno antropologijo. Pirman, Alenka (2017). Personal communication, November 17. Pirman, Alenka (2018). “Artistic Upgrade,” Domestic Research Society (Društvo za domače raziskave). Available at: http://ddr.si/en/artistic-upgrade/ (accessed May 29, 2018). Pirnat, Jani (2013) “Principi, koncepti, metodologije in druge lepe besede o Trdih dejstvih,” Hard Facts [blog], January 22. Available at: https://hardfactsblog.wordpress. com/2013/01/22/metodologija-vaj-iz-trdih-dejstev/ (accessed May 28, 2018). Polajnar, Janez (2017). “Kje so Nemci?” Domestic Research Society (Društvo za domače raziskave). Available at: http://ddr.si/sl/kje-so-nemci/ (accessed May 28, 2018). Polajnar, Janez (2018). Personal communication, 30 October. Samuels, Joshua (2015). “Difficult heritage: coming ‘to terms’ with Sicily’s Fascist past.” in Kathryn Lafrenz Samuels and Trinidad Rico (eds.), Heritage Keywords: Rhetoric and Redescription in Cultural Heritage. Boulder, CO : University Press of Colorado, pp. 111–28. Sysling, Fenneke (2016). Racial Science and Human Diversity in Colonial Indonesia. Singapore: NUS Press. Škerlj, Božo (n.d.). Posmrtna maska. Ljubljana: Slovenska Kinoteka. Štromajer, Igor (ed.) (2015). Pixxelpoint—16th International Media Art Festival. Nova Gorica: Kulturni dom Nova Gorica. Vogrinc, Jože (2015). Pojmovne prikazni: Rešeto humanistike. Ljubljana: Studia humanitatis. Wilson, Dean (2002). “Explaining the ‘criminal’: Ned Kelly’s death mask,” The La Troube Journal, 69: 51–8. Zimmerman, Andrew (2015). “Plaster casters: The Schlagintweit Brothers and the embodiment of colonial rule.” Available at: https://www.academia.edu/11923849/ Plaster_Casters_The_Schlagintweit_Brothers_and_the_Embodiment_of_Colonial_ Rule (accessed May 28, 2018).

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Casting of Death Domestic Research Society “The Casting of Death” is a research project on the phenomenon of death masks in Slovenian public collections (libraries, archives, museums, scientific institutes, memorial rooms). The Domestic Research Society’s (DRS) interest in the topic dates back to 2011 but the actual research took off within the TRACES project, funded by Horizon 2020 (2016–19), and was framed as an artistic contribution to the “transmission of contentious cultural heritage” and to “reflexive Europeanisation.” The DRS’s core research question was: has the role of a fine artist (the one who took the casts and was cast himself when he died) changed or can the same role still be traced in the activities of a contemporary visual artist? Casting of death masks is one of the most ancient portrait techniques in the history of sculpture. In the industrial age, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it went hand in hand with the secularization and affirmation of the bourgeois society, in which the establishment of a public museum also played a crucial role. The same technique, however, was historically used for the reproduction of political and social elites (casts of distinguished deceased men such as artists, scientists, politicians, industrialists . . .) as well as for the affirmation of their superiority (casts of the guillotined traitors of the French Revolution (Jenko 2017) or casts of types of men such as criminals or Slavs (Bajič 2018)). The death masks in Slovenian public collections belong to the first group only and date from 1770 to 1998, and half of them depict artists (painters, sculptors, writers, poets, architects, actors, composers, and one opera singer). Cultural figures that have been objects of veneration (usually posthumously) have undergone a process of canonization and became representatives of their respective national culture as cultural saints (Dović 2016). The following contribution, however, focuses on the Creative Co-Production’s research protocols and methods, presented in a format of two charts with accompanying glossaries. The core article further elaborates on the promise of an “artistic upgrade” of a research and questions the artist’s position.

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Creative Co-Production pizza chart with a “Casting of Death” glossary Protagonists creative co-production – model of a collaborative art-based practice involving artists, researchers, heritage providers and agencies, and their stakeholders, as an innovative way not only to increase knowledge, but to conduct research itself (cf. European Commission 2015: 12) conditions of creative co-production – relations between stakeholders of a creative co-production regarding a project’s funding, management, and communication; this innovation of research is rooted in renegotiated conditions that do not reproduce this established order; out of eleven partners in the TRACES consortium, the Creative Co-Production was the only one with an artistic and curatorial collective (cf. artist →) as a contractual partner that managed the funds itself and acted as initiator of local research (anomalous condition) as opposed to being commissioned (prevalent condition) by art or heritage institutions (cf. self-authorization →) artist – Domestic Research Society (DRS), artistic and curatorial collective based in Ljubljana, Slovenia, active in the field of contemporary art since 2004; its founding

Figure 9.1 Creative Co-Production pizza chart, 2017–18. Photo: DRS.

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members are Damijan Kracina, Alenka Pirman, and Jani Pirnat; DRS strives to conduct collaborative and interdisciplinary research, which enables the development of innovative approaches in contemporary art, actually addressing a broader audience heritage providers – Janez Polajnar (historian; Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana, City Museum of Ljubljana), Marijan Rupert (literary historian; National and University Library), and Marko Jenko (art historian; Museum of Modern Art); the curators (gatekeepers), in charge of particular collections, were actively involved in the “Casting of Death” research and provided access to collections, practical and theoretical knowledge, as well as scientific and institutional authority on the topic which helped gain access to other institutional collections; together with the DRS members they were crucial in establishing a functional creative co-production; they participated in the discussions, depot visits, workshops, public presentations, open platforms (→), such as writing texts for the “Casting of Death” blog (→), and vouched for the research in general scientists – Blaž Bajič (University of Oslo), Andrej Pančur (Institute of Contemporary History), Maruša Kocjančič (documentalist, DRS and SIstory); as consultants Marijan Dović (Institute of Slovenian Literature and Literary Studies, Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts), anthropologists Miha Kozorog and Tatiana Bajuk Senčar (Dept. of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Ljubljana; Institute of Slovenian Ethnology), and linguist and lexicographer Tadeja Rozman

Production open platforms – conventional presentation formats (exhibition, press conference, public talk, online database, media coverage . . .), designed as events for a public dialog and organized already during a research as its constitutive parts; a series of open platforms on different scales involves specific or larger audiences, seeks feedback, and serves as a public trial of the research’s provisional outcomes (cf. sightings →, transformation →) “Casting of Death” press conference – public press conference for media and heritage professionals, customized by the DRS to inform different audiences about the frame of the research, to present open questions and to provoke response by spurring compulsion (→) on the researched topic (cf. self-authorization →, products →) “Casting of Death” online database – the first national digital collection of death masks, collected systematically from Slovenian heritage institutions, was conceived by DRS and the Institute of Contemporary History (ICH) in collaboration with a freelance documentalist at the very beginning of the research and has been openly accessible since; the research’s digital infrastructure has been maintained by the ICH within the Research Infrastructure of Slovenian Historiography program, providing the collection’s sustainability (cf. products →): http://odlivanjesmrti.si/ “Casting of Death” blog – public online publishing platform for the “Casting of Death” Creative Co-Production’s members; regular writing, collecting, and

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presenting preliminary results and various aspects, documents, and theories on death masks, providing a base for printed publications (cf. products →) “Casting of Death” research exhibition – exhibition as an open platform (→), a hybrid of museological and artistic presentation of the selected provisional results of the research in order to obtain the visitors’ contributions and feedback on the phenomenon of the casting of death masks in Slovenia (cf. products →)

Audiences heritage industry audience – curators, pedagogues, restorators, conservators, museology specialists, archivists, documentalists . . . working with or in the heritage institutions and who were directly or indirectly involved or interested in the topic of death masks academic audience – academic researchers, anthropologists, historians, art historians, literary historians and comparatists, art professors, theoreticians that research the national identity phenomena contemporary art audience – contemporary artists, curators, gallerists, art enthusiasts, exhibition visitors, interested in DRS’s projects and in contemporary galleries’ programs; from the DRS perspective this segment represents the “ivory tower” general audience – a wide range of people, informed through open platforms (exhibition, press conference, public talks, online database, media coverage), and invited to participate and contribute information to DRS’s research on death masks; when faced with the general public, the researchers’ conceptualization (→) and position (cf. self-authorization →) are brought out of a comfort zone as their communication potential is trialed

Figure 9.2 Portrait of death masks from Slovenian public collections, sorted by profession of the depicted persons, 2017–8. Photo: DRS.

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Artistic upgrade Alenka Pirman, Domestic Research Society What is the position of the artist, engaged in a collaborative, multidisciplinary creative process? Our beliefs, expectations, and self-deceptions, linked to this profession, were woven into the TRACES research project so skillfully that it obtained funding from the European Commission’s budget for science. We promised to “identify new directions for cultural institutions and museums to effectively transmit contentious cultural heritage and contribute to evolving European identities” (TRACES 2016) What are the artist’s unique mediating capabilities and expertise that enable him or her to contribute to such a goal? Artistic upgrade . . . Let’s stick to this phrase although it appears in several iterations. The Domestic Research Society’s members have been confronted with it many a time. Active in the field of contemporary art since 2004, we have conducted several artistic researches—some of them still ongoing—that have involved different collaborators (citizens, scientists, colleagues, family members) in a variety of ways. We have been reluctant to follow both the scientific and the art systems’ written or unwritten rules. To us, they have appeared all too predictable. On the other hand, we have to admit that since 1990 the Society’s founding members have pursued their individual professional careers as artists, pedagogues, and curators, and have, therefore, mastered or even assisted in strengthening some of these rules. In fact, the need for a parallel working platform grew out of a professional fatigue.

Research process The Domestic Research Society’s driving force is curiosity. Our research has never been goal-oriented. The initial question has led us to the unexpected directions and findings and each project ended up going a different way. Some have not ended up at all. We have, however, paid attention to the research process itself and reflected our methods. The cone chart (developed in 2007 in collaboration with Alexei Monroe) presents the chronological stages of a generic (artistic) research (Figure 9.3 below). Let us quickly walk through these stages only to focus on the final one—the transformation. In the beginning curiosity manifests itself as a series of appearances (unprovoked phenomena of perception). Some of them leave a strong impression and function as triggers that lead to a decision: Let’s research it! A complex process of conceptualization (construction and constant search of focus) follows, during which the appearances turn into sightings (phenomena of provoked perception) and the field expands. While researching, a set of items is produced (nowadays mostly in the format of a computer file). In order to make sense, these need to be transformed into products that enable a communication process. At a glance, the cone chart promotes a savage researcher, wandering in the jungle of phenomena and free to pick up any of the perceived attractions that would indulge his curiosity. Let us leave it at that. Once the decision is taken, however, the researcher succumbs to the commandments and conventions of a particular discipline (techniques,

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tactics, methods) and even more so when it comes to the transformation phase (deliverable products). What happens when the research is conducted by a multidisciplinary team?

Creative co-production In the context of the TRACES project, funded by the Horizon 2020 (EU framework program for research and innovation), the Domestic Research Society coordinated the “Casting of Death” research, set up together with colleagues from three different heritage institutions in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The core working team was comprised of ten people (art historians, artists, anthropologist, historian, literary comparatist). It followed the TRACES assumption that the artist possesses some special skills that can contribute to the “transmission of contentious cultural heritage” in a unique way: the “artists are ascribed an ability to make difficult, awkward or silenced heritage negotiable by using aesthetic methods and techniques” (European Commission 2015: 25). To test this in practice, a new collaborative model was developed by the international consortium—a creative co-production. The artist’s participation should differ from the established and canonized artistic interventions in the tradition of institutional critique, where projects “have often had limited results due to short-term, interventionist and promotion-oriented strategies, although they have successfully located points of conflicting and contradictory meanings within the institutions hosting the interventions projects” (ibid.: 9). The creative co-production thus implies that the “artists . . . become part of research and co-producing team(s), delegate different tasks and eventually produce not only art projects, but also self-sustainable structures and models of future participatory research projects that will reshape the inner structures and concepts of the institutions dealing with contentious cultural heritage” (ibid.: 26; my italics).

Artmaking Let us go back to the cone chart and focus on the transformation process. What do we do with the items (objects, archival material, texts, images, videos, “hybrid records” . . .) collected or produced during the research? The artist is expected to make an artwork that will serve both in situ (during the public stage of the research project) and endure its post-research life in the art museums, art galleries, and art publications. In this context, of course, the notion of artwork must be understood in its broadest sense, including the ephemeral, immaterial, or intangible practices. Already during our first common project, the Domestic Research Society’s members realized that we should not be bothered with the creation of artworks.1 What we have been interested in is conducting collaborative and interdisciplinary research that enables the development of innovative approaches in contemporary art, actually breaking out of its ivory tower and addressing a broader audience. We do strive to create a bridge between the research outcomes and the broader audience, the transformation does take place, yet the goal is not the production of an artwork but a creation of public presentations in open platforms. And the latter have to be invented each and every time. With such an attitude, we had no hard time adopting a multidisciplinary creative co-production model. Again, we did not intend to produce an artwork and yet at one point we were confronted

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with such an expectation by some of the colleagues in the Creative Co-Production team: “That’s it? Oh, but we thought you’d provide an artistic upgrade to the topic.”

Disregard one’s own expertise The TRACES project manifests trust in “potential of artistic practices on popular and professional levels to find the best methods to transmit sensitive cases of cultural heritage. Art is seen as a rich resource to be used when negotiating and developing imaginaries, memories and different narratives of the past” (European Commission 2015: 16). You may finally ask: What, for art’s sake, does the “artistic” stand for then!? I would argue that the artist’s agency has shifted from the production of an artwork (again in the broadest sense of the term) to a service. The artist is no longer commissioned but hired to apply an artistic je ne sais quoi. If a creative co-production is to succeed, each team member may have to, paradoxically, silence his or her disciplinary expertise that qualified him or her to enter into such a model in the first place. In the beginning it was interesting to observe how it even strengthened our disciplinary self-awareness and provoked each one of us to defend his or her discipline. The true value of the creative co-production model may lie in the ways the team members have negotiated their positions and have overcome the defensive attitude. Such a collaborative approach is only suitable for those who can temporarily disregard their alleged skills and doxas.

Embedded artist I have already quoted the TRACES project’s proposal, stating that the artist will “produce not only art projects, but also self-sustainable structures and models of future participatory research projects” (European Commission 2015: 26). The development of applicable knowhow can be understood as a service. When, how, and by whom it may be used in the future becomes a matter of negotiation and of a binding contract, be it formal or informal. Furthermore, the above wording may be understood to suggest that producing an art project is easier than providing a sustainable model, which in the context of TRACES features exactly as an artistic upgrade. The creative co-production model attempts to surpass a superspecialized state of the art in contemporary knowledge production and to embed the artist in a problem (conflict)-solving social and political enterprise. Putting the aesthetic methods and techniques at service, however, reminded me of Michel de Certeau’s (1984: 6–8) warning against becoming an Expert by converting one’s competence into authority. I mentioned that the Domestic Research Society’s members have not bothered with the creation of artworks but I haven’t provided a substantiation. We have not discussed it but my take is that as a collective we opted for such an approach because a production of artworks is, in fact, too contradictory. The transformation process with the ambition to produce an artwork has to follow the rules of a specialized discursive field, which can, as a consequence, result even in a subversion of the initial (good) intention. When engaged in collaborative projects and being responsible for the involved people, the artists may deliberately or intuitively avoid such a path.

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Research cone chart Domestic Research Society The cone chart presents the chronological stages of a generic (artistic) research.

Figure 9.3 Research stages cone chart. Photo: DRS.

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appearances – unprovoked phenomena of perception; they take place when a researcher frequently addresses various topics and issues, but is not yet stimulated to actually start a research (cf. sightings →) triggers – particular appearances (→) that attract a researcher’s attention and curiosity and stimulate her or his decision (→) to start a research decision – starting point of a research, stimulated by triggers (→); it is performed through self-authorization (→) as a researcher and is a first step towards conceptualization (→) conceptualization – construction of and constant search for focus of research according to the formal and informal rules of a particular discipline (industry) and its discursive field (i.e., artistic, scientific, pseudoscientific . . .) fieldwork – collecting of information at different sources; performing a set of allowed or available techniques, tactics, and methods in accordance with the conceptualization (→) process items – materialized information, collected or produced during the fieldwork (→); today they appear mostly in the format of a computer file (images, objects, literature . . .) and serve as intermediate goods in the process of transformation (→) transformation – a process of turning items (→) into products (→); part of knowledge production (known also as transmutation, conversion, translation . . .) products – tangible or intangible public results of a transformation (→) of items (→), enabling a communication process according to the conceptualized intent (cf. open platforms →) sightings – phenomena of directed perception (cf. appearances →) preoccupying the researcher from the point of decision (→) on to detect, collect, or produce research items (→); sightings occur even after the research is finished (cf. compulsion →) compulsion – a state of a researcher’s increased alertness; causes a long-lasting effect on his or her perception; it manifests itself in constant sightings (→); this state is contagious and affects some of the audience members as well self-authorization – an act of self-bestowing a mandate during the decision (→) and conceptualization (→) phases; it enables the researcher to carry out the research without being commissioned or hired by an authorized institution (cf. creative co-production →)

Notes 1

“Animals 1914–1918” (2004–5). Available at http://ddr.si/arhiv/zivali1418.htm (in Slovenian) (accessed June 4, 2018).

References Bajič, Blaž (2018). “Fenomenologija kosti.” Domestic Research Society (Društvo za domače raziskave). Available at http://ddr.si/sl/fenomenologija-kosti/ (accessed July 22, 2018).

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de Certeau, Michel (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press, pp. 6–8. Domestic Research Society and Monroe, Alexei (2007). Jelenometrija: Raziskovalna razstava. Ljubljana: Domestic Research Society. Parts of the book available also at http://pj07.wikidot.com/how-to-hunt-a-symbolic-stag (accessed June 4, 2018). Dović, Marijan (2016). O kulturnih svetnikih in kanonizaciji: uvod. Ljubljana: Založba ZRC SAZU pp. 7–20. Available at http://csaints.zrc-sazu.si/wp-content/uploads/ 2017/09/00_Uvod.pdf (accessed June 4, 2018). European Commission (2015). Transmitting Contentious Cultural Heritages with the Arts: From Intervention to Co-Production. Grant Agreement No. 693857 — TRACES . Research Executive Agency (European Commission). Jenko, Marko (2017). “Cut! And here is your portrait. . .” Domestic Research Society (Društvo za domače raziskave). Available at http://ddr.si/en/cut-and-here-is-yourportrait/ (accessed June 4, 2018). TRACES (2016). Transmitting Contentious Cultural Heritages with the Arts: From Intervention to Co-Production. Project’s website, available at http://www.traces.polimi. it/about/ (accessed June 4, 2018).

10

Dead Images Multivocal Engagement with Human Remains Aglaja Kempinski

This chapter gives an insight into the challenges faced by a team of artists and researchers in putting together an exhibition which explores the complexities and contentiousness of European collections of human cranial remains. The center of this arts installation is a panoramic photograph of around eight thousand skulls, displayed in a cabinet at the Museum of Natural History in Vienna. Facing the history, ethics and politics of European skull collections Dead Images Edinburgh Art Festival exhibition, international conference and a free events programme DEAD IMAGES explores the contentious legacy of collections of human skulls kept in public institutions. By exhibiting a 30-metre-long photograph of thousands of skulls held in the Natural History Museum of Vienna, we ask: who are we to gaze upon the bones of others as an artistic or scientific spectacle? The choice to see the photograph rests with the visitor, who, in choosing, is invited to reflect upon the ethics of display and how we may reimagine a place and purpose for these remains. extracts from Dead Images event poster, June 2018

The story of “Dead Images” began when artist Tal Adler encountered a cabinet of cranial human remains held in the Natural History Museum of Vienna in 2009. Unsettled by the treatment of these skulls, he began thinking about ways to engage with and explore the complex issues connected to their display. In 2012, he took a panoramic photograph of a thirty-meter section of the cabinet. He not only wanted to transform this photograph into an arts installation, but also keenly felt the need to combine such a display with a conference in which the history, ethics, and politics this collection is entangled in could be explored. “Dead Images” is part of TRACES, a program (March 2016 to February 2019) which brings together five creative coproductions (CCPs), each made up of artists and researchers who, through art-based projects, explore the transmission of contentious cultural heritage in Europe. Further, 131

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each CCP is accompanied by an ethnographer who writes about the processes and practices inherent in those projects. The original team of CCP4 consisted of: Tal Adler, the artist who had originally initiated the “Dead Images” project; Anna Szöke, art historian and PhD candidate in European Ethnology, Humboldt University of Berlin; Maria Teschler, physical anthropologist at the Natural History Museum in Vienna and former head of the Anthropology; Linda Fibiger, an osteoarchaeologist from the University of Edinburgh; Joan Smith, an artist and lecturer at the Edinburgh College of Art; and John Harries, a senior teaching fellow in Social Anthropology from the University of Edinburgh. Tal, Anna, and Maria initially found the Edinburgh-based team members as the “Bones Collective”—an interdisciplinary research network at the University of Edinburgh interested in human bones—and invited them to collaborate on “Dead Images.” The original CCP4 members were brought together by a shared interest in human remains. In addition to this shared interest, the group also—in Linda’s words—“just got on really well from the very beginning,” a factor which contributed to the decision to embark on this three-year project together. This sense of having “great chemistry” was a notion expressed to me very early on by all of the original team members I spoke to, often emphasizing how this friendly and collaborative dynamic was extremely important for tackling the contentious subject of human skull collections. While they did not necessarily agree on everything, they felt they could productively discuss anything and that the variety of perspectives was a promising resource for their collaboration. This chapter explores the multiplicity of perspectives and opinions that exist around the subject of collections of human remains, interrogates how the team navigates these multivocalities, and examines how the variety of viewpoints was translated into the exhibition.

My positionality I first joined “Dead Images” in autumn 2017. My role was to observe the process of the exhibition coming together ethnographically in order to write about it for this book. A few factors made this project a particularly unique anthropological and ethnographic experience for me. Firstly, the subjects of my research were spread across different countries. Due to time and logistical constraints I was only able to conduct two brief trips to Berlin. This meant I spent much more time with the part of the group in Edinburgh than the team members in Berlin. Moreover, there was unfortunately no suitable opportunity for me to visit Vienna and spend time with Maria. As an ethnographic text, rooted in the subjective experience of its ethnographer, this chapter therefore does not and could not claim to observe or discuss the totality of the “Dead Images” creative co-production process. This is important to bear in mind when reading my ethnographic accounts. Secondly, I started my ethnographic engagement with “Dead Images” when TRACES was at its midpoint and the team had been working together for a year and a half already. Thus, I thrust myself into a project which already had firmly established relationships. As I will suggest further below, these relationships and the mutual trust they had produced were crucial to the way in which CCP4 managed their decision-

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making process and resolved potential conflict. The relationships I was able to establish and the time I spent with individual team members varied widely owing to the geographical distance to some and working in the same building (in the case of John, on the same corridor) as others. Perhaps because of spending a comparatively much shorter time with “Dead Images” than the CCP4 team members (except for Ola, who joined roughly at the same time as I did) I subjectively felt that I was occupying a position on the periphery, without ever fully becoming part of the group. One might wonder whether being with the team from the very beginning might have afforded me a qualitatively different insight into the project. On the other hand, however, I believe that my slightly more peripheral positionality enabled me to better observe the interplay between what happened inside the group, versus the ways in which their efforts were perceived and engaged with by other members of the heritage community and the wider public. On the one hand, I was part of many of the internal CCP4 meetings, spent time with the team members, observed online basecamp activities, and even became practically involved with designing a strategy for gathering audience research. On the other hand, there were also many conversations and interactions I was not privy to, and other TRACES members treated me as someone who they could talk about “Dead Images” with in a way they seemed to not speak to any of the CCP4 members. To do justice to this position on the periphery, I will discuss my insights into both the inner group workings and the way the exhibition was received and engaged with once opened to the public, touching on the difficult question of how—in a multivocal context—it is possible to let go of control over contentious content and how internal dynamics are translated into a public space. Finally, it is important to mention that this chapter was edited substantially in consultation with the CCP4 members represented in it.

“The one thing you can guarantee is that it’s going to be controversial” “Indigenous cultural exploitation,” one comment read after “Dead Images” was announced on the Facebook page of the International Committee for Museums and Ethnography. While by far not all initial reactions to the exhibition’s announcements were negative, some indicated extreme upset. Its [sic] disgusting & disrespectful for them to be “Used” in this manner. These people were buried with love, ceremony and respect. How would they feel if someone dug up their parents [sic] remains, photographed them and put them on public display? They should be returned to they’re [sic] home lands. comment on Facebook

Before opening the exhibition, the group held consultation sessions with a focus group of students to discover possible blind spots and gauge some audience reactions. The

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students were a mix of mostly archaeology and arts students but also included some from anthropology. They unanimously agreed that the debate and critical engagement which might be triggered by the exhibition was of crucial importance and therefore “worth it.” However, they also agreed that there was no way to engage with the photograph through a public exhibition that would entirely avoid making some people angry or upset. Asked whether the issues which the subject and format triggered could be resolved, the group—which in response to other questions had demonstrated a wide range of opinions—unanimously answered “no.” “The one thing you can guarantee,” one student said, “is that it is going to be controversial.” While the display of human remains might stir curiosity or unease through their affective powers, there are some more straightforward ethical concerns to consider. Collections of human remains are often deeply embedded in colonial legacies. Remains were often acquired without the consent of the communities they originated from, with no way to ascertain whether the individual would have consented to their skull being displayed. As John put it during one meeting, “If a skull ended up here it probably got there by less than ethical means.” Repatriation of human remains seems like an obvious fix for this problem. At the Dead Images Conference, a presentation by Te Herekiekie Herewini (Repatriation Manager at the Museum of New Zealand) demonstrated that in cases of unambiguous provenance and guided by indigenous communities, the repatriation of skulls can be a satisfactory, dignified, and conciliatory solution. However, most cranial remains are not in as straightforward a situation as the Maori skulls that have recently been repatriated under Te Herekiekie’s guidance. As Anna explains, many of the skulls that ended up in the collection of the Natural History Museum of Vienna either have no one claiming them back, or the communities claiming them back do not have sufficient institutional support, or provenance cannot be established, or nobody knows they are even there. This raises a host of difficult ethical questions. Many European institutions find themselves with literal skeletons in their closets. In a way, the genesis of “Dead Images” emulates this conundrum. While Tal had permission from the Natural History Museum of Vienna when he took the photograph, he did not ask (and could not have feasibly done so) for consent from the communities who might claim the remains as part of their people. While not wanting to suggest that the photo was taken with the same haphazard ethical approach as was employed by colonial travelers taking skulls back to Europe, CCP4 nonetheless began their engagement with the subject from a position of ethical ambiguity and culpability. Due to this position of initiating an artistic intervention from and about a point of ethical uncertainty, the decision of whether or not to show the photograph remained a subject of discussion throughout the project. Since the issue of skull collections is widespread, there are some ethical guidelines available for the curation, display, and treatment of human remains (Giesen 2013: 1–3). However, as the team points out in an article they collaborated on, such guidelines do not exist for the display of photographs of human remains. In a publication about the curation of human remains in British museums, Antoine writes that images of human remains are “seldom discussed in guidance literature or most of the relevant debate” (2014: 7). This raises a new set of ethical concerns which are central to the exhibition,

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not only because the exhibition is of a photograph of skulls, but also because of a further feature of the panoramic picture. In addition to seemingly endless rows of skulls, the panorama also shows a big wooden door, embedded in the shelves. Behind this door was the historical photo laboratory of the anthropology department, established during the Nazi period by the then head of the department, Josef Wastl. Wastl saw great scientific value in photography and used it extensively, adding not only the darkroom and new photographic equipment but also many thousands of images to the department’s photographic collection. His avid interest in photographic techniques went hand in hand with his obsession with increasing the department’s expertise in and materials relating to racial research. He conducted research in various POW camps and on imprisoned Jews who were sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp on the same day he completed his investigation. Of course, in addition to photographs and films, data sheets, handprints, footprints, hair samples, and plaster cast masks, Wastl obtained osteological material too. Skeletons of Jews from Viennese cemeteries as well as skulls of concentration camp victims were added to the department’s collections during this time. Nowadays, in the digital photography era, the old darkroom is not needed anymore and instead the department houses its entire photographic collection in this room that opens directly from within the skull cabinet (Harries et al. 2018: 17–18). The door represents the techniques of photography that were part of colonial processes and early anthropology’s “dissoluble links with colonialism” (Poignant 1992: 41). The panoramic photograph is not only potentially contentious because it depicts human skulls—through the technique of photography, Tal’s picture brings together questions about the display of human remains, as well as questions about the role of photography as a tool for scientific racism and subordination, making visible an issue which, as Edwards and Mead (2013) argue, usually remains invisible. Thus, an engagement with the photograph gives rise to a variety of questions which the team had to grapple with while developing the exhibition. The following questions (and more) were either debated at team meetings, displayed in the exhibition’s “info lounge” to invite audience feedback, or both: Are human skeletons persons? Under what circumstances (if at all) is it ethical to display human remains? Should human skeletal remains always be repatriated? How should colonial legacies be addressed? What scope is there for contemporary science to make use of these human remains? Does photography lessen the effect of the skulls compared to the “real” cabinet or does it contribute to the subject’s contentiousness due to the power relationships inherent in the medium’s technology and history?

Multiplicity of viewpoints As I looked closely at the real skulls in front of me, I clearly saw how different and unique each one was, I started to think about the people they used to be, how each had a name, a life with passions, love stories, families, projects, problems—just like me. Confronting this realization of the individuals behind the bones with the (almost obscene) gigantic scale of the collection was overwhelming. I felt I was

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standing in front of a silent city full of individuals without a life’s story, organized like empty books on endless shelves (it almost sounds like a scene from a science fiction or horror movie). Tal Adler, reflecting on his first encounter with the skull collection in a document shared at a TRACES workshop during the midterm meeting

In order to begin thinking about the challenges of putting together the “Dead Images” exhibition and conference, it is crucial to appreciate the complex response triggered by the panorama in both the potential visitors and the team members. In July of 2018, I met Sophie outside the Edinburgh College of Art. Sophie, a recent graduate from the University of Edinburgh, now employed by a local NGO, had agreed to talk to me about how she had experienced the exhibition as part of my audience research. Since the exhibition was part of the Edinburgh Art Festival and open during a time of year when the Scottish capital hosts “The Fringe,” the world’s biggest international arts festival, the exhibition’s potential audience was diverse. My account of Sophie’s reaction is therefore not to indicate that she represents a typical or average visitor (if indeed there is such a thing). Nonetheless, I believe her words hint at one of the conceptual challenges “Dead Images” engages with. After crossing the art college’s courtyard we walked through an unassuming double door flanked by temporary wooden walls that shield the public from some ongoing construction work. In the reception area, signs in the style of TRACES’ publication material were leading the way to “Dead Images,” and flyers and pamphlets on a table offered up information on the different exhibitions hosted by the school. The corridor which led us to the exhibition, lined with replicas of Roman statues, and walls that have been repainted in white to erase temporary images many times over, distinctly situated us and the exhibition we were about to enter in an arts school. It had not been easy to find a space to accommodate the exhibition. There were not many venues in Edinburgh big enough to display the giant photograph. Some of the gallery spaces that would have been big enough felt the project did not fit into their portfolio. The Edinburgh College of Art was perfect not only because their rooms were big enough but because they represented the spirit of experimentation and learning which “Dead Images” and TRACES was committed to. As Sophie and I walked through the tall double doors, the first sight we encountered was that of screens fixed to a temporary wooden wall, showing four films exploring questions about the subject of collections of human remains through interviews with stakeholders from a variety of backgrounds. Sophie watched the films for roughly ten minutes, and then followed the temporary wall around a corner. There, a bigger screen played a film with the same interviewees, exploring the controversy of whether or not the picture should be looked at. Sophie sat down on a bench in front of it and watched one loop of the video (15 minutes) before getting up and walking past a sign urging the visitor not to take photos, to the other side of the temporary wall. I followed Sophie into this protected area, even though it had been agreed that we would not talk until she had taken in the exhibition. This sectioned-off part of the exhibition, which visitors could only enter after walking past the videos and cautionary signs, displayed the three-by-thirty-meter photograph. Looking at the picture, Sophie stepped backwards

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to take in as much of the panorama as possible, looked at it for a few minutes, walked down the room along it, and—as if to herself—said, “Gosh, it just keeps on going” as she realized the picture continued through the next room. She spent another ten minutes or so looking at the picture, standing sometimes far away from it and sometimes getting as close as she could. After Sophie went to the “darkroom,” a separate room built as a photography darkroom with a red light and a video installation which explored the implication of photography through a discussion of the photography archive at the Natural History Museum of Vienna, we sat down in the school’s café to talk about her thoughts on the exhibition: It’s very impactful . . . But the weird thing is, I can’t quite put my finger on what is so upsetting about it. It’s like I’m being pulled in different directions, and to follow one would mean to ignore the others. On the one hand, there is the sheer scale— like the skulls are evidence . . . or better witnesses to some vague atrocity committed. For me, it made me think of the acts committed by Belgian Colonial forces, but that’s probably because I’m Belgian . . . But then there is the specificity of the shelves, questions I have about that collection in particular. This is all when you are standing far away from it and I feel like those are important things to be upset about. At the same time, you can get drawn to one individual skull, which has a haunting effect . . . I was feeling empathy for whoever they were and started wondering about their story . . . I was thinking about whether there is ever a way to know how they would have felt about being displayed like this. But somehow, none of these feelings linked up. It was as if they were in competition with one another. It’s almost like I’m trapped in a contest over where to place my attention and there is just no right answer.

There are two points in Sophie’s experience which hint at more common themes in how the panorama was received. Firstly, her reference to associating the picture with atrocities familiar to her own cultural background was an effect mentioned by several visitors, as well as interviewees in the videos. In talking about the scale of the photograph, visitors would often take it to represent political issues close to their heart, even if those issues were not directly linked to the Natural History Museum of Vienna. Secondly, her reaction highlights how complex, unexpected, and sometimes unresolvable responses triggered by pictures of human remains can be. As I heard from several team members throughout the project, showing the multiplicity of perspectives on the exhibition of human remains was very important. “It’s about multivocality, not black and white or right or wrong,” Linda once pithily put it. The videos of different people involved with, affected by, and interested in collections of human remains, which are shown on the other side of the wall on which the panorama is mounted, are the first thing visitors are confronted with. They showcase a wide variety of views, ranging from indigenous activist Te Herekiekie, who advocates for repatriating skulls and argues against having Maori skulls exhibited, to curators, to a private collector of human skulls who sees nothing wrong with the collecting and exhibiting of human remains but chooses to remain anonymous.

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It is hardly surprising that such a variety of individuals from such a broad background would show a broad variety of views. However, while relatively short,1 edited interviews might give the impression of neatly bounded perspectives, it is important to remember that attitudes, opinions, and feelings about contentious issues are rarely simple and straightforward. Even within the original “core” group of CCP4, and—more importantly—within the same individual, there were varying, evolving, and sometimes conflicting attitudes and reactions to the subject matter. Conversations between team members gave an account of experiences with human remains that illustrate the unpredictability and complexity of their affect. These conversations showed that the way we react to human remains is shaped and predefined by our context and backgrounds. It matters if one is brought up in a context where human remains might have been part of everyday life experiences, such as in the Catholic Church, or if exposure to human remains is associated with more complex issues, such as in Judaism. However, these attitudes are not fixed and stable but pervaded with different and contradictory, sometimes unconscious impulses and emotions. Moreover, the way in which individuals’ upbringings inform reactions to human remains is not always conscious but provides individuals with systems of enunciability which open up pathways for unexpected responses to emerge.2 In some instances, team members were unaware of how emotional responses were entangled with their own cultural background until faced with unpredictable triggers. For instance, in one of the observed situations, during an anatomy workshop in Edinburgh where the team handled human remains, one of the participants reflected that they initially approached the bones with an interest in anatomy and a scientific mindset. These attitudes changed when they suddenly had to think about exposing children to this situation in a shift which, to the surprise of that team member, seemed to be influenced by their religious and ethnic background, even though they had not expected them to be significant to their experience initially. Different impulses an individual may be subject to as a result of the affective powers of skulls and our individual background and personality do not always come together neatly in one person. In the first pre-exhibition consultation session with students, for instance, it was put to a vote whether museums and galleries should display human remains. Joan, despite having been on the project for over two years, voted both in favor and against. When the vote was put to the group again at the end of the session, she abstained. I think that, for me, it’s a clash between what is no doubt very interesting and informative for the visitor, the wishes of the deceased person, if known, and the context in which the human remains are being shown. And also my own perspective as a non-religious person interested in anatomy and history who is interested in looking at human remains but feels a bit guilty about it! . . . The lack of consent worries me most . . . The other part of my “multiplicity of impulses and perspectives” is that I have seen a lot of dead bodies and I know the dead body isn’t the real person anymore. I’m not religious but there is a lack of a living spark, or essence of life in a dead person. It’s a shell of a living person. If I believed in a soul I’d say the soul had fled. But I wouldn’t want my own dead body put on display so that people could look at

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me because I don’t know what purpose that would serve. So why should I think it is OK to look at other people’s remains?

Even in those that may be expected to have a perspective focused primarily on the scientific use of human remains, the complexity of attitudes may defy expectations. Linda’s view on the subject here provides a useful example. Throughout the project, she says, she has been somewhat worried about the way in which physical archaeology might be portrayed. It would break my heart to think that the people come out of the exhibition thinking: “Physical archaeology . . . insensitive, inappropriate, what a waste of space!”

She worried whether there was inequality in how the team treated skulls from colonial contexts over those that were archaeological finds from ancient populations and how the project might portray physical archaeology. As she explained, she wanted “something good” to come out of the project and, to her, the point of the project was not just about repatriation, but about the blurring of disciplinary boundaries, broadening of perspectives, and understanding researchers not only as “cold” scientists but as complex individuals. I am a physical anthropologist. But I am also a person. I have feelings. And to me, it’s very personal, not detached.

Rather than viewing cranial remains merely as neutral objects of scientific value, Linda says she “cares deeply” about the skulls she works with. In the student consultation sessions, one osteoarchaeology student expressed a similar opinion. To her, an ethical encounter with cranial remains was one which did not assign identity or personhood through fictional ideas about what life they lived or what kind of person they were. As a scientist, this was a way to be respectful. At the same time, she said, she did recognize a kind of personhood in the skull, albeit one that differed from considering them as an individual. We see identities but it is different. A baby for instance is still a baby—so you coo at it. Just knowing that it was a baby enables you to have a relationship with it without attributing a specific identity.

I do not mean to conflate this student’s viewpoint with Linda’s, but I believe it contributes to showing that a scientific approach, although perhaps thought of as detached, is indeed compatible with affectionate, personal, and emotional attitudes towards human remains. The above are only a small selection of examples, but they demonstrate that opinions are not only varied but also often unresolved, messy, or unexpected. From the beginning, the team placed importance on doing justice to this multiplicity of views. The goal of the project was to bring the issue to light and provide a way of engaging with the subject that would facilitate discussion. This was reflected not only in the video

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installation, but also in the way in which the exhibition encouraged feedback from visitors on a wall of questions in the “info lounge” where visitors were encouraged to leave their own thoughts to be displayed. Perhaps most importantly, the spirit of multiplicity and debate was also reflected in the conference with which the exhibition opened and which invited a wide variety of participants to give talks on the subject of the treatment of human remains over the course of two days. According to its TRACES website presence, the conference brought together “diverse reflections on encounters with collections of human remains, to critically explore the histories, including histories of violence and dis-possession.” Moreover, the team understood “Dead Images” as an opportunity to create “unsettling spaces of encounter that transcend the limitations of history and science” which would allow for an open and reflexive engagement with this contentious subject matter (TRACES 2018). It was this multiplicity and the unresolvability of some of the questions that collections of human remains give rise to, however—experienced on an individual level, mediated through the collaborative process of putting together the exhibition, and explored through a meeting of a variety of perspectives in the exhibition—that was responsible for some of the challenges the team was experiencing in making decisions about how to present and deal with the material.

Using humor to navigate the unresolvable Karin Schneider and Nora Landkammer3 had traveled to Edinburgh to meet with the Edinburgh Contingent and Tal to discuss education strategies “This is about conflict learning,” they began their presentation about ways to facilitate encounters with museum objects that allowed visitors to engage with complex questions, rather than simplified narratives. Rather than being told univocal truths, audience and facilitators should become part of a process of collective knowledge production. This, Nora explained, may require “unlearning” of previous ways of looking at objects, and, because of this, would likely involve discomfort or frustration. The contentious nature of the project, differences in personal opinion, as well as the fact that the group was spread across three different locations, made all members of the team vulnerable to potential conflict, frustrations, and anxieties. While the group benefited from positive and productive relationships between its members and a well of trust established through their early collaboration, disagreements or frustrations seemed to increase the closer the group came to the opening date of the exhibition. About halfway through the project one team member noted almost prophetically: We do have great chemistry. We’ll see how that develops when we actually have to start putting things together. Linda, at the midterm meeting

While up until early 2018 most of the discussions had been abstract and open, with plenty of space to give room to differing opinions, the time had come to make irreversible decisions. For instance, the name “Dead Images” was still being debated

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right up until the point it had to be included in the program for the Edinburgh Art Festival. As John pointed out, everyone had “a stake in how this contentious exhibition [would] be received, and anxieties over its impact and individuals’ reputation [were] amplified by having to make final decisions.” Secondly, the productive and constructive way of working together was based on the original team members getting on well together, their experience of working well together, and having had the opportunity to develop mutual trust. The addition of new team members might have had an unsettling effect. When Ola, the Education Research assistant, began working for CCP4 and making active use of Basecamp–the online project management platform used by TRACES—she had not had the opportunity to form these ties of trust through personal meetings. Despite the challenges posed by the complex and sometimes unresolvable issues raised by the panorama as well as by the technical and logistical elements of the project, the team did manage to successfully put together an exhibition and conference. The most important reason for this was the strong foundation of trust, on which, as one team member put it, they were drawing heavily towards the end when tensions and pressures increased. I argue that one of the ways in which this trust and ability to work together productively is expressed is through humor, which played a vital part in CCP4’s day-to-day social navigation of the subject of human remains. “We make a lot of inappropriate jokes,” Linda told me at our first meeting. Effectively describing the humor in CCP4 is something of a challenge. Humor is a notoriously difficult subject to translate into written anthropological analysis (Swinkels and de Koning 2016). The jokes made within CCP4 often wrestled with views that would ostensibly be highly problematic. For instance, in a conversation about images to be used on a website advertising the conference, the team humorously threw around suggestions such as “a white carriage drawn by a white horse” or “the most horrible image we can find of human remains.” There was talk of a gift shop, chocolate skulls, and much more. I argue that humor does a number of things in this context. For one, it contributed significantly to the resolution of the tensions. In a Skype meeting following a disagreement about whether to include a facial reconstruction workshop in the educational activities that accompanied the exhibition—which led to significant frustrations on all sides— John and Tal opened the conversation with friendly banter and jokes. While this was not unusual, my initial impression that this might have been an attempt to resolve tensions was confirmed by Anna reflecting on this conversation later: It was interesting. The tone was very conciliatory, with everybody joking around. translated from German

There are several theories that strive to explain humor. Due to the unresolvable nature of the issues the panorama raises, the predominance of jokes that highlight inappropriate approaches, and the sense in the group that humor is a frequent recourse to deal with the complexities of the subject, I would like to suggest that the most useful of those frameworks for this context might be incongruity theory. Briefly, this stipulates that humor may be a way to socially resolve tensions faced by a difficult and ultimately

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unresolvable subject (Clark 1970). Applied to the context of CCP4, this would mean that team members use humor to ease the pressures brought about by often having differing opinions on how the photograph should be approached despite the fact that there might not ultimately be a solution to this question. We might also, here, understand humor as “play” which allows one to experiment with ideas and concepts one normally cannot—for instance because they would normally be considered immoral, distasteful, or inconceivable. In play, as Sennett argues, the usual rules of proper conduct, as well as existing power relations, are temporarily lifted, in order to allow the participants to experiment with the fabric of society (Sennett 1974: 319). In the context of a group trying to deal with unresolvable questions, complex responses triggered by the encounter with human remains, and a multiplicity of opinions, this seems to be a useful tool. However, play can only function properly if all the participants can be trusted to follow the rules. To engage in play, where the usual rules of morality are suspended, is to enter a contract in good faith. Particularly contentious humor depends on whom one is joking with. Research (Ford and Ferguson 2004) shows that humor which expresses problematic views works only so long as one can trust the moral integrity of the person one is joking with. For instance, in a conversation between a team member and one of the interviewees the two talked about a museum official who had made a joke concerning what should be done with the panorama. While the joke itself could easily have been made during an internal CCP4 meeting and resulted in laughter, it was subject to outrage and criticism in the conversation between the team members in this particular instance. I am giving this example not to point to any inconsistencies in moral integrity, but rather to emphasize how mutual trust is crucial to a creative engagement with contentious subjects. Therefore, the fact that it was chiefly Tal and John—two members of the original group with an established foundation of trust—who used jokes to diffuse tensions from the meeting in February may be significant. One might wonder, for example, to what extent it would have been acceptable for Ola to use this kind of humor or whether this would have resulted in a deterioration of trust.

Conclusion: outcomes and reactions Many compromises were made along the way to the exhibition—especially towards the end, when pressure to turn abstract ideas into concrete tangible installations was mounting. When the exhibition opened in late June 2018, it consisted of a video installation showing interviews with individuals working with, interested, and affected by collections of human remains, the thirty-meter-long panorama photograph, accessible in such a way that audiences had to make a conscious decision to see it, a separate “darkroom” which, through a video, explored the contentious legacies of the anthropological photography archive housed behind the cabinet of skulls, and an “info lounge” which provided biographical information on selected skulls and invited the audience to reflect further. It was opened with a conference which invited the heritage community to reflect on the conundrum posed by skull collections and offered a variety of educational workshops throughout the exhibition.

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Perhaps unsurprisingly, visitors fell largely into two camps: those who viewed the exhibition positively and those who did not. However, the divide was not between people who objected to the photograph being displayed and those who did not. In fact, hardly anyone chose not to see the photograph. Of the voluntary anonymous feedback collected in the first month, only one person indicated that they had chosen not to see the photograph. One visitor even went so far as to suggest that seeing the photograph was “not really a choice.” Rather, interviews with and feedback from visitors during the first weeks suggested a divide between those who felt stimulated by the exhibition, and those who were put off by the relationship they felt was established between the installation and themselves. I feel a little judged. It’s like the space to consider the complexities of this becomes smaller and smaller as you get to the photograph. First you watch the videos with all these people telling you “this is how it is. This is how you have to feel.” And then, when you actually look at the photograph, you definitely know that there is only one acceptable reaction: shock, outrage . . . deep sadness. visitor during opening night I feel like I have to perform a certain kind of reaction. visitor during opening night It feels like it’s more about virtue signaling . . . or asks you to virtue signal than it is about the freedom to really think about this. visitor during first week

The above are the most extreme responses I recorded and represent a relative minority of the feedback I encountered. However, I do believe they point towards a challenge that is worth considering, especially in the context of TRACES being intended to be an experimental learning process. While team members were able to create an atmosphere internally that facilitated a multivocal engagement with the subject through mutual trust and humor, a few visitors experienced the resulting exhibition very differently. In large part, this may be due to the constraints of the exhibition format. As I discussed above, contentious humor hinges on those involved knowing that jokes are made among people who share the same values. Thus, humor may be a useful tool in small intimate groups where shared moral values have been established. In a public exhibition, however, there is no way to ensure these shared values are held by all visitors. Hence, humor—despite its potential to help individuals consider varying perspectives more freely, as was the case inside CCP4—has no place in a public forum not only because it would be highly inappropriate but also because its social function is hindered by a lack of assurance about shared values. A majority of the visitors from whom feedback was collected felt positively about the exhibition. However, among them was a vast variety of interpretations that mirrored the multivocality of the whole “Dead Images” process so far. Some people felt that the exhibition somewhat led them, others that it allowed the visitor to consider various perspectives freely. Some felt that the photograph itself was very impactful, while

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others were unaffected by the picture itself but were impressed by the narratives. Some felt the medium of photography lessened or “flattened” the impact of the subject matter; others felt it added to it. Among this multiplicity, however, two trends stood out: people tended to relate the affect of the photograph to atrocities that played an important part in their own life— whether the Herero Genocide, the Holocaust, massacres of Native Americans, or the Bosnian war (this may have been influenced by the interviews shown in the video installation). Neither the variety of views, nor the tendency to associate the photograph with something relevant to oneself, is surprising. However, despite the variety of interpretations, and despite the personal and unique nature of each individual’s engagement, the overwhelming majority—even among those who indicated that they were not convinced by the route the exhibition took— commented that the issues which “Dead Images” invited them to explore were important ones that had to be brought to light. One visitor summed up the interplay between affect and impact particularly well: I thought it was great. It resonated on so many different levels, bringing up all of these questions that are personal but also ethical. I didn’t quite know what to expect when I walked around the corner to see the image. But the impact was incredible. All these skulls . . . all these dead people. It reminded me of the massacres in Bosnia. The exhibition connects to so many things that are important to have a conversation about, to be brought to light. We need to have these conversations. visitor in beginning of August

It is interesting that despite the unresolvability of many of the questions surrounding collections of human remains and the multivocality that saturated each sphere of engagement of “Dead Images,” the simple act of rendering the issue visible seems to be something most can agree on. At the same time, this visibility, as Edwards and Mead (2013) might argue, may well be the most subversive part of the project.

Notes 1 2 3

The total duration of these interviews was 110 minutes, split into four videos. However, most visitors did not watch the complete set of interviews. In the sense of a Foucauldian archive (Foucault 2002: 146). TRACES Workpackage 3, research on education and stakeholder involvement, Institute for Art Education, Zurich University of the Arts.

References Antoine, Daniel (2014). “Curating human remains in museum collections: broader considerations and a British Museum perspective,” in Alexandra Fletcher, Daniel Antoine, and J.D. Hill (eds.), Regarding the Dead. London: British Museum, pp. 3–9. Clark, Michael (1970). “Humour and Incongruity,” Philosophy, 45(171): 20–32.

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Edwards, Elizabeth and Matt Mead (2013). “Absent histories and absent images: photographs, museums and the colonial past,” Museum and Society, 11(1): 19–38. Ford, Thomas E. and Mark A. Ferguson (2004). “Social consequences of disparagement humour: a prejudiced norm theory,” Personality and Social Psychology Review, 8(79): 78–94. Foucault, Michel (2002). The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Routledge. Giesen, Myra (2013). “Introduction: human remains curation in the United Kingdom,” in Myra Giesen (ed.), Curating Human Remains: Caring for the Dead in the United Kingdom. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, pp. 1–12. Harries, John, Linda Fibiger, Joan Smith, Tal Adler, and Anna Szöke (2018). “Exposure: the ethics of making, sharing and displaying photographs of human remains,” Human Remains and Violence: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 4(1): 3–24. Poignant, Roslyn (1992). “Surveying the field of view: the making of the RAI Photographic Collection,” in E. Edwards (ed.), Anthropology and Photography 1860–1920. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, pp. 41–73. Sennett, Richard (1974). The Fall of Public Man. London: Penguin Books. Swinkels, Michiel and de Koning, Anouk (2016). “Introduction: humour and anthropology,” Etnofoor, 28(1). TRACES (2018). “CCP4 Conference ‘Dead Images’.” Available at http://www.traces.polimi. it/2018/05/23/ccp4-conference-dead-images/ (accessed October 1, 2018).

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Disposing of Dead Images Reflections on Contentious Heritage as Toxic Waste John Harries with Tal Adler and Aglaja Kempinski

Dead Images This contribution comes from within the work of creating and then destroying the “Dead Images” exhibition. The exhibition was built across three large studio spaces at the Edinburgh College of Art. It was opened to the public on June 28, 2018, and closed on August 25 (Figure 11.1).

Figure 11.1 “Dead Images” announcement poster at the entrance to the Edinburgh College of Art, June 2018. Photo: Tal Adler.

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The main feature of the exhibition was a very large photograph, approximately thirty meters long and three meters high, of a display of somewhat over eight thousand human skulls in a cabinet along a corridor in the Natural History Museum of Vienna. The photograph was created by Tal Adler in 2012. It is a multi-perspective panorama of very high resolution, which would allow it to be printed life-sized, at a 1:1 ratio, and for the resulting print to be highly and vividly detailed. The image existed in digital form until June 2018 when Eastern Exhibition and Display printed Tal’s photograph onto thirty-two self-adhesive gray-back vinyl drops. These were affixed to a temporary MDF (medium-density fibreboard) (Figure 11.2) wall and so a life-sized panorama of a skull cabinet at the Natural History Museum of Vienna came to be displayed before the public in Edinburgh to be visited by more than 1,500 people.

An ethnography of “Dead Images” The “Dead Images” exhibition and related events (a conference, lectures, workshops, etc.) was the culmination of more than two years of work by a core team of six people: Tal Adler, Linda Fibiger, John Harries, Maria Teschler-Nicola, Joan Smith, and Anna Szöke, who were convened as Creative Co-Production (CCP) 4 within the TRACES project. As the work went on this team expanded to include an educational assistant,

Figure 11.2 Mounting of the 30-meter-long “Skull Cabinet Panorama” at the “Dead Images” exhibition, Edinburgh College of Art, June 2018. Photo: Tal Adler.

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Ola Wojtkiewicz, two interns, Callum Fisher and Hayley Whittingham, and an ethnographer, Aglaja Kempinksi. Aglaja’s chapter in this volume gives a fuller description of the team and the complex, energizing, enlightening, sometimes fractious and frustrating work of “creative co-production,” but it is worth noting that the author of this piece is writing as a member of this “core” team. It is also worth noting that I am not writing as an ethnographer. My time with the “Dead Images” project was spent coordinating resources, organizing a conference, sweeping floors, writing bits of text, and, above all else, talking with the rest of the team, whether in meetings, via Skype or “pings” on Basecamp, about what we should do and how we should do it. This is not, then, an ethnographic piece. What I do have is some insight into the complex work of making a complex thing. The particular focus is, however, not on making but on unmaking and destruction. This is, in other words, an ethnographic chapter, written by someone who did not do ethnographic research, about the destruction of a work of art, specifically the big print of a very high-resolution photograph of over eight thousand skulls.

Destroying an exhibition One could reasonably ask why attend to the unmaking of an exhibition, rather than its making. One answer is that in attending to the destruction of the “Skull Cabinet Panorama” we are attending to a process that is mostly neglected in writing anthropological accounts of artistic endeavor, where the focus is on art as a peculiar genre of making and expression (Gell 1998; Ingold 2013) or the affordances of art as an alternative mode of ethnographic inquiry (Foster 1995; Schneider and Wright 2013). Art is, as my experience of being involved in the “Dead Images” exhibition revealed, not only made, it is also unmade, and so our ethnographic understandings of art practice should be extended to embrace the afterlife of an exhibition. Beyond this, however, this afterlife of art, this process of dis-assemblage, transformation, and ruination, is worthy of attention because it brings into view the materiality of the exhibition as a form of public assembly whose constitution is critically exposed and exposed to critique as this assembly is disbanded and those things that were gathered together become unmoored from the attachments that we crafted in the making of an exhibition. In attending to the unmaking of an exhibition we may, therefore, explore the anxieties that haunt the becoming of such public events as a form of what Bruno Latour calls dingpolitik: a gathering of things and people which constitutes “a hybrid forum” or “agora” (Latour 2005: 23) or, to use Paul Basu and Sharon Macdonald’s phrase, a “space of encounter” (2007: 14). In their dissolution we may bring into view the fragility of such public spaces of encounter, a fragility that is intrinsic to the very constitution of the exhibition as the “demon” to its “demos” (Latour 2005: 24–5), and so animates and motivates the work of securing attachments, of nailing things down to ensure as much as possible the integrity of this space and the quality of affective encounter that this space affords.

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The big photo coming down On Tuesday, August 28, Callum and I tore the big photograph of skulls down. This was not a difficult task. We just hauled the photograph from the bottom and it pulled away from the plywood in long, sticky sheets. Sometimes the sheets would tear and we would climb a ladder to peel away the photo from the top, but that was no problem. The only thing that happened was that Callum experienced electric shocks when pulling the photograph away from the plywood. Static electricity, we supposed. But it was enough to make him stop what he was doing and take a step back. The photograph became a crumpled mass on the floor. We pulled and pushed at this mess of vinyl sheets to get them compact enough to fit into the bin bags. We took to tearing and folding and then standing on the folded remains. Then we shoved remains into the bin bags and carried these bags filled with the sticky mass of a destroyed photograph along Lauriston Place onto Middle Meadow Walk and then into the Chrystal Macmillan Building to a cupboard in the stairwell between the fourth and fifth floors, where we had been given permission to store the remains anticipating their final disposal. The thing was, Callum had acquired many bin bags for little money. You get what you pay for. They were useless, tearing apart like paper. So we walked through the circulating street life of the city on an overcast day with these bags dangling from our hands and cradled in our arms. And the bags were coming apart and as they came apart you could see the skulls, no longer as a neat flat display (crushed and mangled as they were), but still visible. Aglaja’s chapter in this volume describes the importance of “humor” in how the people of “CCP4” got on and dealt with stuff. Dark humor. Maybe even transgressive humor. So, darkly, Callum and I found humor in this situation. As we walked down Lauriston Place we voiced a fantasy that the bags would come apart altogether and the mangled images of skulls would come tumbling out and carelessly join the life of the street. Bits of the destroyed photograph would transform into detritus, circulating beyond control, unmoored from structures of display, concern, and authorship. There for all to see. This was the sad joke of it: after all the talk and worry about carefully curating the encounter with the photograph, we would, at the very last minute, be grossly, inadvertently careless, just because we had bought the cheapest garbage bags possible.

Making contentiousness As a “Creative Co-Production” we undertook the work of making contentiousness. This does not mean that gatherings of human skulls in museums and universities are not contentious already, but we wanted to bring this contentiousness into view, to make people aware, reflect and respond. Much of this work took the form of managing the visibility of the photograph so as to transform looking upon a still image of a display of skulls into an ethical, even political, act, which implicated the viewer, as well as we who brought this image into view, in the difficult history of constituting and keeping craniological collections.

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We did so by withholding sight of the photograph until the viewer had been made aware of the problematic nature of such a display. So the visitor would come through the doors of the studio to see the “back” of the photograph. They would turn right and pass before a series of four video pieces in which various people with various involvements and concerns with craniological collections would introduce themselves and then speak of their thoughts and feelings about the good and bad of displaying human remains. The last of these video pieces focused on the question of the image itself. Should it have been made? Should it be seen? Once the visitor had watched the videos and had, suitably sensitized to the contentiousness of the panorama of skulls, paused to question whether they should look upon the photograph, they would pass a sign forbidding any photography (Figure  11.3), turn left when faced with a temporary plywood wall, which ensured the photograph could not be carelessly seen, then turn right to come before the photograph itself. Of course, this was a properly attentive and disciplined visitor. One could just enter the exhibition, ignore everything else, and stand before the photograph without breaking stride or pausing to listen to the murmur of voices speaking as to why this photograph should be a matter of concern. The specter of the thoughtless visitor, the selfie-taking tourist, the artistic flaneur troubled us, but what could we do? Moreover, our capacity to engineer thoughtfulness was limited by practicalities and, finally, money. The little maze of plywood walls that visitors needed to navigate before seeing the photograph was, like the cheap but plentiful garbage bags, a compromise

Figure 11.3 Sign at the entrance to the space in which the “Skull Cabinet Panorama” was mounted, “Dead Images” exhibition, Edinburgh College of Art, June 2018. Photo: Tal Adler.

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Figure 11.4 Detail of the proposed exhibition’s floor plan with a photo of a revolving door, used for the exhibition-design workshop for CCP4 by Francesca Lanz and Jacopo Leveratto, at the ECA, April 2017. Photo: Tal Adler.

inspired by limited funds. Briefly there existed on paper a wonderful rotating door that the visitor would pass through before seeing the photograph (Figure 11.4). When it became clear the money we had allocated to “Other Research Costs” would not pay for a revolving door, the door became a heavy black curtain drawn onto our plans as a squiggly line. When the imaginary curtain proved too expensive, the plywood walls became the only solution to engineer the possibility that a visitor would pause and consider their decision to see the photograph. Our design of the installation was, in other words, directed by a desire to make this image potent and problematic and then to control its potency. As a collective, we were, however, haunted by the anxiety, given form in the figure of the thoughtless visitor, that the experience of seeing the big photograph of skulls could, if unregulated, become reduced to a mere spectacle and void of the possibility of ethical unsettlement.

The promiscuity of images Maybe this anxiety had something to do with the medium. The making and printing of the skull cabinet panorama was a complex and costly undertaking. Nonetheless, this was and is a digital photograph and, once printed, digital photographs could be taken

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of the panorama by visitors. The image we so carefully curated as “contentious heritage” could, therefore, become promiscuous, escaping the confines of the exhibition to reproduce, multiply, and mutate. Our concern with the potential proliferation and commodification of images of skulls in the age of mechanical, now digital, reproduction (Benjamin 2002; Davis 1995; Kearl 2015) was not so much a matter of maintaining the aura and authenticity of the photograph as a work of “art” (in conversation Tal was clear that the work was the whole of the exhibition and not only the photograph itself); it was, rather, a matter of taking care in our handling of material that we deemed potentially hazardous. This was an ethical hazard. At the very center of our work was an understanding that for some, in particular indigenous peoples who had seen the remains of their ancestors looted and exiled to faraway European cities, the keeping and exhibition of skulls had the potential to be profoundly troubling and hurtful (Riding In 1992; Turnbull 2007). This understanding translated into an ethical obligation that we take care when exhibiting this photograph so as to ensure it was not encountered haphazardly but with due notice and in a spirit of quiet and critical reflection. This care, as discussed above, was materialized in the very design of the exhibition, but it was also expressed in our concern with controlling the potential promiscuity of the digital image and the printed photograph (Harries et al. 2018). For example, in drawing up a contract with Eastern Digital Exhibition and Display for the printing of the photograph (Figure 11.5), Tal placed a series of restrictions on the production of the image including that they would “not allow anyone . . . to photograph the prints or parts of them,” “treat these images of the dead with the respect accorded to the ancestors,” and “immediately destroy and discard any prints, test prints or parts of them.” The exception to this last demand was, of course, the thirty-two printed sections that were assembled as a panoramic photograph of the skull cabinet. But when the time came and the exhibition was closed, these also needed to be destroyed. Tal gave Callum guidance concerning the proper destruction and disposal of the photograph, suggesting that it be cut into small enough pieces that it will not be possible to salvage them from the bin and “keep a souvenir.” So this means there shouldn’t be an image of a whole skull. I guess the pieces have to be around 10–15 cm or less in height, and around 20–30 cm or less in length.

Joan, Linda, and I then hit upon the idea of burning the photograph. Linda already had a working relationship with Dr. Rory Hadden and his colleagues at the BRE Centre for Fire Safety Engineering, and they very kindly agreed to burn the remains of the big photograph under controlled conditions. So it was that on August 28, Callum and I ripped the photograph free of the MDF wall so it could to be stored in a cupboard where it would await final transport to the Fire Lab at King’s Buildings, the science campus of the University of Edinburgh. All this was motivated by a desire to safely dispose of hazardous waste, created by the disassembling of an exhibition, so as to prevent the image becoming promiscuous. This

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Figure 11.5 Signed agreement for the use of the digital files of the “Skull Cabinet Panorama,” June 2018. Photo: Tal Adler.

is why it seemed so perverse and darkly humorous that the very thing purchased to manage the photograph as waste, some cheap bin bags, tore away in our hands, exposing the image to anyone who might pass by (Figure 11.6).

Toxic remains The bags filled with the mangled remains of the photograph remained in the cupboard in the Chrystal Macmillan Building until Monday October 8. Then Linda and I shifted the bags into a black cab and transported them to the entrance of the John Muir

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Figure 11.6 Destroyed “Skull Cabinet Panorama” in flimsy garbage bags, October 8, 2018. Photo: John Harries.

Building. Joan arrived by bicycle and then Rory found us and helped us carry the bags to the Fire Lab on the first floor. We were directed to put on goggles and given masks to cover our mouths and noses. The bags were torn into shreds and then some, perhaps a third, of the remains of the photograph were piled onto a grill supported by bricks, below which was a metal pan filled with diesel oil. The oil was set alight and the photograph began to burn. Grayblack smoked billowed up and was gathered by a ventilation hood. The flames were orange and yellow and sometimes purple as they took on the colors of the ink. The torn and folded lumps of the photograph blackened and then turned to gray ash (Figure 11.7).

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The air became sour and strange. We pulled the masks over our faces and became mindful of our breathing. Rightly so. Vinyl, or PVC, burns poisonously, giving off carbon monoxide, hydrogen chloride, and dioxins (Huggett and Levin 1987; Buekens and Cen 2011: 193–5). The notion that the print of the photograph was hazardous waste was, then, not simply figurative, a way of describing the ethical anxieties that surrounded the disassembling of an exhibit concerning the contentious heritage of human remains held in public institutions in Europe. This stuff was literally, physically, toxic. I had a class to teach and so left early. I was light-headed, feeling a bit dizzy and sickly. In my absence, they built a bigger fire—“bigger is better,” Rory said—consuming the remainder of the ruined photograph. According to Joan and Linda the fire burned for a long time.

Figure 11.7 Destroyed “Skull Cabinet Panorama” alight in University of Edinburgh Fire Laboratory, October 8, 2018. Photo: John Harries, Joan Smith and Linda Fibiger.

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We asked if we could retain some of whatever was left of the photograph after the fire. On the Friday I collected seven plastic jars of gray-black ash and a plastic box holding blackened lumps of stuff that was once the photograph. Looking closely and fancifully at these lumps one could imagine them as the surface of some dead, faraway planet, or an asteroid, dry, ashen, pitted with little holes. One could also, still and in spite of all our efforts, see the melted, twisted image of a skull held within the folds of this black and ruined alien landscape. I kept this material in my office for a few hours but I came to feel it was poisoning me, this toxic residue of a toxic legacy. I opened the window. Then I phoned Linda. She came by and we carried the remains to a lab in archaeology. There, at the time of writing, it sits in a lab under a fume hood. We are unsure what to do with this ash and blackened lumps of poisonous matter. More art, perhaps.

References Basu, Paul and Sharon Macdonald (2007). “Introduction: Experiments in exhibition, ethnography, art and science,” in Sharon Macdonald and Paul Basu (eds.), Exhibition Experiments. Oxford, Blackwell, pp. 1–24. Benjamin, Walter (2002) [1937]. “The work of art in the age of technological reproducibility,” reprint in Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (eds.), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 3, 1935–1938. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, pp. 101–33. Buekens, Alfons and Kefa Cen (2011). “Waste incineration, PVC, and dioxins,” Journal of Material Cycles and Waste Management, 13(3): 190–7. Davis, Douglas (1995). “The work of art in the age of digital reproduction (An evolving thesis: 1991–1995),” Leonardo, 28(5): 381–6. Foster, Hal, (1995). “The artist as ethnographer?” in George E. Marcus and Fred R. Myers (eds.), The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology. Berkeley and London: University of California Press, pp. 302–9. Gell, Alfred (1998). Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Harries, John, Linda Fibiger, Joan Smith, Tal Adler, and Anna Szöke (2018). “Exposure: the ethics of making, sharing and displaying photographs of human remains,” Human Remains and Violence: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 4(1): 3–24. Huggett, Clayton and Barbara C. Levin (1987). “Toxicity of the pyrolysis and combustion products of poly(vinyl chlorides): a literature assessment,” Fire and Materials, 11(3) 131–42. Ingold, Tim (2013). Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. London: Routledge. Kearl, Michael C. (2015). “The proliferation of skulls in popular culture: A case study of how the traditional symbol of mortality was rendered meaningless,” Mortality, 20(1): 1–18. Latour, Bruno (2005). “From realpolitik to dingpolitik,” in Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds.), Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. Cambridge, MA and Karlsruhe: MIT Press and ZKM/Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, pp. 14–40. Riding In, James (1992). “Without ethics and morality: a historical overview of imperial archaeology and American Indians,” Arizona State Law Journal 24: 11–34.

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Schneider, Arnd and Christopher Wright (2013). “Ways of working,” in Arnd Schneider and Christopher Wright (eds.), Anthropology and Art Practice. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 1–24. Turnbull, Paul (2007). “Scientific theft of remains in colonial Australia,” Australian Indigenous Law Review, 11(1): 92–102.

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Participatory Approaches to Places of Unresolved Heritage Working with The Communities of Long Kesh/Maze Laura McAtackney

Introduction This chapter will critically engage with anthropological experiences of working with two artists—Martin Krenn and Aisling O’Beirn—who used dialogic and participatory practices as part of their TRACES Creative Co-Production (CCP). The chapter will start by critically assessing the current status of Long Kesh/Maze in the narratives of the Troubles alongside examining the role of its material presence in wider society. It will argue that the “distributed self ” (McAtackney 2014: 244–65) of the prison is still a prominent factor in retaining and reconfiguring memories of the conflict. However, these memories are not easily defined or simple to understand. The material presence of the prison in wider society provokes diverse reactions as to its previous role in the past, contested place in the present, and potential position in the future. The rest of the chapter will engage with the processes involved—and the challenges encountered—in working alongside self-defined groups and individuals associated with Long Kesh/ Maze as part of a dialogic artistic project lead by Krenn and O’Beirn. It will note the challenges this project has faced—both expected and emergent—regarding using dialogic and artistic approaches with communities and how these have evolved during the course of the project. Despite this chapter being written twenty years after the official end of the conflict— with the signing of the Belfast Agreement (1998)—transitioning to a normative society has in many ways not been a straightforward process. In particular, the spatial nature of the conflict (Douglas and Shirlow 1998) has survived in various forms into the peace process. Urban areas in Northern Ireland remain as materially segregated as in 1998, if not more so, and the physical remnants of the Troubles still play a significant if underarticulated role in “presencing” conflict throughout the province (see Jarman 2002; McAtackney 2011, 2015, 2018). Although there was initial media emphasis on the need to remove overtly military infrastructure associated with the Troubles—such as many police stations and British army bases—as a process of “normalization” (Irish 159

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News 2005), there was little consideration as to what happened afterwards. The demolition of structures associated with conflict initially resulted in fenced, rubblefilled inertias euphemistically called “Regeneration Zones.” Their fates were not consistent or anticipated. While some Regeneration Zones transitioned into functional places, a number endured for long periods of time—and some still remain—as “troubling remnants” (Jarman 2002). Although largely undiscussed due to their acceptable mundanity and placement in (and creation of) contained, marginal zones these inertias are the enduring, placeless signature of what Colin Knox has called “negative peace” (2016). Long Kesh/Maze is a celebrated, some would even say “iconic,” example of a remnant of conflict that is unusual in being not quite eradicated but also not quite regenerated (Figure 12.1). While it is widely acknowledged the prison is an important remnant from the conflict, the lack of agreement as to its meaning in the past and role in the future means it remains a high security site with little public access. Most of the 300+ standing buildings that remained in situ on closure have been demolished but there remain a number of exceptional and representative remnants that continue to exist in limbo (McAtackney 2014, 137–82). The lack of critical engagement at the level of government policy with how we deal with enduring, if officially defunct, security infrastructure has resulted in an uncomfortable lack of consensus as to how to “deal” with the prison that continues to present day. This prison is the backdrop to CCP5 TRACES: Transforming Maze/Long Kesh Prison.

Figure 12.1 Aerial map of Long Kesh/Maze prison hanging on a wall inside the prison (c. 2007). Photo: Laura McAtackney.

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While the transition to peace after conflict is rarely easy—and cyclical crises at the level of party politics have played a critical role in maintaining divisions in Northern Ireland—the nature of the Belfast Agreement (1998) is also implicated. One of the main critiques of the Agreement has been how its silences and absences have precipitated political fall-outs as parties remain without an agreed blueprint to structure progress (McGrattan 2009). In particular, the difficult issue of how to deal with the past was not included in its text. Rather the document was framed in a positive and almost wholly future-orientated way that believed difficult issues would eventually resolve themselves. This meant that, while the perspective of the Agreement was framed with a mindset of leaving behind past enmities to achieve peace, the difficult, residual issues of shaping public memory towards a shared future were left unconsidered. As time has moved on these (what are now described as) “legacy” issues (NIO 2018) have increasingly taken a central position. They have especially grown in prominence since 2016 due to the increasingly fragmented political system unbalancing the power-sharing equilibrium that was established in 1998 to the point of imminent collapse. The elected assembly in Northern Ireland surpassed the previous record for longest period without government in September 2018 (Kelly 2019) and the threat of Brexit and the potential return to a hard border have been hugely destabilizing backdrops since June 2016 (see Hayward 2017; Parr and Burke 2017). The insecurities engendered by these two simultaneous political crises had very real repercussion on the TRACES “Transforming Long Kesh/ Maze Prison” project—with its temporal gaze shifting between the past and present and its focus on the “specters” (Derrida 1993) from this still inaccessible site. This chapter will focus in more detail on this wider political context of completing the project in contemporary Northern Ireland and the insights gained from this experience.

Contentious heritage and Long Kesh/Maze Prison In the period since the signing of the Belfast Agreement (1998), which officially ended the Northern Ireland conflict, there have been significant heritage implications in its practical working out, implementation, and funding. This has been particularly notable in the creation of relatively long-term (if sporadic) funding for community and heritage bodies, initiatives, and projects that seek to work on a variety of community “identity” issues through grants such as the monies from the EU PEACE program (see Byrne et  al 2008). Since the Agreement, official “heritage” institutions have been perceived as a relatively neutral and usable “contact zone” to facilitate a wide range of projects that allow for both single-identity and cross-community expressions on potentially difficult and contested issues of identity, contested history, and sectional memory. While there have been some successful outputs from the utilization of museums as mediators of the past it has been noted that they often lack specific training and skills at both the level of the institutions and practitioners to take on the difficult role of repairing a divided society (including Crooke 2010). Their ability to perform these roles is particularly problematic given the critiques of the official heritage institutions in Northern Ireland and their promotion of risk-averse visions of the past that misrepresent in their attempts to offend no one (Jones 2010; see Figure 12.2). The

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Figure 12.2 An overview of the “Troubles’ Gallery” at the Ulster Museum (c. 2014). Photo: Laura McAtackney.

lack of an authentic “authorised heritage discourse” (Smith 2006) that includes the Troubles in Northern Irish heritage has resulted in many of the communities most impacted by the conflict creating their own bottom-up heritage constructions. Indeed, there has been a notable degree of curation of experiences of the Troubles at community level that is spatially significant. In particular, there is a proliferation of paramilitaryrun, community museums locatable in many areas most impacted by the conflict (Markham 2018), and single-identity (and often extremely selective) memorials to dead comrades are found in similar locations (McAtackney 2011, 2018). Long Kesh/Maze occupies an ambiguous place within the contemporary heritagescape of Northern Ireland. It is both official and unofficial heritage due to the intentions of its creators and enduring ownership—it was, and remains, a government institution—and the subversion by its forced occupants—the majority of its narratives and a significant proportion of its movable material world have been acquired by former (especially republican) prisoners and their networks. The place of Long Kesh/ Maze as the touchstone for this project will be discussed in more detail in the next section. However, before the site is analyzed and dissected as the inspiration for agnostic art practices, a short historical background will follow in order to reveal it as a place of contentious, if unresolved heritage. Long Kesh/Maze is infamous due to its associations with paramilitary imprisonment during the course of the conflict colloquially known as “the Troubles” (c. 1968–98). While the prison’s biography tightly

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followed the conflict that created it—the prison opened in 1971 to deal with an overspill of paramilitary prisoners and closed in 2001 when its final inmates were released on license or were transferred elsewhere—it had a reach far beyond its walls. The prison is associated with some of the most widely remembered events of the conflict, including the escalation of prison protests starting in 1976 and culminating in the hunger strikes of 1980/81 (in which ten republican prisoners eventually died, including the first and most famous, Bobby Sands). The mass prison escape of 1983 was the biggest jail break in British penal history, and 1994 saw the truly remarkable scene of the then British Secretary of State, Marjorie (Mo) Mowlam, publicly visiting the prison to negotiate peace with the loyalist and republican prisoner leaders. Due to the scale and form of imprisonment during the Troubles—when a previously peaceful and largely lawabiding society experienced a huge rise in its jail population—the prison impacted the lives of many civilians as well as combatants in Northern Irish society (McAtackney 2014). The prison and the events that occurred within it remain central to the identities of ex-prisoners and their communities and retain a high profile in terms of murals and commemorative memorials, especially for ex-republican prisoners (Figure  12.3). However, it is not an agreed place of significance that is destined to be retained, preserved, and presented to the public as a site through which to remember the difficult past. Cahal McLaughlin has presented Long Kesh/Maze as having a “disputed iconic

Figure 12.3 Mosaic wall “mural” commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the 1981 hunger strikes, located at the junction of Beechmount Avenue and the Falls Road in nationalist West Belfast (c. 2006). Photo: Laura McAtackney.

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status” (2007: 234) due to the mismatch between republican veneration of it as a place of martyrdom connected to dead hunger strikers and mainstream unionists’ dismissal of it as a holding center for terrorists. These generalized, opposing views have meant that the prison has been dismissed as “zero-sum heritage” (Graham and McDowell 2007: 363)—its retention or destruction can only be viewed for one side as a loss, the other side as a victory—but this project has shown that this dichotomy is in some respects overstated. While Long Kesh/Maze is a problematic, complicated, and contested site it is clear its significance is not completely abandoned to republican narratives and its meanings have not solidified with the end of the conflict. Its ability to demand attention has been retained—if in an altered state—in its post-functional state and this means it retains the potential to change meaning. After its closure in 2001, Long Kesh/Maze quickly became a celebrated case for how we engage and deal with the remnants of conflict, heightened security, and advanced surveillance as we moved through an uncertain, if cautiously optimistic, peace process. The transitions of Long Kesh/Maze from a functional prison to a defunct institutional landscape and on to potentially something more meaningful have been stilted and at times sidelined. It is currently at a crossroads; a place of unresolved heritage potential. While there have been a number of high-profile reports that have created blueprints for guiding the prison to become something new it remains stubbornly connected to the past and an inaccessible place apart. Since around 2006, significant parts of the prison infrastructures have been demolished. By 2018 the majority of the approximately 300 structures that stood on the site at closure have disappeared with a small core of “retained” infrastructure remaining in situ. The remnants of the prison are still not open to the public and there is a lack of official consensus on its meaning and/or status. However, this does not mean the prison has not retained meaning to those who were either imprisoned in it, worked in it, were part of the social network of ex-prisoners, or came from the (mainly working-class, urban) communities that were impacted by mass imprisonment. I have argued elsewhere that the governmental desire to “control” the meaning of this site has not always been successful. Indeed, the emergence of parallel narratives of meaning relating to the prison have been facilitated by the illicit recontextualization of a wide range of prison-related material culture from the site to wider society (McAtackney 2014). The role of what I have called the “distributed self ” (ibid: 244–68) of Long Kesh/Maze and its status as unresolved heritage are the two key focal points of this chapter that I will discuss further in the next section.

Positionality: anthropologist, archaeologist, and insider I was approached by Martin Krenn and Aisling O’Beirn to be involved in the “Transforming Long Kesh/Maze Prison” Creative Co-Production (CCP) after the project had been funded by the EU and the CCP had been established in spring 2016. I accepted the invitation just before the first meeting of anthropologists in November 2016 and I attended the initial meeting in Oslo. I soon discovered that my background was unusual as I was more senior than my anthropologist colleagues, who were mainly early-career researchers (I have been an Associate Professor at Aarhus University in

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Denmark since 2015), and I had a long, pre-existing relationship with the subject of the CCP. I completed an archaeology-based PhD on Long Kesh/Maze in 2008 in which I explored the prison through the various forms and scales of its material existence from text, artifacts, and buildings to landscapes and its “distributed self ” in the world outside its perimeter walls. I had completed oral testimonies with ex-prisoners, ex-prison officers, and visitors to the site and I had a significant network of stakeholders and people of interest who were connected to Long Kesh/Maze. In some ways it was a perfect match—I agreed to be involved in the project as I thought that the conception of what the artists wanted to do sounded creative and interesting and the expectations involved in being an “anthropologist” did not appear to be too taxing. The artists—Aisling O’Beirn lived in Belfast and Martin Krenn was based in Vienna—were aware of the changing political climate and as they had no prior relationship with the site they wanted a way to engage with the prison that did not necessitate access to the site. They found a relevant theoretical framing for this form of engagement through my book An Archaeology of the Troubles: The Dark Heritage of Long Kesh/Maze (2014). I had formulated the concept of “distributed self,” which was loosely derived from anthropological conceptions of personhood. I was inspired by the prehistoric archaeologist Andy Jones, who had argued that “relationally persons are created through networks of relationships and these networks include things as well as people” (2005: 199). My spin on these inspirations was to focus on the site of Long Kesh/Maze, rather than on a human being, as the center point of these networks of personhood. I argued that due to the heightened importance of this site, and the conflict over its meaning, the material remnants of the site continued to circulate in wider society in a meaningful way as the “distributed self ” of the enduring out-of-bounds prison. The inaccessibility of the physical site of Long Kesh/Maze did not stop it being a potentially unresolved heritage in post-conflict Northern Ireland. It was exciting to discover that Krenn and O’Beirn thought the idea of the “distributed self ” worked with the premise of their dialogic and participatory art practices. However, there were certain power differentials in the background, as well as circumstances on the ground, which made the balance of being considered an “insider” and expert outweigh my ability to be an effective anthropological observer. Firstly, I was the only person in the team who actually came from Northern Ireland (Aisling is based in Northern Ireland but comes from the Republic of Ireland and Martin is a German based in Austria) and that local connection, enduring networks, and even my familiar accent opened up access to people as a perceived insider. Secondly, due to the increasingly tense political atmosphere in Northern Ireland, the artists experienced many difficulties in finding people who were willing to participate in the CCP in the way it was originally conceived. It is impossible to define exactly why this was and how much the dynamics changed due to the perceived tensions that started in mid 2016 but I would suggest that there were a number of fluctuating issues. These included the uncertain political climate, loyalist exprisoners being more reticent to speak about their relationship with the prison than republicans (McAtackney 2014), a similar project—oral testimonies gathered from people who had prison art in their homes—being simultaneously underway through the republican ex-prisoner group Coiste na n-Iarchimí (Heritage Lottery Fund 2016) and the associated issues of research fatigue affecting overly researched communities (see Clark 2008 for discussion of this phenomenon). There also appears to have been at least

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a small degree of antagonism towards the project from some elements of the close-knit artistic community in Northern Ireland. When I approached a famous mural painter about the project in February 2017 the invitation was declined with the comment that it was “arty farty pretentious rubbish” and a claim the artists had sold out “for the price of gold.” While this difficulty in attracting participants was problematic for the artists it was not unexpected from my point of view. Having conducted research in Northern Ireland since 2002 I have experienced many times when the ebbs and flows of participation have been impacted by wider societal tensions. An enduring characteristic of a society that has experienced long-term, cyclical civil conflict is that periods of relative peace do not necessarily result in rapprochement and so participation in cross-community initiatives is still viewed with suspicion. Furthermore, rises in uncertainty and tension can result in withdrawal from shared spaces and projects that are already ongoing. A.C. Hepburn noted in 2001 that in Northern Ireland “segregation increases more in bad times than it eases in good times” (2001:93), and with the backdrop of increased political uncertainty due to Brexit (June 2016) and the fall of the power-sharing government in Northern Ireland (January 2017) these were clearly “bad times.” The political climate resulted in a lack of willingness by many potential participants to partake in shared endeavors, especially as they were focused on a contentious remnant of the Troubles. The site of Long Kesh/Maze should not be considered immaterial to the willingness of participants to be involved in the CCP. In some ways, Long Kesh/Maze is perfect for such a project to take place but in others it reveals the potential limitations of contentious places being used as an inspiration for agonistic forms of art production when the timing is not right. While the prison has been described by government civil servants as possessing “about 33” different narrative strands (COFMDFM 2012), it lends itself to being described as a touchstone of the conflict. However, in reality it is most strongly connected to republican prisoners and their narratives of the past. This is due to events that occurred within the prison (briefly addressed above) and the belief held by many republican prisoners that their periods of imprisonment in Long Kesh/ Maze, in particular, were a “badge of honour” (McKeown 2001: xiii) that linked them to a continuation of resistance to British authorities that dated back centuries. This situation means that many of the other potential narrative strands associated with Long Kesh/Maze continue to be latent, if not rejected, by those who do not consider themselves republicans. In my experience, the polarization of opinions about this site have not always been unbridgeable—some ex-loyalist prisoners have at various times engaged in private with researchers and government officials to ensure their stories were included in publications and proposed redevelopments of the site—but in the public domain it is still considered a “zero-sum heritage site” (Graham and McDowell 2007: 363). In the present context, there is little room for that polarization to dissipate. While Long Kesh/Maze is so strongly associated with republican narratives—and bigger questions of sovereignty and identity are being actively contested—the site of Long Kesh/Maze will be rejected by the majority of unionists as a site meaningful for them. In 2016 this situation meant that the initial aims of the artists to facilitate dialogic art creation as a cross-community endeavor had to be reconceptualized. Lastly, my own role within the CCP was also not without problems. As noted above, I did not quite fit the role as an observer, watcher, assessor, or “anthropologist” as

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designed for the overarching EU project. While this project always belonged to Krenn and O’Beirn, initially at least I took a heightened role in order to provide advice and assistance when attempts to engage with participants were proving difficult. My opinions and contacts were sought early in the process and I was integral to introducing the artists to some of their most fruitful contacts, including the “50+ Club,” and to provide speakers for their launch conference in March 2017. My suggestions were always gratefully received and considered but this made me an uncomfortable presence as the project moved forward after the initial set-up. Officially, I was supposed to be an observer but in reality I had been an integral member of the team, a source, and an “expert” who could not easily move backwards and fulfill the role of anthropologist in a way that would have allowed the artists to feel comfortably in control of the process. This meant the period when I should have been most active as the “anthropologist”— during the “restaging” and “retelling” processes (Krenn and O’Beirn, this volume)—was one when I was most absent. As the artists moved forward with realizing their project alongside having to continually reimagine and re-envision it into its final form, I was also largely absent from Northern Ireland, and the uncertainties of ongoing participation ensured that no one was eager to unsettle the balance by pushing for me to “observe” the antagonistic art production.

Insights into “TRACES: Transforming Long Kesh/Maze Prison” When this project was envisaged Long Kesh/Maze was still a contentious, postfunctional site—the Daniel Libeskind-designed peace center and associated EU funding had already been rejected by the then First Minister, Peter Robinson, in August 2013—but it was not especially active in terms of identity politics. Long Kesh/Maze had remained behind closed doors, the majority of the site had been demolished, but there were activities behind the scenes in terms of government consultation with various stakeholders. It was still a problematic site due to its connections with republican experiences of imprisonment but it retained the potential for meaningful, cross-community engagement during times of relative stability. In the spring of 2016, when this project began, the potential for the site to allow cross-community, or at least multiple-stakeholder, engagement remained. Therefore, in the early stages of the project formulation it was decided that the artists would conduct a series of workshops with people who have had a relationship with the prison such as ex-prisoners, exemployees, and ex-visitors. The groups were envisaged as cross-community and from different and even opposing conceptions of the meanings and understandings of the prison. By June 2016, this situation had changed. Despite Northern Ireland voting against Brexit, the UK-wide referendum had resulted in a vote to leave the EU, and with this decision tensions increased in Northern Ireland, the only part of the UK with a land border with another EU state. The ideal of working with a variety of participants in mixed groups had to be sidelined due to the lack of willingness from any participants to work in such groups. Instead, group work had to be contained within stakeholder groups, individuals were facilitated to engage in ways they felt comfortable, and the pre-determined outputs had to be more and more loosely interpreted.

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The participants’ experience of the physical reality of the prison and its material world was central to the project. However, a previous experience of having made prison art (Figure 12.4) was not a prerequisite of their participation. Rather, it was expected that participants would assist each other in creating artwork(s) related to their personal experience, memory of, and contemporary feelings about, the prison using various materials and techniques that would have been used by prisoners who made “prison art” while in jail. At a conceptual level the project wished to facilitate dialogue as a means of opening new ways of imagining the future as it continues to emerge from conflict. This was envisaged to be through focusing on the process of creation rather than the form of the created artwork. The interest in process was important. It was initially conceived that while the artists facilitated this dialogic process, the anthropologist (me) would be present to record and investigate how the dialogues, negotiations, relationship building, and processes involved in production would take shape. During the course of this project many of these aims, hopes, and objectives had to be amended in order to facilitate participation by diverse groups in ways that would not have been foreseen in the more relaxed times of early 2016, and my role also stalled. The initial focus on “prison art” meant that the lens for participation was viewed through the material culture of those who would have produced such items while in

Figure 12.4 An example of prison art as located in an exhibition of Conway Mills Irish Republican History Museum, West Belfast (c. 2007). Photo: Laura McAtackney.

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Long Kesh/Maze—the prisoners (Moloney 1999). While this was considered an important aspect of the participatory approach—utilizing prison art ensured that the source material was embedded in the “troubled” past of Northern Ireland—it quickly become clear that definitions would have to be widened in terms of what was defined as “prison art,” and what included participation would also be extended. It was acknowledged early in the process that to achieve the involvement of ex-prisoners, exprison personnel, and their communities then the focus on prisoner material culture had to be negotiable. By mid 2016, many people did not feel quite so open about negotiating their meanings and understandings of iconic remnants of the recent conflict with those whom they would have considered antagonists. This meant that “prison art” was theoretically reconceptualized as a multifaceted term that allowed any prison-related material culture to be included. In this sensitive context it was extended to encompass a wide range of objects, including parts of the prison infrastructure that have been scavenged and transitioned into community museums through to artistic artifacts made from wood, leather, plastic, paper, string, nails, metal, or any form of material traditionally used in the prison (Figure 12.5). This term was so flexible as to include artworks created by the artists that were inspired by pre-existing forms of prison art, a method called “reappropriation” by Krenn and O’Beirn. In practice, the

Figure 12.5 A piece of prison infrastructure—a blood pressure gauge with “HMP Maze Hospital” written on the side—that has transitioned from Long Kesh/Maze to the Conway Mills Irish Republican History Museum (c. 2007). Photo: Laura McAtackney.

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focus of the artists and participants stayed on more traditional forms of prison art and this focus was reflected in the eventual participants not including prison officers or other official personnel, despite attempts to include them. It became clear at the beginning of the project that ex-prisoners were more reticent than we had anticipated to take part in the project and ex-prison personnel and their communities were almost absent. This further impacted on my role as the anthropologist. Would any of the contributors be happy to be observed in discussing or creating their “prison art”? I think by the time the only creative group workshop had been set up— with the “50+ Club”—the anxiety around working with this group of women would not have allowed this to have been a helpful addition. Throughout the project there was perceived to be a need to engage as widely as possible, with a large number of interested individuals, stakeholders, and groups, to ensure that participation of various forms could be undertaken. This was a lengthy and often fruitless process that was impacted by the reticence of some groups and individuals to publicly engage with issues relating to the prison. It became clear during some of the meetings with groups, visits to community museums (many of which house remnants from Long Kesh/Maze), and discussions with facilitators and advocates that this was particularly an issue for some loyalists and marginalized republicans. In their meetings with the artists it was expressed by many potential participants outside of mainstream republican circles that the site was a problem because it was perceived as already established as part of a perceived Sinn Féin (official republican) narrative of the Troubles. However, there was also clear anxiety about publicly discussing (or reopening contentions about) legacies issues from the conflict when the present peace did not feel stable. Due to the unexpected reverses and disappointments in the setting-up and maintaining of contacts with many groups and individuals there was an issue of time. It was necessary to move the project forward at a pace that worked with gaining the trust of the uncertain participants but also addressed the pre-conceived outputs of a three-year-funded, multi-sited EU project. Especially in the first year of the project, this created a lot of tension for the project team and meant that the artists had to continually change their aims and push for new contacts while they often waited for extended periods for responses and replies. The realities of working with contentious heritage during times of uncertainty meant that progress into actually creating participatory art pieces was not as swift or linear as envisaged at the project set-up stage. In the end only one set of communal, participatory art workshops were completed and this was with a pre-existing republican women’s group—the “50+ Club”—none of whom had been inmates in the jail. Their participation was ongoing over a number of months in the spring and summer of 2017 and their outputs were displayed alongside a range of new creations and images as part of an exhibition curated by O’Beirn and Krenn in Belfast in September 2018 (TRACES 2018). The changes to the project outcomes had to include less invasive, time-consuming, and interactive forms of participation. This included the method of “restaging,” which entailed having conversations about the pre-existing prison art, including a process of naming, culminating in photographing the artworks in a studio (by Krenn). The dialogic aspect was often limited to participants talking with the artists rather than with other participants (except in the “retelling” method).

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The decision to include the voices of various stakeholders in the CCP was informed by insights gleaned from the various policy plans for the transition of the site. As noted above, the last version of the Maze/Long Kesh Masterplan (2011) stated that there were “about 33” different narrative strands identified from the site and it was concluded that each story should be told “with sensitivity and equality” if the site is opened to and interpreted for the public (COFMDFM 2012). While the aims and scale of this project are smaller than what was envisaged by the prison masterplan it was considered central to its successful completion that a variety of perspectives should be included. While it would not be possible to locate thirty-three different narrative threads during this TRACES project, it was apparent during the three years that many underrepresented stories were uncovered. It was also apparent that some stories are easier to locate, more palatable for the participants to tell, and are more central to understanding the prison than others.

Some final thoughts As someone who comes from Northern Ireland and has worked on the material remains of conflict for nearly two decades I found “Transforming Maze/Long Kesh Prison” a greatly insightful project to be involved in. This is not because everything happened as it had been planned or the insights arrived at were especially earthshattering. It was because this project revealed that a site that has been closed and largely demolished throughout the post-conflict context is still “active.” Long Kesh/ Maze being the subject of the CCP clearly provoked responses that were meaningful, unexpected, sensitive, difficult, emotional, and conflicted. It is a contested and contentious site but it is clearly a site of potential heritage whose impact and significance is retained despite its rescinding from the media spotlight and political jostling. While involved in this project I discovered many interesting insights into how people remember and engage with the material remains of this site. Working with artists has made me question my archaeological gaze on the material world of the prison and consider how they are creatively inspired by it. Ethically, I have questioned my reactions to the roles of participants in the project but also its outputs. During the latter stages of the project, I argued for protecting the anonymity of participants, regardless of their consent to be named. I have long experience of working with people who were connected to Long Kesh/Maze and I have discovered that while many people feel comfortable with the validity of their comments at the time of making them, they do not always feel that way moving forward. In my own experience, participants have later told me they no longer believed statements they had definitively made in previous interviews. In a similar vein, Cahal McLaughlin has discussed his ethical decision to allow participants in his Prison Memory Archive to retain ownership of their oral testimonies in perpetuity. Such a decision recognizes the limits of informed consent but it has resulted in some participants withdrawing the material many years after it was made (Bannerman and McLaughlin 2009). I believe such issues have implications for artists as well as social scientists and I enjoyed discussing the repercussions of these decisions with Krenn and O’Beirn.

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Looking back from the end of the project, I feel this collaboration was important and meaningful for me and I feel I was able to contribute to its completion. That is not to say this was always an easy collaboration. Working relationships, especially across distance, can be difficult to maintain over long periods of time. The stresses the artists felt in trying to ignite and then complete the project, alongside the exclusion I felt during the workshop stage in 2017, became a point of mild contention at times. It became clear to me that stepping beyond the role of anthropologist to assist in the setup of the project had implications in how I was able to engage with the processes of artistic creation moving forward. In the end, I retained my role from a distance and I have tried to be supportive of how Martin and Aisling have progressed and negotiated the material role of Long Kesh/Maze in the uneasy peace of contemporary Northern Ireland. I know little more about the intricacies of the thoughts and motivations of the many participants due to my lack of engagement in the practice of “restaging” and “retelling.” However, I feel I have a better understanding of how multi-sited projects based on a singular idea of transmitting “awkward pasts” can take various, unexpected forms in practice. In that respect, I believe the project “Transforming Long Kesh/Maze Prison” was highly successful in providing insights into the changing nature of “contentious heritage,” the limits of dialogic artistic practices, and their connection to contemporary politics in post-conflict contexts.

References Bannerman, Christopher and Cahal McLaughlin (2009). “Collaborative ethics in practiceas-research,” in Ludivine Fuschini, Simon Jones, Baz Kershaw, and Angela Piccini (eds.) Practice-as Research: In Performance and Screen. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Belfast Agreement (1998). Belfast: Stationery Office. Byrne, Sean, Chuck Thiessen, Eyob Fissuh, Cynthia Irvin, and Marcia Hawranik (2008). “Economic assistance, development and peacebuilding: the role of the IFI and EU Peace II Fund in Northern Ireland,” Civil Wars, 10(2): 106–24. Clark, Tom (2008). “ ‘We’re over-researched here!’ Exploring accounts of research fatigue within qualitative research engagements,” Sociology, 42(5): 953–70. Committee for the Office of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister (COFMDFM) (2012). Maze/Long Kesh Site: Departmental Briefing, May 16, Official Report (Hansard). Belfast: Northern Ireland Assembly. Available at: http://www.niassembly.gov.uk/ assembly-business/official-report/committee-minutes-of-evidence/session-2011-2012/ may-2012/mazelong-kesh-site--departmental-briefing/ (accessed March 19, 2019). Crooke, Elizabeth (2010). “The politics of community heritage: motivations, authority and control,” International Journal of Heritage Studies, 16(1–2): 16–29. Derrida, Jacques (1993). Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. London: Routledge Classics. Douglas, Neville and Peter Shirlow (1998). “People in conflict in place: the case of Northern Ireland,” Political Geography, 17(2): 125–8. Graham, Brian and Sara McDowell (2007). “Meaning in the Maze: the heritage of Long Kesh,” Cultural Geographies, 14(3): 343–68. Hayward, Katy (2017). “The DUP was painted into a corner by Brexiters’ hyperbole, but a solution is possible,” Guardian, December 6. Available at: https://www.theguardian.

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com/commentisfree/2017/dec/06/dup-brexiters-northern-ireland-brexit (accessed March 19, 2019). Hepburn, A.C. (2001). “Long division and ethnic conflict: the experience of Belfast,” in Seamus Dunn (ed.), Managing Divided Cities. Keele: Keele University Press, pp. 88–105. Heritage Lottery Fund (2016). Irish Republican Prison Crafts: Making Memory and Legacy. Available at: https://www.hlf.org.uk/our-projects/irish-republican-prison-craftsmaking-memory-and-legacy (accessed March 19, 2019). Irish News (2005). “The Road to Normalisation,” (news report), August 28. Jarman, Neil (2002). “Troubling remnants: dealing with the remains of conflict in Northern Ireland,” in John Schofield, William G. Johnson, and Colleen M. Beck (eds.), Matériel Culture: The Archaeology of Twentieth-Century Conflict. London: Routledge, pp. 281–95. Jones, Andy (2005). “Lives in fragments? Personhood and the European Neolithic,” Journal of Social Archaeology, 5(2): 193–224. Jones, Jonathan (2010). “Belfast’s Ulster Museum and the troubles with the Troubles,” Guardian, May 19. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/ jonathanjonesblog/2010/may/19/museums-northern-ireland-troubles (accessed March 19, 2019). Kelly, Ben (2019). “Why is there no government in Northern Ireland and how did power-sharing collapse?” Independent, February 14. Available at https://www. independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/northern-ireland-talks-latest-updates-stormontpower-sharing-deal-what-deal-look-sinn-fein-dup-deal-a8207916.html (accessed March 19, 2019). Knox, Colin (2016). “Northern Ireland: where is the peace dividend?” Policy & Politics Journal Blog, July 27. Available at: https://policyandpoliticsblog.com/2016/07/27/ northern-ireland-where-is-the-peace-dividend/ (accessed March 19, 2019). Markham, Katie (2018). “Organised innocence in the Paramilitary Museum.” in Elizabeth Crooke and Tom Maguire (eds.), Heritage After Conflict: Northern Ireland. London: Routledge. McAtackney, Laura (2011). “Peace maintenance and political messages: the significance of walls during and after the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland,” Journal of Social Archaeology 11(1): 77–98. McAtackney, Laura (2014). An Archaeology of the Troubles: The Dark Heritage of Long Kesh/Maze. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McAtackney, Laura (2015) “Memorials and marching: archaeological insights into segregated tradition in Northern Ireland,” Northern Worlds: Special Edition of Historical Archaeology, 49(3): 110–25. McAtackney, Laura (2018). “The many forms and meanings of (peace) walls in contemporary Northern Ireland,” Review of International American Studies, 11(1). McGrattan, Cillian (2009). “ ‘Order out of chaos’: the politics of transitional justice,” Politics, 29(3): 164–72. McKeown, Laurence (2001). Out of Time: Irish Republican Prisoners, 1982–2000. Dublin: Beyond the Pale Publications. McLaughlin, Cahal (2007). “ ‘Under the same roof ’: separate stories of Long Kesh/Maze,” in Louise Purbrick, Jim Aulich, and Graham Dawson (eds.), Contested Spaces: Sites, Representations and Histories of Conflict. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Maze/Long Kesh Masterplan (2011). Belfast: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. Moloney, Mike (1999). Prison Art and the Conflict in Northern Ireland. Belfast. Northern Ireland Arts Council.

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Northern Ireland Office (NIO) (2018). Addressing the Legacy of Northern Ireland’s Past (Consultation Paper). Belfast and London: Northern Ireland Office. Parr, Connal and Edward Burke (2017). “Brexit: what are the issues surrounding Northern Ireland’s border and could it scupper UK’s EU withdrawal,” Independent, December 5. Available at: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-latest-northernireland-border-republic-dup-arlene-foster-theresa-may-david-davis-eu-a8093171.html (accessed March 19, 2019). Smith, Laurajane (2006). The Uses of Heritage. London: Routledge TRACES (2018). “Dispersed Presence: Transforming Maze / Long Kesh. CCP5 Exhibition,” August 23. Available at: http://www.traces.polimi.it/2018/08/23/ transforming-maze-long-kesh-ccp5-exhibition/ (accessed March 19, 2019).

13

Dispersed Presence Long Kesh/Maze Prison, its Artifacts as Catalysts of Testimony Martin Krenn and Aisling O’Beirn

A catalyst can be understood as a substance, person or thing whose presence precipitates material or metaphorical change, while itself remaining unchanged by that process. While a catalytic metaphor has its origins in describing mechanisms inherent in chemical reactions it is also a useful analogy for suggesting the potency of materials to deal with more philosophical and aesthetic problems. To extend the metaphor, can a catalyst still retain the power to precipitate change while no longer in the presence of one of the reactants?1 Being mindful of this metaphor was useful during our artistic research for “Transforming Long Kesh/Maze,” a dialogical art project exploring the famous, contested, and now inaccessible former prison just outside Belfast. Taking inspiration from Laura McAtackney’s research into the importance of the material culture of the prison as a vehicle to understand its complexities and contested nature, we explored her concept of the “distributed self ” (McAtackney 2014: 244–65) to devise an artistic methodology centered around prison materiality and dispersed material presences as a catalyst to work with participants with first-hand experience of the prison.2 On encountering McAtackney’s work we made contact with her at an early stage of the project. She was instrumental in introducing us to many contacts for the subsequent project and our conference, as well as sharing with us ongoing invaluable insights into ways to navigate the difficulties of the ever-evolving political context, which had a bearing on our initial attempts to make contacts. Not unlike the political situation, our project started, stalled, and stopped at various stages. These ongoing interdisciplinary dialogues with McAtackney were fundamental in negotiating the ever-shifting political terrain and are further explored in her chapter in this volume. Considering the site’s history and context as articulated by its dispersed material presences we were triggered to consider its artifacts as catalytic “lieux de mémoire”/“places of memory” (Nora 1989: 7–24), where the tangibly physical reveals its psychological dimension. As such, its artifacts have a catalytic ability to haunt, in all the contradictory forms it can involve. Hence, in working with diverse participants 175

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having different political perspectives, the prison’s inaccessibility, along with its dispersed material culture, we marshaled Jacques Derrida’s concept of “Hauntology” with specific focus on the paradox inherent in defining the “specter” as “the furtive and ungraspable visibility of the invisible or an invisibility of a visible X” (Derrida 1993: 4). Declan Long, in his introduction to Ghost-Haunted Land, in citing Willie Doherty’s work, recalls Derrida by imploring us to live with ghosts (Long 2017: 4). This makes sense in relation to a prison that is a tangibly intangible “ghost” with the potential to “haunt” us yet. Since its closure, the ontological status of this prison has adopted a “spectral” status. This status is represented by “the figure of the ghost as that which is neither present nor absent, neither dead nor alive” (Davis 2005: 373–9). Clearly, such a “specter” has potential to unsettle post-conflict society; as long as the will and/or capability to address the past is lacking. However, this “spectral” status also means that the legacy of “Long Kesh/Maze” legacy remains open to new interpretation, and, if handled in an agonistic and mutually respectful manner, holds the potential to contribute to ongoing reconciliation. Thus, given the ongoing lack of access to the prison site, Long’s recognition of the productive potential inherent in the paradox of being neither fully in the past or present, nor wholly in one place or the other (Long 2017: 5) allows the paradoxical specter, released by the artifact/catalyst, to be harnessed in service of constructive agonism (Mouffe 2013: 1–18). By focusing on the prison’s testimony, via participants’ interactions with its material culture, we use art as a means to dialogically engage with this contested context. Our work, with participants who had first-hand experiences of the prison, resulted in a set of dialogically produced photographs of existing prison artifacts, as well as a range of newly produced objects made employing a range of techniques traditionally used in the production of prison art. The participatory production of these images and objects acted as a catalyst to perform and channel lesser-known narratives regarding the prison, its specters, and its future. Against such political and philosophical contexts, we outline some artistic examples from our project to discuss three principal dialogical methods we developed for working with a range of participants. The methods, “restaging” (while occasionally repairing), “reappropriation,” and “ ‘retelling,” engender dialogue while avoiding negatively dwelling on the past or the reiteration of previously rehearsed and ideologically overdetermined narratives.

Method 1: restaging Methods of restaging have long been a tradition in art practice, with their roots stemming from the avant-garde of the last century. One recent prominent example is Jeremy Deller’s seminal artwork, The Battle of Orgreave (2001), wherin protagonists in the original confrontation (among others) between striking miners and police during the 1984 Miner’s Strike were invited to reenact the event.3 Deller’s project goes beyond representation, with a long lead-in dedicated to researching the context and working with participants, and served as a vehicle to deal with a difficult and seminal historic event within living memory.

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Rather than developing a performance that would “stage’ ” ex-prisoners, ex-prison employees, and ex-visitors from Long Kesh/Maze, we worked with participants to restage objects and artifacts from the prison, on a purposefully intimate scale to trigger memories, thoughts, and ideas.4 Time spent building trust was integral to participants allowing us to photograph personal objects from the prison, which they made, own, or are “caretaking” for the future. With the participant in the room, playing an active role in the task of image making, we placed each object in a mobile photo studio. We recorded the participant outlining their relationship to the object as a starting point to develop statements which were further refined and agreed in follow-up meetings and correspondence. The actual “naming process” was much more spontaneous as we asked participants to title and date the respective artifact, for a label made on site with a small portable labeling machine. The label was then positioned within the image frame, before photographing the object. Thus, “naming” became as integral as the object to the restaging process. Finally, Martin Krenn photographed the object. These photographs with testimonies became the final photo-text works. The collaborative restaging of objects allowed us to appropriately address the individually diverse and often very difficult social and political layers inscribed in the artifacts. Although each photo-text work focuses only on a single object, the title and personal statement supplemented with footnotes give additional historical information to the detailed photographic representation of the staged object. This method also importantly opened up ways of working with custodians of artifacts in private collections, normally unseen by the public.5 Many artifacts (Figures  13.1, 13.2 and 13.3) are in individuals’ collections, acting out various performed and hidden roles on their respective private stages before being “restaged” in our photo booth. Somewhere my Love’s owner said she regularly activates her windmill with a turn of its arms to play its song as she enters her bedroom. The object resides among an extensive range of artifacts made by republican ex-prisoners. Her collection grew as her imprisoned son and his fellow prisoners showed their appreciation for her ongoing weekly visits by gifting her objects they had made. However, not all objects are on display. Many are tucked away in storage, on top of wardrobes, in boxes under beds, or stowed in attics. Thankfully Never Used 1976–2000, a former prison officer’s disused, pristine, prison-issue stainless steel whistle was one such object. It was safely packed away for years. Our request to see personal objects pertaining to the prison prompted him to remember where he had kept it and it was only taken out of storage for us to see and photograph. It was not lost on us that even the desire to seek out or look at these unseen and often ephemeral or delicate objects can result in material changes to them. Storing them might safeguard them from damage but, equally, it can mean that damage caused by the passage of time or the seclusion of storage can go unchecked. If these objects have catalytic properties they show that even metaphorical catalysts can be changed by their context. As well as being largely unseen, many objects are not as robust in surviving domestic storage conditions. Especially vulnerable are those crafted by prisoners using whatever materials came to hand. Destruction can come from unexpected sources. A mouse ate

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Figure 13.1 Somewhere my Love, testimony and artifact courtesy of Chrissie McCorry, 50+ Group. Materials: music box, brass chain, brass tacks, lollipop sticks, mahogany, matchsticks, paint, timber strips, upholstered velvet, and wood. Photo: Martin Krenn and Aisling O’Beirn, 2018.

Figure 13.2 Thankfully Never Used 1976–2000, testimony and artifact courtesy of Phil Holland, former prison officer. Description: stainless steel whistle on a chain with buttonhole clasp. “Made in England” embossed on whistle barrel. Photo: Martin Krenn and Aisling O’Beirn, 2018.

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Figure 13.3 Porridge Stage 1, testimony and artifact courtesy of loyalist ex-prisoner, repaired by Martin Krenn and Aisling O’Beirn. Materials: brass fittings, broom bristles, doll’s bed, draughts pieces, lollipop sticks, matchsticks, paint, plum velvet, printed pictures, prison yard pebbles, wood, and varnish. Photo. Martin Krenn and Aisling O’Beirn, 2018.

Figure 13.4 Message 1981?, testimony courtesy of loyalist ex-prisoner, object made by Martin Krenn and Aisling O’Beirn in response to testimony. Materials: chalk, found display drawer lined with plum-colored velvet, fishing line, panel pins. Photo: Martin Krenn and Aisling O’Beirn, 2018.

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the porridge render from a model thatched cottage made by a loyalist ex-prisoner. The damage was only discovered when he went up to his attic to get the object for us to photograph. On hearing his story, O’Beirn spontaneously offered to repair the cottage, using the techniques and materials he described. The repair process was tentative and telling. While serving to build trust it also gave some insight into the time and material resourcefulness needed for making objects in the confines of a prison.6 In repairing something made by someone else one has to consider the material process from the maker’s perspective. Attention was all the more important as the object was a gift, with a dedication to his young daughter. The episode highlighted the vulnerable, familial, and hidden nature of many of these prison-made objects. The question regarding their fate once their current custodians are gone arose through the “restaging” process. Many people we spoke to from both republican and loyalist backgrounds said objects can get lost, damaged or thrown out in house clearances and that early mortality is common among the ex-prisoner population. Our next method, “reappropriation,” addresses some “lost” objects and images.

Method 2: reappropriation “Appropriation Art” describes a recently developed artistic method where artists strategically copy or quote pre-existing objects of cultural significance, or even other artists’ works, with, at most, only slight alteration. The citation is the art practice itself. In opposition to plagiarism or forging artworks, this practice is not a fraud. It is an act of conscious appropriation of other artworks to create new art (Nelson 2003; Schneider 2003).7 Our approach to “Appropriation Art” has been tailored to address the temporal nature of remaining prison artifacts and the time limits on first-hand testimony. Having taken photographs of existing artifacts, we also employed materials and methods traditionally used in making prison art to create new artifacts. We term this “Reappropriation” as our new objects echo participant testimonies, which provided us with a catalytic framework for their creation. “Reappropriation” also allowed us to point to the importance of the relationship between testimony and artifact. Making Message 1981? reiterated the need for material inventiveness and resourcefulness. The “string art” technique harks to a time-consuming early 1970s aesthetic, a period just before political imagery was overtly used by prisoners. It was not lost on us that these string images are dependent on threads continuing to hold under tension. The uncertainty around details of seeing and tracking the kite-like form emanating from the prison is intriguing and telling. The unknown Irish words on the kite become an undecipherable code on landing in a predominantly loyalist area at the height of the conflict. Here O’Beirn used inherited materials found in her studio, a former fishing tackle shop. Fishing line stood in for the metallic colored threads used in original 1970s string art. An old velvet-lined display drawer for fishing flies provided a faux plush backdrop to the image, mindful that making fly-fishing ties was one of the more popular courses offered to prisoners.

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Method 3: retelling As Long Kesh/Maze was an all-male prison, much of the familiar narrative focuses on prisoners and prison staff. Accounts of prison protests, and the dangers of the prison environment to prisoners and staff, are widely known (especially to those with firsthand experience of the prison, regardless of political affiliation). Perhaps lesser known are the accounts of prisoners’ families whose everyday lives and routines were also permeated in every way by the prison. The 50+ Group of women met weekly under the umbrella of Tar Anall, an organization dedicated to the welfare of republican ex-prisoners and their families. These women were politically active as well as visiting their republican prisoner relatives. Some were also imprisoned in Armagh Women’s Prison during the conflict. After several meetings with us, they became the most engaged participants in our project. They generously gave an often unheard, female perspective on an ostensibly male-dominated narrative. We worked very intensively with this group. We not only photographed their extensive private collections of artifacts using our “restaging” method, but they also made new objects with us. They employed prison material techniques traditionally to testify their experience of visiting loved ones, thus retelling an “other” story of Long Kesh/Maze from their unique visitor perspective. The women made four new objects: The Bully Bully Bus (pictured), a minibus used for prison visits; a black taxi also used for visits; as well as a Nissan hut and an H-Block, reflecting different periods in the prison’s history. In making the 1970s-style minibus, they shared reminiscences and good humor about the van’s rickety state and frequent breakdowns, as well as the tricky and often frustratingly fiddly process of working with lollipop sticks and glue. Many said that they had never made objects before, unlike

Figure 13.5 The Bully Bully Bus, testimony courtesy of the 50+ Group. Artifact made by the 50+ group with Martin Krenn and Aisling O’ Beirn. Materials: card, glue, lollipop sticks, paper tape, wood, and varnish. Photo: Martin Krenn and Aisling O’Beirn, 2018.

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their imprisoned relatives. However, they had previously worked together making large stitched wall hangings with prison-related imagery, now displayed in their meeting room. Several were dressmakers prior to retiring and brought their skills and craftsmanship to bear when making the new objects.

Conclusion Using the three complementary processes of “restaging,” “reappropriation,” and “retelling” to produce dialogical artworks, we engaged both present and absent artifacts as catalysts for testimony and dialog investigating perceptions of this prison. We purposefully worked with objects and methods to try to move past previously inscribed ideological positions to engage in debate about this difficult and diffuse site against a background of dislocated “specters” and continued political stagnation. Our findings take the form of a traveling exhibition, designed to be shown in public places such as libraries, schools, and community museums, outside traditional artworld settings. Additionally, a book of photographs with the participant statements and several articles by guest authors (Laura McAtackney, Suzana Mileskva, and Peter Mutschler) will be published by K. Verlag in 2019. As the title of our project “Transforming Long Kesh/Maze” suggests, the bespoke, paradoxical phenomenon of the site’s inaccessibility/accessibility can act as a springboard to consider future possibilities by engaging with its lesser-known narratives. We believe that it is possible to transform perceptions of the partly invisible but always highly contested heritage of this prison into productive multi-perspective knowledge so that this spectral site’s contentiousness might yet be harnessed to sustainably improve the peace process in Northern Ireland.

Notes on the figures Figure 13.1: Somewhere my Love “Somewhere, my Love”* was the song that plays on it. There’s a name on it: “To Chrissie McCorry ó Dinny.”** Ó Dinny: that’s a fella from Derry. I don’t even know his second name. Dinny was my son’s friend who was also in jail. I was given many objects; every time I went on a visit I got something. I keep it in my bedroom. Most nights when I go in I turn it on to listen to the song, as it’s one of my favorite songs. * “Somewhere, my Love” is a song from a 1966 album by Connie Francis. The song uses a leitmotif from “Lara’s Theme,” composed by Maurice Jarre, made famous on the soundtrack of the 1965 film Doctor Zhivago. ** “ó Dinny” is the Irish translation of “from Dinny.” Testimony and artifact courtesy of Chrissie McCorry, 50+ Group

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Figure 13.2: Thankfully Never Used 1976–2000 The only thing that I kept of my own, that I thought worthy of keeping, was my prison service issue alert whistle. I don’t know why I kept it, but it’s just been there. I’ve had that from when I first joined in 1976. It was something that was part of my uniform. It was like an adornment between the two breast pockets. You would have used it if needed if you’d had time to do so. If there was any trouble you knew to call for help because a lot of the time in the prison you were on your own. You could have been quite isolated at times. You used to only hope that you never needed to use it. Testimony and artifact courtesy of Phil Holland, former prison officer

Figure 13.3: Porridge Stage 1 For the cottages that we made, we actually used porridge and it was painted with glue. It was OK for the exhibition in November 2016. It was put back up into the attic. When I went to get it last night a mouse had eaten all the porridge off it. I’d say it’s dead after eating twenty-year-old painted porridge. It would be pretty easy to repair, just glue it and stick the porridge on again. It is worth doing because it is very nice. I never look at it very often but it’s there. It’s nice to have it there you know. Testimony and artifact courtesy of loyalist ex-prisoner, repaired by Krenn and O’Beirn

Figure 13.4: Message 1981? Many years ago there was a particularly strange scenario.* I remember kites being flown from the prison. It must have been connected to the hunger strikes, but I’m not sure, it might have been before that. The kites were flown so high that they looked just like very small coffins. They cut them and there was about 200 meters of fishing line on each to launch it into the sky. I remember it well because we followed one of the kites for about two miles from where we lived. We found the kite and it had messages written on it in Irish. I brought it home. My mum and dad both worked and when they walked in that night there was a white coffin just sitting on the floor. It was the kite. I’ve never been able to get an explanation; it was definitely republican prisoners. I’ve heard that it might have been the Official IRA sending messages out. I don’t know whether that’s true or not. It would be interesting to find out what that was all about because it wasn’t just one kite, there was a number of them, made from white bed sheets. * The author of the statement grew up as a child in a housing estate very close to Long Kesh/Maze. Years later, as an adult, he eventually was arrested and became an inmate of this prison. His experience as a prisoner is described in “Reflection.” Testimony courtesy of loyalist ex-prisoner

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Figure 13.5: The Bully Bully Bus A Hamill Street resident drove the bus.* It was called the Bully Bully Bus because the first time we went on a visit all the young women on it with their babies and young children were singing rebel songs. We couldn’t sing because we were crying so much. It was miserable. The women were amazing because some of them were very young but they kept their spirits up by singing. * Local people volunteered to drive relatives to the prison once a week for prison visits. Many of the women in the 50+ Group got to know each other going on these grueling weekly prison visits. This system of someone volunteering to drive relatives to their visits was also used by loyalists. We photographed a table made as a thank-you to someone who drove a bus for relatives of loyalist prisoners. Testimony courtesy of the 50+ Group

Notes 1

2

3

4

5

6

We use catalyst as a metaphor mindful that it is frequently used in art contexts almost to the point of cliché; however, it is a useful metaphor in the absence of alternative terminology and is borne out by how it even lends itself to the names of progesssive arts organizations that seek to initiate cultural change such as the artist-run venue Catalyst Arts in Belfast and Arts Catalyst in London, an organization that facilitates and promotes ambitious research projects between artists and scientists. With thanks to all participants for access to collections and participation: David Stitt, The Andy Tyrie Interpretive Centre, The Eileen Hickey Irish Republican History Museum, The Roddy McCorley Society Museum, Simon Bridge, Phil Holland, The 50+ Group, and various private collections and individuals. There was something almost archaeological and painstaking in this dialogical artistic inquiry. Participation provides subtle ways to jog memories and reassess events with the benefit of hindsight. See http://www.jeremydeller.org/TheBattleOfOrgreave/ TheBattleOfOrgreave.php (accessed April 25, 2018). Another example of such a participatory project by Deller is We’re Here Because We’re Here, where thousands of volunteers took part in a public action to mark the 100th Anniversary of the Battle of the Somme: https://becausewearehere.co.uk (accessed April 27, 2018). Theater of Witness, founded over thirty years ago by the director Teya Sepinuck, is an excellent example of a form of testimonial performance and filmmaking. Pieces are performed by people brought together to collectively share their experiences of suffering. See http://www.theaterofwitness.org/about/ (accessed April 27, 2018). Although we conceived and realized all aspects of the project together, we decided to subdivide our work in certain cases over the course of our project. Aisling O’Beirn recorded the interviews while Martin Krenn took the photos in consultation with Aisling O’Beirn and the respective participant. Equally, Aisling O’Beirn constructed new objects in consultation with Martin Krenn and the participants (see sections on “reappropriation” and “retelling”). Mike Moloney, in his publication for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland (2009), discusses how sometimes objects were made because they were very time-consuming

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because the act of making prison art is not just about the object but also about using time up during very long days in prison. This artistic technique goes back to the beginning of the last century but the term has became especially popular since the 1980s.

References Davis, Colin (2005). “Hauntology, spectres and phantoms,” French Studies, 59(3): 373–39. Stable URL: https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/kni143 (accessed January 24, 2018). Derrida, Jacques (1993). Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. London: Routledge Classics. Krenn, Martin and Aisling O’Beirn (eds.) (2019). Restaging the Object: A Participatory Exploration of Long Kesh/Maze Prison. Berlin: K. Verlag. Long, Declan (2017). Ghost-Haunted Land: Contemporary Art and Post-Troubles Northern Ireland. Manchester: Manchester University Press. McAtackney, Laura (2014). An Archaeology of the Troubles: The Dark Heritage of Long Kesh/Maze Prison. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moloney, Mike (2009). Prison Art and the Conflict in Northern Ireland: A Troubles Archive Essay. Belfast: Arts Council of Northern Ireland. Nelson, Robert S. (2003). “Appropriation,” in Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff (eds.), Critical Terms for Art History (2nd edition). Chicago. IL : University of Chicago Press. Mouffe, Chantal (2013). Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically. London and New York: Verso. Nora, Pierre (1989). “Between memory and history: les lieux des mémoires,” Representations, Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory, 26: 7–24. Schneider, Arnd (2003). “On ‘appropriation’: a critical reappraisal of the concept and its application in global art practices,” Social Anthropology, 11(2): 215–29.

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Index Abélès, Marc, 49 Abraham, Nicolas, 89 Ades, Dawn, 2 Adler, Tal, 5, 7, 131, 134–6, 148, 153 Ahmed, Sara, 47 Akkad, Moustapha, 34n Anderson, Benedict, 50, 60 Andrić, Ivo, 11n Antoine, Daniel, 134 Anton, Răzvan, 10, 65–7, 69 Appiah, Kwame, 4 Augé, Marc, 6 Badiou, Alain, 116 Bajič, Blaž, 5, 121 Baker, Simon, 2 Balibar, Etienne, 50 Ballinger, Pamela, 27, 31 Bannerman, Christopher, 171 Basu, Paul, 5, 149 Bataille, Georges, 2 Bateson, Gregory, 2 Baumgarten, Lothar, 3 Becker, Howard, 2 Bellier, Irène, 49 Bellu, Matei, 5, 10 Belting, Hans, 109 Benjamin, Walter, 60, 153 Berlusconi, Silvio, 30–1 Biehl, João, 48 Borneman, John, 49 Brglez, Živa, 103–4 Bruner, Edward, 3 Buekens, Alfons, 156 Burke, Edward, 161 Byrne, Sean, 161 Campbell, Joseph, 2 Cankar, Ivan, 106, 117n Cappelletto, Francesca, 28 Caputo, Giacomo, 16, 25, 37, 45n

Cen, Kefa, 156 Cerol Paradiž, Ana, 110 Cipriani, Lidio, 20, 23 Clark, Michael, 142 Clark, Tom, 165 Clifford, James, 2–4, 6 Commodus, 45n Contini, Leone, 2, 5, 7, 10, 15, 20, 23–5, 28, 32 Cooper, Frederick, 29 Crapanzano, Vincent, 28–9 Crooke, Elizabeth, 161 Czarnecki, Adam, 80–1, 83–4 Czerwiński, Włacław, 96 David, Isabel, 29 Davis, Colin, 176 Davis, Douglas, 153 Dawson, Julie, 10 de Certeau, Michel, 127 Del Boca, Angelo, 19, 28 Deleuze, Gilles, 48 de Koning, Anouk, 141 Deller, Jeremy, 176, 184n Deren, Maya, 2 Derrida, Jacques, 10, 88–9, 161, 176 di Lella, Rossana, 32 Dohorty, Willie, 176 Douglas, Neville, 159 Dović, Marijan, 109–11, 117n, 121 Edwards, Elizabeth, 135, 144 Einstein, Carl, 2 Eldridge, Claire, 28–9 Elhaik, Tarek, 10 Engelking, Barbara, 90n Estalella, Adolfo 76 Evans-Pritchard, E.E., 22, 26 Fabian, Johannes, 81 Feldman, Jeffery David, 117n Ferguson, Mark A., 142

187

188 Fibiger, Linda, 135, 148, 153 Fiorletta, Serena, 20 Fissuh, Eyob, 161 Ford, Thomas E., 142 Foster, Hal, 149 Foucault, Michel, 144n Fowler, Nick, 49 Francis, Connie, 182 Gaddafi, Muammar, 26–7, 29, 31–2, 34n Gandolfo, Francesca, 34n Geissler, Paul Wenzel, 6, 10 Gell, Alfred, 149 Gellner, Ernest, 117n Giesen, Myra, 134 Gilroy, Paul, 4 Gojkovič, Viktor, 114, 117n Grabowski, Jan, 90n Graff, Grzegorz, 94 Graham, Brian, 164, 166 Graziani, Rodolfo, 17–19, 37, 43 Gregorčič, Simon, 107 Gross, Jan Tomasz, 90n Guattari, Félix, 48 Gusterson, Hugh, 54 Habjan, Jernej, 109 Halberstam, Judith, 61 Hallam, Elizabeth, 9 Hamm, Marion, 115 Haraway, Donna, 48, 54 Harries, John, 5, 7, 135, 148, 153 Hawranik, Marcia, 161 Hayward, Katy, 161 Hedetoft, Ulf, 50 Hepburn, A.C., 166 Herewini, Te Herekiekie, 134, 137 Hiller, Susan, 3 Holbraad, Martin, 108 Holfelder, Ute, 8 Huggett, Clayton, 156 Ibarra-Frausto, Tomás, 3 Ingendaay, Paul, 11n Ingold, Tim, 9, 149 Irvin, Cynthia, 161 Jarman, Neil, 159–60 Jarre, Maurice, 182

Index Jenko, Marko, 114, 121 Jezernik, Božidar, 109, 117n Jones, Andy, 165 Jones, Jonathan, 161 Kafka, Franz, 47 Karp, Ivan, 3 Kaumkotter, Jürgen, 81 Kavanagh, Jen, 95 Kearl, Michael C., 153 Kelly, Ben, 161 Kelly, Julia, 2 Kempinski, Aglaja, 5, 7, 149–50 King Idris, 29, 31 Klekot, Ewa, 81 Kłos, Ludwik, 83, 95 Knight, Emily, 109 Knox, Colin, 160 Kocjančič, Maruša, 117n Kolbe, Maximilian, 79, 83, 90n Korczak, Janusz, 79, 83, 90n Kracina, Katarina Toman, 114 Kratz, Corinne, 3 Krautwurst, Udo, 52, 54 Kreamer, Christine Mullen, 3 Krenn, Martin, 5, 10, 167, 169–70, 177, 183, 184n Križnar, Naško, 110 Labanca, Nicola, 19–20, 28 Lachenal, Guillame, 6, 10 Laerdal, Asmund, 114 Lähdesmäki, Tuuli, 50 Landi, Mariangela, 20–1 Latour, Bruno, 149 Laviolette, Patrick, 6, 31–2 Lehrer, Erica, 76–7, 89, 94, 102n Leiris, Michel, 2 Le Sueur, 27 Levin, Barbara C., 156 Levine, Steven, 3 Libeskind, Daniel, 167 Lidchi, Henrietta, 4 Liebenberg, Louis, 7 Lim, H.H., 32 Locke, Peter, 48 Long, Declan, 176 Lubkemann, Stephen C., 29

Index McAtackney, Laura, 5, 159–60, 162–5, 175, 182 Macdonald, Sharon 3–5, 11n, 50, 149 McDowell, Sara, 164, 166 McGrattan, Cillian, 161 McKeown, Laurence, 166 McLaughlin, Cahal, 163–4, 171 Macron, Emmanuel, 11n McSweeney, Kayte, 95 Maniak, Katarzyna, 5, 9–10, 76 Marcus, George, 5–6, 9, 15, 54 Margozzi, Mariastella, 34n Markham, Katie, 162 Márta, Adorjáni, 71 Martínez, Francisco, 6 Masson, André, 2 Mattl-Wurm, Sylvia, 109, 117n Mead, Margaret, 2 Mead, Matt, 135, 144 Metken, Günter, 7 Métraux, Alfred, 2 Mezzadra, Sando, 60 Mileskva, Suzana, 182 Miró, Joan, 2 Moggi Cecchi, Jacopo, 20–1 Moloney, Mike, 169, 184n Mouffe, Chantal, 10, 176 Mowlam, Marjorie, 163 Mukhtar, Omar, 26, 34n, 43 Munapé, Kublai, 16 Musil, Robert, 98 Mussolini, Benito, 26, 43 Mutschler, Peter, 182 Nader, Laura, 54 Nader, Luiza, 10, 85, 88 Neilson, Brett, 60 Nelson, Robert S., 180 Nencel, Lorraine, 48 Nora, Pierre, 175 Nowicki, Wojciech, 88 O’Beirn, Aisling, 5, 10, 167, 169–70, 180, 183–4n Osthoff, Simone, 72 Paderni, Loretta, 32 Parlato, Valentino, 40 Parr, Connal, 161

Paternosto, César, 3 Pedersen, Axel Mort, 108 Pels, Peter, 54 Perec, Georges, 75 Pieke, Frank, 6 Piłat, Józef, 97 Pirman, Alenka, 104, 106–7, 117n Pirnat, Jani, 106, 108 Plankensteiner, Barbara, 3 Plečnik, Jože, 106, 114, 116n Plesner, Ursula, 54 Poignant, Roslyn, 135 Polajnar, Janez, 114, 117n Poljanec, Nani, 116n Popescu, Diana, 79 Price, Sally, 3 Puccioni, Nello, 20–3 Quinn, Anthony, 34n Rainey, Mark Justin, 10 Reeves-Evison, Theo, 10 Riding In, James, 153 Rivoal, Isabelle, 6, 15 Robinson, Peter, 167 Römhild, Regina, 1, 49 Rondini, Giuseppe, 33n Rupert, Marijan, 113 Salazar, Noel, 6, 15 Samuels, Joshua, 111 Sánchez Criado, Tomás 76 Sands, Bobby, 163 Sangren, P. Steven, 52 Sarr, Felwine, 11n Savoy, Bénédicte, 4, 11n Schifano, Mario, 40 Schneider, Arnd, 2–3, 5–7, 9, 11n, 32, 116n-17n, 149, 180 Schönberger, Klaus, 8 Schult, Tanja, 79 Sendyka, Roma, 10, 76–7, 89, 102n Sennett, Richard, 142 Sepinuck, Teya, 184n Severus, Septimus, 45n Shirlow, Peter, 159 Shore, Chris, 49, 52 Silverman, Helaine, 3 Škerlj, Božo, 110, 117n

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190 Skocz, Jan, 94–5 Skrętowicz, Zygmunt, 97 Smith, Joan, 135, 148, 153 Smith, Laurajane, 162 Sontag, Susan, 86 Staszak, Jan, 94, 98 Stearns, Carol, 88 Stearns, Peter, 88 Strathern, Marilyn, 51–2 Štromajer, Igor, 106 Strzemiński, Władysław, 85 Surdich, Francesco, 20 Swinkels, Michiel, 141 Sysling, Fenneke, 23, 117n Szczurek, Małgorzata, 95 Szöke, Anna, 135, 148, 153 Szwaja, Lynn, 3 Teschler-Nicola, Maria, 148 Thiessen, Chuck, 161 Torok, Maria, 89 Turnbull, Paul, 153

Index van Andel, Pek, 6 Verdery, Katherin, 51 Vogel, Susan, 3 Vogrinc, Jože, 116n von Oswald, Margareta, 4 Waligórska, Magdalena, 96 Walpole, Horace, 6 Wastl, Josef, 135 Wilczyk, Wojciech, 9, 77, 84–8, 95–8, 102n Wilson, Dean, 109 Wilson, Thomas M., 49 Wright, Christopher, 2–3, 9, 149 Wright, Susan, 52 Zimmerer, Ludwig, 96 Zimmerman, Andrew, 117n Župančič, Oton, 116n Zupanič, Niko, 117n Zych, Magdalena, 77, 95, 102n Żywolewski, Stanisław, 84