Performative Materials and Activist Commemoration.

Abstract

Monument debates in the second decade of the twenty-first century, turning almost entirely on questions of who is represented and by whom, might benefit from considering questions of how and with what material resources first raised in the context of post-WWII commemoration of the Holocaust and other traumatic events. The involvement of audiences in the memorial’s physical substance, entering its spaces and otherwise performing acts of commemoration rather than just looking upon public art meant to broadcast an ideal official history, has been central to the most durable memorials of the last half century, and is given a particularly radical turn by artist interested in justice and restitution. In Colombia, Doris Salcedo has taken the very fabrication of a memorial space—made from surrendered FARC firearms by women who had suffered in the war in cathartic acts of hammering sheet metal—as a performative process making commemoration physical. The same phenomena can be observed spontaneously in acts of public imagination directed at more conventional memorial objects, such as the Korean Statue for Peace, whose bronze girl commemorates the victims of sexual exploitation during WWII is clothed by anonymous contemporary Koreans. The task for theorists of monumentality today, as much as for monument-makers, is to understand how an ethics of care can meet and interact forcefully with a politics of taking responsibility.