Black Space and Trauma Ruins

Abstract

This text compares two artistic works and two ways of playing with leftovers to ask how they perform in those two seemingly different contexts. It presents two models of thinking about the relationship between history and present day mediated by leftovers, remains and ruins proposing “leftovers theory” in relation to famous Bill Brown's “Thing theory”.Black space is a term used by American artist Theaster Gates in reference to places abandoned by their inhabitants due to process of gentrification. In one of most well-known Gates’ works, band called The Black Monks of Missippi performs in the decommissioned St Laurence church in Chicago. In this instance, black space becomes a model for affirmation of the black identity described by famous philosopher Fred Moten as nothingness. The material traces, ruins, leftovers of capitalism become a space of something that in Moten work is called non-performance: specific ability to constitute the identity on the denial of agency. Blackness is always fragmented; it has a structure of leftovers that deny to become new building, new better reality.On the other side of the world Polish artist Robert Kuśmirowski reconstructed ruins that never existed. His Traumagutstrasse was site-specific work produced for gallery belonging to Warsaw Academy of Fine Art. In Polish context, the relation between body, ruin and leftovers is almost always, even if not directly, marked by the experience of II World War. In Kuśmirowski's body of work Marianne Hirsches postmemory reveals its performative potential: it is a field of “scriptive things” directing our bodies and motions to re-enact those missing in the ruins. Kuśmirowski's leftovers are a way to make history present and to make present time already historical.In the end leftovers can be understood as performative things, becoming material expression of time.