Abstract
Abandoned sites of trauma often become objects of art-based research. The forensic turn offered artists the requisite tools to approach uncommemorated post-violence sites to interact with their human and non-human actors. The usage of artistic methods allows us to inspect nondiscursive archives and retrieve information otherwise unavailable. The new wave of “forensic art” joins the efforts of post-war artists to respond to sites of mass killings. In the post-war era, sites of trauma were presented as (implicated) landscapes, or unhospitable terrains. The tendency to narrow space to the site and to contract the perspective is continued today by visual artists entering difficult memory grounds, looking down, inspecting the ground with a “forensic gaze”. A set of examples of such artistic endeavors, following the research project Uncommemorated Genocide Sites and Their Impact on Collective Memory, Cultural Identity, Ethical Attitudes and Intercultural Relations in Contemporary Poland (2016–2020) is discussed as “bystanders’ art.”
Highlights
Uncommemorated post-violence sites, sites that witnessed the Holocaust or another type of mass violence but have not been marked with monuments of explanatory plaques, display paradoxical faculties
11 Thanks to Wiesław Bartkowski, the co-author of the object, there was another important context for this object: an analysis of the influence of the spread of geolocational devices over the capability of people to find out where they are and move around autonomously
Ijhmc.arphahub.com ijhmc.arphahub.com gain access to this unique, non-verbal, mediated and local knowledge. To perceive this is of the essence to understand processes of remembering which have happened and continue to happen in relation to non-sites of memory, in contrast to globalized discourses on memory
Summary
Uncommemorated post-violence sites, sites that witnessed the Holocaust or another type of mass violence but have not been marked with monuments of explanatory plaques, display paradoxical faculties. They are frequently discussed, recalled, explained and visualized as if they were topographically more extensive than they really are, as if they were swallowed by their surroundings In his 2014 essay on sites of past trauma, Martin Pollack grasped and aptly described the cause of the “dilution”, the “spilling over” of the violence of the past out of its historical area into a larger space: Some time ago, I came across a photograph in the internet of Karolina Bullowa’s stone house. We will be interested in a shift from constructing a broad panorama typical for a landscape genre, to narrowing the scope of observation, lowering the eyesight, concentrating the attention on the narrow portion of land This recent action of a visual “zoom into” the landscape might reveal a fundamental motivation of visitors trying to understand the past of the abandoned, uncommemorated sites that have suffered violence, the need to answer the urgent question: “What does it mean to stand in the place of death?” (Schuppli 2014). The effects of such inquiries we will call here “forensic art”
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