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The Arts of Transitional Justice pp 63–79Cite as

Dispersed Truths and Displaced Memories: Extraterritorial Witnessing and Memorializing by Diaspora Through Public Art

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Part of the book series: Springer Series in Transitional Justice ((SSTJ,volume 6))

Abstract

In 2010, Canadian contemporary artists Diane Misaljevic and Allan Kosmajac invited survivors of genocide, torture, war crimes and other international human rights violations to donate artefacts for an installation, Fragments, that was intended as a temporary memorial site for grieving and the public acknowledgement of suffering. Fragments offers fertile space for considering how an extraterritorial public art intervention might expand opportunities for diaspora to participate in transitional justice processes. This chapter examines the structural framework of the Fragments project, how it shaped the participation of diaspora and the implications in terms of the effectiveness of the installation as a forum for witnessing and memorializing. The chapter argues that Misaljevic and Kosmajac presented a conceptual mechanism to place individual memory narratives, associated with specific traumatic events, within a collective framework. Misaljevic and Kosmajac could be considered to have acted as artist–curators, delegating certain artistic decisions to the participating diaspora, who sifted through objects, processing juxtapositions and isolating materials and iconography to convey, through a visual lexicon, specific self-narratives to a public audience. Through their choice of site, consideration of spatial relationships and use of artefacts and receptacles, Misaljevic and Kosmajac structured an audience encounter with an architectural archive that indexed trauma and survival. By decoupling collective memory-making from national geographies, the Fragments meta-structure prompted participating diaspora to situate their object-narratives alongside those of exiles from other backgrounds who had experienced similar traumas, such that the archive provided an index at once sub-national (personal self-narratives) and supra-national (human solidarity). Fragments was exhibited as one programmed element of Nuit Blanche, a highly patronized contemporary art festival, and the chapter also considers the implications of inclusion in a mass public spectacle.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    “The Installations: Sightings and Fragments”, accessed February 16, 2012, http://www.ccji.ca/nuit-blanche/index.php#ccij.

  2. 2.

    See, for example, Laura Young and Rosalyn Park, “Engaging Diasporas in Truth Commissions: Lessons from the Liberia Truth and Reconciliation Commission Diaspora Project,” The International Journal of Transitional Justice Vol. 3 (2009): 344.

  3. 3.

    See, for example, Olivera Simić and Kathleen Daly, “One Pair of Shoes, One Life’: Steps Towards Accountability for Genocide in Srebrenica,” The International Journal of Transitional Justice Vol. 5 (3) (2011): 489.

  4. 4.

    Young and Park, 344.

  5. 5.

    Simić and Daly, 489.

  6. 6.

    Allan Kosmajac, email message to author, February 28, 2012.

  7. 7.

    Ralf Beil, Boltanski.Time. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2006.

  8. 8.

    “Memento Mori”, accessed November 8, 2012, http://www.44art.ca/Site_11/Memento_Mori.html.

  9. 9.

    “Faith in Facts”, accessed November 8, 2012, http://www.44art.ca/Site_11/Faith_in_Facts.html.

  10. 10.

    For her role in catalysing the project, facilitating funding and assisting implementation, Julie Stewart is credited on certain project documentation as a collaborating artist.

  11. 11.

    Diane Misaljevic and Allan Kosmajac, “Fragments” (unpublished poster, 2010).

  12. 12.

    Misaljevic and Kosmajac, “Fragments.”

  13. 13.

    Misaljevic and Kosmajac, “Fragments.”

  14. 14.

    Martina Fischer, “Transitional Justice and Reconciliation: Theory and Practice,” in Advancing Conflict Transformation: The Berghof Handbook II, ed. B. Austin et al. (Opladen/Framington Hills: Barbara Budrich Publishers, 2011), 411.

  15. 15.

    Jacqui Poltera, “Self-narratives, Story-telling, and Empathetic Listeners”, Practical Philosophy 10:1 (2010): 65.

  16. 16.

    Charlotte Delbo, Days and Memory (Evanston: The Marlboro Press: Evanston, 2001), 2.

  17. 17.

    Dori Laub, “Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening,” in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, ed. S. Felman and D. Laub, (New York: Routledge, 1992), 57–74.

  18. 18.

    Jill Bennett. Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 31.

  19. 19.

    Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy (New York: Harper Collins, 1993), 68.

  20. 20.

    Bernadette Lynch, “The Amenable Object: Working with Diaspora Communities through a Psychoanalysis of Touch”, in Touch in Museums: Policy and Practice in Object Handling, ed. Helen Chatterjee (London: Berg, 2008), 266.

  21. 21.

    Lynch, “The Amenable Object,” 266.

  22. 22.

    Lynch, “The Amenable Object,” 268–269.

  23. 23.

    Lynch, “The Amenable Object,” 269.

  24. 24.

    “Fragments Box Index”, accessed 17 September 2012, http://www.fragments.ca/Site_16/Box_Index.html.

  25. 25.

    “Josephine Murphy”, accessed 17 September 2012, http://www.fragmentsandsightings.ca/Site_14/Josephine.html. Also see “Shelter Them”, accessed 26 January 2012, http://www.shelterthem.com.

  26. 26.

    Susan Brison. “Outliving Oneself: Trauma, Memory and Personal Identity,” in Feminists Rethink the Self, ed. D. Meyers (Colorado:Westview Press, 1997), 23.

  27. 27.

    Descriptive details of the installation and artists’ recollections of audience response are drawn from electronic communications with Diane Misaljevic and Allan Kosmajac on 28 February, 2012, and 17 September, 2012.

  28. 28.

    Telephone interview by the author with Dr. Christine Conley, 25 January, 2012.

  29. 29.

    Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” October, 110 (Fall) (2004): 3–22.

  30. 30.

    Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge [Oxon: Routledge, 2002 (1969)]. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

  31. 31.

    Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, “Memory Unbound: The Holocaust and the Formation of Cosmopolitan Memory,” European Journal of Social Theory 5(1) (2009): 88–89,100–102.

  32. 32.

    Brison, “Outliving Oneself,” 23, 25, 29.

  33. 33.

    Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (New York: Atheneum, 1994), 188.

  34. 34.

    Laub, “Bearing Witness,” 69.

  35. 35.

    Laub, “Bearing Witness,” 70, 71.

  36. 36.

    Laub, “Bearing Witness,” 57, 68.

  37. 37.

    In-depth interviews with a comprehensive sampling of participants/audience would be useful to gain insight into this question, but are beyond the scope of this chapter. The present discussion focuses on a theoretical consideration of specific structural conditions in relation to audience empathy. With the assistance of Misaljevic and Kosmajac, the author attempted to interview a range of participants/viewers (non-exclusive categories), but as detailed records of participants and viewers were not kept, only six diaspora (four of whom were from the former Yugoslavia) and one non-diaspora viewer were located who agreed to be interviewed. The author would like to acknowledge and thank Patricio Bascunan, Irfan Cehajic, Midhat Cehajic, Dr. Christine Conley Josephine Murphy, Aldina Muslija and Fadil Kulasic for their willingness to share their recollections of the event.

  38. 38.

    Diane Misaljevic and Allan Kosmajac, electronic communication with the author, 28 February 2012.

  39. 39.

    Allan Kosmajac, telephone interview with the author, 28 February 2012.

  40. 40.

    “Nuit Blanche,” http://www.scotiabanknuitblanche.ca/about/event-history.html, accessed 4 September 2012.

  41. 41.

    “Nuit Blanche.”

  42. 42.

    Luc Boltanski, Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 12.

  43. 43.

    Boltanski, Distant Suffering, 12.

  44. 44.

    Boltanski, Distant Suffering, 3.

  45. 45.

    Boltanski, Distant Suffering, 98.

  46. 46.

    Fischer, “Transitional Justice and Reconciliation: Theory and Practice,” 411.

  47. 47.

    Laub, “Bearing Witness,” 57.

  48. 48.

    Laub, “Bearing Witness,” 72–73.

  49. 49.

    Eric Kilgerman, “Reframing Celan in the Painting of Anselm Kiefer,” in Visual Culture in Twentieth Century Germany: Text as a Spectacle, ed. Gail Finney (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 269.

  50. 50.

    Gene Ray, “Joseph Beuys and the After-Auschwitz Sublime,” in Joseph Beuys: Mapping the Legacy, ed. Gene Ray, (New York: D.A.P., 2001), 60.

  51. 51.

    James Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 94.

  52. 52.

    Young, At Memory’s Edge, 206.

  53. 53.

    Young, At Memory’s Edge, 206.

  54. 54.

    Richard Serra withdrew from the process once modifications were requested, citing a threat to his artistic integrity.

  55. 55.

    Young, At Memory’s Edge, 210.

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  1. PO Box 1164, Castlemaine, VIC, 3450, Australia

    Fayen d’Evie

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  1. Faculty of Law, University of Melbourne, Carlton, VIC, Australia

    Peter D. Rush

  2. Griffith Law School Griffith University, Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia

    Olivera Simić

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d’Evie, F. (2014). Dispersed Truths and Displaced Memories: Extraterritorial Witnessing and Memorializing by Diaspora Through Public Art. In: Rush, P., Simić, O. (eds) The Arts of Transitional Justice. Springer Series in Transitional Justice, vol 6. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8385-4_4

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