In the text History and Trauma about the exhibition Monumentalism in Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in 2010, Jennifer Allen explains the impossibility of Representing Trauma.
Like Allen, I am (again) wondering what it is that art can do, more than a display of uneasiness towards troubled histories through representation and repetition of silenced voices of the marginalized. For example in the much quoted work of Renzo Martens (episode 3, enjoy poverty) where again the repetition of history by an artist in a new context is re-enacted.
Allen writes: "Many of the artworks in the exhibition seem to sit uneasily between historical representation and traumatic repression (..) In this context, what citizen-residents share are not the particular events of one history - whether the national official history or the not so official history - but history as a general phenomenon: from wars, politics, and treaties to cultural history, memoire, and micro history, to feminism, post colonialism and queerness. If the particular events no longer coincide, then it is the emotions themselves - the trauma of being a historical subject - that increasingly binds us together. (..) Trauma cannot be turned into history, the repressed into representation, without a common subject, a common experience, a common narrative that can be symbolized and witnessed. (..) What we share is the lingering fear and panic, which can so easily break out." page 148,162,164 Monumentalism catalogue SMBA 2010
This text is written 5 years ago, but the question remains I feel. In my own work I am troubled with the same issues. I tend to zoom in on private histories that are not mine. What is there to be found in this proximity?
Mieke van de Voort was an artist participating in the show, she gained my interest because I recognize a similar questions in her last works before she died. There is not much documented of her work. She went to Surinam to photograph former Marrons, in particular one of her friends Vinije, but struggled with the photographic process and the ontological impossibility of capturing the essence of a loved one. Therefore she decided to make a three-dimensional figure, a wax cast of Vinije taken with plaster molds.
What if one would place her work next to Nola Hatterman's figurative portraits? First thing I would point out is that Vinije is looking at Mieke. Hatterman's models never really do.
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| Schets voor Vinije, 2010 |
