In Promises Beyond Memory, Vikki Bell shows how archives of contemporary political violence in Argentina, Chile, and Colombia challenge the idea that simply sheltering the documentation of violence is sufficient to fulfill the obligations of attending to the past. Beyond mere preservation, these archives, museums, and sites of memory invite exploratory modes of enlivening the past through aesthetic practices like photography, installation, film, and performance. These practices foster the “survivance” of memory where populations still grapple with legacies of violence and often state-sponsored mass disappearance and torture. Rather than produce a definitive account of the past, such survivance facilitates polyvocal articulations that open deeply political and ethical questions around contested histories. They may even create moments for what Bell terms “tender forgetting”—the ability to remember without reawakening trauma. Integrating theory, extensive archival work, and interviews with artists, archivists, museum workers, and survivors of state violence, Bell analyzes the creative ways that archives pass on stories of violence as they seek to defend against attempts to rewrite the past.
- Cover
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I. Chile
- 1. Entwined Tellings: Detention and Survival in Pinochet’s Chile
- 2. Paper Afterlives: On the Archive as Biopolitical Remains
- Part II. Colombia
- 3. Colombia’s Propositions for Memory: The Spirit of the Archive
- 4. Negotiating the Force of Art: The Work of Erika Diettes
- Part III. Argentina
- 5. A Critical Ecology of Practices: Forums and Their Arts of Dramatization
- 6. Risking Images, After All: Art at the Espacio Memoria y Derechos Humanos, Ex-ESMA, Argentina
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
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