“Precisely because we can destroy, we are obliged to do so, not to do it.”
I can't raise my head, the neck muscles cannot. Because I'm bored, listened to a bit of Butler (very difficult in English!) A few years ago, Butler gave a lecture at the Harvard Museum on installations by a Colombian artist named Doris Salcedo, whose work deals, among other things, with forgetting: Oblivion, turns.
The exhibition shows, among other things, non-opaque, loose children's clothes, somehow hanging in the room like shadows, chairs, broken through with several scars, white bones with wafer-thin limbs, placed as if by chance in the white museum room, a museum room, trying to get something back, which I don't think really works, because space represents something, and thus refers to something new.
The visitor can also enter or leave this room at will, he can follow what is lost with his imagination, and yet loses track after a short time. This anxiety remains, that the artist cannot retrieve the absent bodies, they only serve her imagination; through which she creates the memorandum with forgetting.
Colombia is apparently a country with a bloody history, as I briefly looked up. In Colombia are between 1985 and 2015 5,7 millions of people “disappeared” and been expelled: minorities, Indigenous, smallholders. 5,7 millions of people, many of them unregistered ….. where are they? Apparently nobody knows. And nobody did it, to look for these people again…. why not?
5,7 Million displaced persons is an unbelievable number, and yet it is only a number. And so someone in charge counted these disappeared people. But it also counts the dead? Freight Butler: “Do they count the deaths or do count the deaths?”
What do the dead weigh?
Oblivion: In principle, whole parts of peoples can be forgotten and the question revolves around that, How does one mourn such a loss?. To grieve …. the word is called. And Butler says: “Sometimes there was never a life that is to be grieving ….”
what a pain! How devastating.
But then: “To establish a life as grievable, as worthy of grief—and worthy of preservation—is an injunction that pertains to both the living and the dead. But under conditions when the body is no longer recognizable, how do the objects that remain come together to speak to the loss?”
I do not know that either, honestly.
I learned a few things about Colombia (Art):
Colombia is one of the countries, with the largest inequality gap between rich and poor. At the same time, it has great biodiversity, has the greatest biodiversity of birds and mineral resources with emeralds, oil etc.
In the North, in the jungle of the Chocos, part of the indigenous population lives surprisingly primitively, separated from important infrastructure and incredibly rich in children. On average, a woman has (a 16 year old girl) eight births. It's even funnier, that midwives are not allowed to work officially. Definitely in the country, the situation looks like this, that alternative herbalists miles away, walk through dangerous jungle passages, to attend a birth in a village. One of the brews, designed to ease the pain of labor, is the verbena. The jungle midwife brews it according to her grandmother's recipe and takes it to the births. Many women meet and learn the nuts and bolts of emergency aid from the jungle midwife, e.g., how to look before childbirth, wipes hands.
8 average births, but the government does not recognize the profession of midwife.
In the pandemic, the poor part of the Colombian population was plagued by hunger. People, who were in need, hung a red cloth in front of the house during the quarantine, which meant so much, how: we have nothing left to eat, help us!
This is a good idea, I mean, at all: use an object to draw attention to an emergency or a specific condition in a house, make themselves visible through a red cloth. The suburbs of Bogota must have been swarming with red flags, and maybe people will continue to hang the red cloth on the window, who knows?
Also the 74 percent of Colombian women, who experienced domestic violence during the pandemic, should mark their house with a visible symbol …. only it is probably not done with the delivery of food packages.
Or loneliness: Why no crape on the house wall for solitude?
Of course, the shadows of the absent bodies also appeal to me, regarding my situation. Is there a possibility, to mourn or not to mourn a displaced body/or/and people? He's still there, if only as a shadow ….. And how about one “the shade”, the no “worthy” life had, who was not registered ….. and now it is no longer there as a whole, only as a shadow …. how should people, who cannot be called the bereaved, because the death of the missing person, which did not actually occur, was a farewell and therefore a “To grief” impossible, constitute/fix this loss something like?
(7.4.22)