Narrativising Dispossessed Histories

The commentary investigates the ethics, politics and mechanisms of the retrospective mining of cultural absences, voids, silences, and blind spots where the condemned artefact or cultural object was forcefully and intentionally disappeared by authoritarian, dominant, hegemonic cultural control systems. Each project in this commentary is a creative and generative counter-performance that grapples with memory and counter-memory to produce and militate a space of appearance - materially, affectively, and experientially. The commentary intends to critically evaluate four of my ongoing historical, artistic, and curatorial projects and consider their formal, methodological, and theoretical frameworks. It will discuss the ideations, methodologies and intentions of each investigation, re-presentation, and the creative steps deployed to retroactively engage and exploit those cultural artefacts to expand knowledge, reconciliation, and justice. It will consider the ethics and politics of such militancy. Processual retracing, assembling, and reintegration – the action – is based on performatively opening a great occasion for asserting the “negative” against the visible ‘positive’ established version of history as told by the victor. Curating-as-practice is designed as forensic investigations, performative militancies, and re-constructive system-makings to escape, bypass or refute authoritarian injuries/injustices and to reclaim their restorative possibilities/potentialities.

Creative tension is wrested in narrativising rather than narrating historical discourse, where representation is supplanted by manners of speaking/seeing and being heard/seen. The premise is that the psychodynamic technologies and processes of loss, reconciliation, and justice-seeking correlate with the therapeutic requirement to be seen and witnessed. Negotiations through rituals of collective acknowledgement and witnessing by the wider group are necessary for the voided experiences, traumatised histories, and injured spaces to attain symbolic and real meaning. In line with social constructivist theories, grief, mourning, reconciliation, and cultural healing are considered not primarily interior processes but intricately social ones. The community of spectators are actively implicated as potential witnesses in a dialectical confrontation with historical truth.