AFFECT AND ART SOCIAL PRACTICE: The POLITICS OF RE-PRESENTING TRAUMA featuring: artist Kader Attia

ICI ON NOIE´ LES ALGERIENS

"Here We Drown Algerians", October 17th, 1961.

To reveal is trickery.

In the act of revealing—uncovering, something is opened and exposed. As content is analyzed and reconfigured, found faulty and unreliable, there is hurt. It is painful to open. To open means to reconsider. To open means to allow affect. In opening, there is no guarantee or promise of safety or security. To open up history is to understand a cover up. In opening up the words in history, it can be painful. To reveal is trickery, because in the act of revealing, there is no singular resolution, instead, there is, diverging pluralities to discover and explore for those who are made to be aware.

In Leila Sebbar’s, book, The Seine Was Red; Paris, October 1961,

she unearths a painful experience. Sebbar opens and reveals a trauma buried deep in history. In the act of uncovering, Sebbar correlates two events. The first event occurred in the 1840s. During this time, the French military, under the direction of General Thomas Robert Bugeaud, implemented various projects and military tactics in order to appropriate and colonize the country. The tactics employed brutal violence, including enfumade, asphyxiation of Algerian tribes that were taking refuge in caves.¹ The second event was the Paris Massacre on Oct 17, 1961. During a peaceful Algerian protest, led by the FLN to protest a curfew imposed upon them by the head of the Paris police, Maurice Papon, a man who had been a Nazi collaborator during World War II between 200 and 300 Algerians were massacred.² According to Mildred Mortimer³, Sebbar’s French translator and colleague, Sebbar’s endeavor is speleological and meta-reflective because she herself identifies as a Croisée, being the daughter of an Algerian father and French Mother.⁴ In opening up to Sebbar’s account, I will correlate this with contemporary artist Kader Attia’s work entitled, The Repair, which also deals with the relationship between time, history and memory. Both Sebbar and Attia’s works, will be examine in an Art Social Practice context. The purpose is to explore the ethical and personal responsibility that is presumed by both writer and artist, and realize, as a writer, I become an assumed participant and spectator; what— if anything, is at risk.

Mortimer tells us that Sebbar’s use of anamnesis, the collective process of remembering has significant consequences for the individual as well as the community.⁵ Amel, the main protagonist in Sebbar’s story, cannot speak her mother and grandmother’s native tongue. Because of this, Amel is only able to understand the secrets of her family and the historical account surrounding October 1961, through the collective memory traces discovered together with her friends Louis and Omer. Specifically, her only way to tap into her mother’s history is indirectly through the mediation of the camera’s eye provided by Louis. Sebbar writes:

You talk to Mom; you could tell me everything and you say nothing, and Mom says nothing. You keep saying I’m well-educated, but you make fun of me, and I’m kept in the dark. You speak of a secret. What’s a secret” Is it so dreadful you have to hide it all.⁶

This is significant, because in the story, historical memorial sites are re-visited and new texts are added ​

by Amel and her friends to interact with the old scripts. For example, a commemorative plaque previously noted that high school and university students were imprisoned due to the revolt against the French occupation; however, Amel and her friends supplement that with a new text that relays that Algerian resistors were guillotined. Through this juxtaposition of text, Mortimer notes, it reveals the difference between imprisoned and guillotined.⁷ Through this difference what can be seen is the disparate punishment to Algerian who lives were taken for

their protest in contrast to the French students slight discipline of temporary imprisonment.

In this extended time base process, of complex multiplicities and convergent perspectives, Sabbar, in unearthing the painful past, co-creates new memories and commemorations in her book as well as in actual life. For example, around the time of the completion of Sebbar’s book, Mortimer relays that on June 10, 1999 the French National Assembly recognized the fact that actions to maintain order in Algeria from 1954 to 1962 did constitute a war⁸. Sebbar re-presents trauma by means of completing the official story with unofficial accounts⁹. However, the pain in remembering along with Sabbar and her metaphorical characters, Amel, Louis and Omer is warranted by a sense of hope. This is made evident by the transformation of the memorial sites as well as the “public” action taken by the Prime Minister Lionel Jospin on May 5, 1999 to facilitate access to the archives dealing with the events of October 17, 1961.¹⁰ Although this connection is not the sole result of Sabbar’s work, it is an example of the interconnected power of anamnesis and reveals a potential model for practically imagining difference together.

Similarly, Artist Kader Attia deals with the relationship between time, history and memory. In his work entitled The Repair, a 14 minute double-screen video projection that features wounded World War I soldiers, he explores the ethics of conflict and divergent notions of beauty.¹¹

Attia’s projection of juxtaposed pictures functions by layering and miming historical past events that simultaneously create hybrid correlations. These pictures portray asymmetrical malformed facial wounds suffered by WW1 solders alongside renditions of figurative primitive art that share similar proportion, compositions and symmetry. In Attia’s work, the painful past he articulates with form and content, appear to fixate trauma by reaffirming their similarities rather than exploring their differences. The danger in his reveal is that the spectator is a passive recipient. The lack of participation, mental or actual, in the context of disturbing imagery, though elicits a reactive response, does not allow symbiotic affect. The risk involved in how Attia’s work is revealed is that the content could be seen to function mimetically. Although his correlations are shocking and effective, his work fetishizes trauma. It does this by exemplifying Attia’s idea that “the notion of repair [is] central to understanding multicultural relationships “and “the instinct to repair a defect is inherent to all living organisms and to all cultures”.¹² Attia’s work utilized juxtaposition and hybridization, to re-present visual traumatic events of WW1; however, his work is ineffective because he fixates the spectator’s gaze and attention on the idea that, repair in history is a repetitive type of resistance. This implies that in order to repair something, something first must be undone. This creates a sense of redemption in the act of repairing but also links it to a dependency or inevitability of trauma as a necessary initial cue. Attia states, “the dramaturgy of my project aims at, … explaining clearly and visually to viewers how, across both nature and culture, any system of life is based on endless repairs”.¹³

The difference between Attia and Sebbar is that Attia does not redirect the issue of re-presenting trauma of the past in his imagery; therefore viewing his work as a spectator, although reflective, proves more singularly painful. This coincides with Attia’s statement when he says he “like[s] the idea of the spectator standing in front of the sceen of death, fragility and weakness and witnessing the passage of time”.¹⁴ Sebbar, on the other hand, revisits the past but allows herself and the reader to experience affect. Although Sebbar’s account proves painful, her process co-creates memories through multiplicities, fictional and actual. This results in influencing “public” events in a positive way. In particular, the previous mentioned events of the re-inscribed memorial site, the public access to archives, and the recognition from the French National Assembly.

Being re-introduced to the painful past, as writer, participant and spectator, it was uncomfortable to endure with the portrayals of theses traumatic experiences revealed through the lenses of Attia and Sebbar. However, whereas Attia fixates trauma through juxtaposing and re-representing imagery; Sebbar opens and un-fixes history, and with affect, creates a story that allows a flexible understanding through collective remembering. Though revealing is paradoxical, in that no one thing can ever fully be realized as a singularity, with anamnesis, what is revealed can prove more reflective of difference and multiplicities. In this process, there is no singular revelation or trick. In complex and divergent relations, there is, instead, the interaction of imagination and potential. This has the potential to invoke positive and “public” gestures that generate a sense of hope.

Bibliography

Blumenstein, Ellen. Nafas Art Magazine. July 2013. http://universes-in-

universe.org/eng/nafas/articles/2013/kader_attia_kw (accessed april 2, 2014).

Lankarani, Nazanin. "French-Algerian artist Explores Identity and Repair." The New York

Times, 6 19, 2013: 1-4.

Sebbar, Leila. The Seine Was Red: Paris, October 1961. Translated by Mildred P. Mortimer.

Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2008.

End Notes

1. Sebbar, Leila. The Seine Was Red: Paris, October 1961. Translated by Mildred P. Mortimer. Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2008. xiii

2. Sebbar, xiv

3. Mildred Mortimer is an associate Professor of French and French African Literature at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Mortimer also translated Sebbar’s book from French into English.

4. Sebbar, xv

5. Sebbar, xxiii

6. Sebbar, 2

7. Sebbar, xxi

8. Sebbar, xxiii

9. Sebbar, xix

10. Sebbar, xxiii

11. Lankarani, Nazanin. "French-Algerian artist Explores Identity and Repair." The New York Times, 6 19, 2013: 2.

12. Lankarani, 2

13. Blumenstein, Ellen. Nafas Art Magazine. July 2013. http://universes-in-universe.org/eng/nafas/articles/2013/kader_attia_kw (accessed april 2, 2014).

14. Lankarani, 1