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Marcio Seligmann-Silva
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Between
Art and violence
Antimonuments: Between Memory and Resistance
Text.Serial.Journal
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Essay
2020-11-30
2020-09-11
2020-11-30
2020-12-07
149-169
1
Marcio Seligmann-Silva
2020/11/30
10.13125/2039-6597/4283
149
State University of Campinas, UNICAMP
2039-6597
20
Art and violence
en
169
urn:nbn:it:unica-26948
Antimonuments: Between Memory and Resistance
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10
                  Antimonuments:
           Between Memory and Resistance

                           Márcio Seligmann-Silva



Abstract
      The essay presents a reflection upon the “antimonuments” phenomena
that emerged at the end of the twentieth century as a way of dealing through
art with State violence, as in the case of Nazism and the Latin American
dictatorships. The text begins with an explanation of the mnemotechnics, that
is, the old “art of memory”, that had Simonides of Ceos as its mythic father. It
goes on presenting the contemporary “art of memory” under the sign of
“antimonuments”. The article proposes to think of a “new art of memory” based
on the gesture of anti-monuments. The study shows and discusses the works of,
among other artists, Jochen Gerz, Horst Hoheisel, Andreas Knitz, Marcelo
Brodsky and Fulvia Molina.



Keywords
     Antimonuments; Art of memory; Mnemotechnics; Art and violence.




Between, vol. X, n. 20 (Novembre/November 2020)
ISSN 2039-6597
DOI: 10.13125/2039-6597/4283
                                  Between, vol. X, n. 20 (Novembre/November 2020)




            Antimonuments:
     Between Memory and Resistance

                      Márcio Seligmann-Silva


       There is a vast and interesting history of the theory of memory,
which has been re-updated in recent years, owing to the cyber
revolution and the construction of the Internet universe. It is as if a new
continent had been discovered. But not only technological imperatives
determine our new view of the human being and revolutionize its
memory. We should point out, in addition, political and historical
issues. The 20th century was an era of extremes. If, on one hand, for the
first time in many centuries, more than one generation of men arose that
did not go to war or pick up a gun, on the other, never have so many
lives have been exterminated on such a scale, in the contexts of
nationalist character and “ethnic cleansing”, as during this period. In
addition, and as a result of these catastrophes, the end of the ideologies
and universal interpretations for the "history of humankind" has caused
the organization of our self-image to abandon any hope in relation to a
“collectivist” utopia and move increasingly to the narrow limits of our
body. Classical sociological theory has been replaced by a reflection of
anthropological, psychoanalytic and biological bases. More than ever,
the universal is seen now as a result of the individual: it is not only a
question of the “linguistic turn” in knowledge, but a much deeper crisis
that erodes its foundations as a whole and launches us into a field in
which the question of memory becomes unavoidable. In this article,
based on some assumptions of the tradition of the art of memory, I wish
to introduce anti-monuments, as a new mode of dealing with this new
role of memory. My proposal is to extract from the anti-monuments a
poetics capable of illuminating a new lineage of art.




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                              Antimonuments
      The art of memory was described in Antiquity by various masters
of rhetoric. The descriptions that we know are those of Cicero, Quintilian
and, above all, the unknown author of the treatise Ad Herennium. (Müller
1996) Cicero sees memory as one of the five parts of rhetoric (inventio,
dispositio, elocutio, memoria, pronunciatio) (Yates 1974: 8ss.). The art of
memory served both as a technique to memorize long speeches and to
develop the speaker’s memorization capacity (essential, for example, in
a court context, in which the arguments of any opponent should be
carefully memorized). In Antiquity, neither the printing of books or
paper as we know it today existed; hence the importance of memory for
the speaker. In Cicero, it is clear the value assigned to vision in memory
technique. The central principle of the ancient mnemotechnics consisted
of memorizing the facts through their reduction to certain images that
would enable their subsequent translation into words: reality (res) and
the final discourse (verba) would be mediated by the images (imagines
agens). These images would be stored in the memory in certain places
(loci) either imaginary or inspired by the architecture of real buildings.
The important thing was that the speaker had a mastery of these spaces
of memory, so as to be able to run through them in the act of speech,
when each image would then be retranslated into a word or an idea.
(Yates 1974; Ricoeur 2000: 5-66; Seligmann-Silva 2009) My proposal here
is to think to what extent a new lineage of artistic works incorporates
and renews this mnemonic tradition. It is about reflecting how, in recent
decades, a new art of memory has developed and once again attempts
to articulate narratives, images and spaces. Let me begin by thinking
about the enormous differences between monuments and anti-
monuments.
      The term monument comes from the Latin monere, meaning to
warn, exhort, remember. But since Antiquity, the tradition of building
monuments has been associated more with the celebration (of victories
of war, for example) than with the idea of warning. It was after World
War II, and especially in the context of the memorialization of
Auschwitz, that an aesthetic of what became known as anti-monument,


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or counter-monument, was developed (Young: 1993; 2000)1, which
somehow fuses the tradition of the monument with that of the funeral
commemoration. The heroic sense of the monument is therefore totally
modified and shifted to a place of remembrance, in the key of
admonition, of the violence and of homage to the dead. Anti-
monuments, as they are oriented towards the dead, inject a new view of
history into the context of public commemoration and, at the same time,
restore very ancient practices of commemoration and cult rituals for the
dead.
      It can be said that the relation of each people to death is the
symbolic core of its culture. If Freud insisted on the relation between
death and the birth of culture, one may say with him that the symbolic
is structured in a dialogue with the idea of death. In the very etymology
of the Greek word sema, we can observe the proximity between sign and
death: originally this word means “grave” and only later received the
meaning of “sign”. While the concept of mnema, since its origins,
indicates traces or vestiges of a forgotten past. That is, memory and the
difficulty of reading its traces are archaic ideas within the Greek
imagination. On the other hand, mnema comes to mean not only the
material element of a remembrance, but also the very dirge, in order to
finally arrive at the notion of sema as grave, as occurs, for example, in
Euripides. Sema means more the place itself, the elevation that indicates
the grave, while mnema is the quality that makes sema a memorial or an
object of glory (kléos), referring to the overlap in the Greek universe
between death, sign, and eternal life. Mnemosyne, the Mother of the




     1
       I do not intend to explicitly address the issue of difference between anti-
monument and counter-monument here. I merely emphasize that Latin Amer-
ican anti-monuments and memorial artscape owe much to counter-monu-
ments that arose in Europe in the context of the Shoah memorialization. In
Latin America, this new way of coping with the task of inscribing the violent
past, however, took on its own distinctive characteristics, as I shall argue later
in this article.


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Muses (and therefore of culture) must, accordingly, be regarded in her
aspect of a dual face: one focused on the past, another on the future.2
      Michele Simondon presented in detail the various meanings of
mnema in its relation to death, glory, and the beautiful monument (which
compensates for the death), and gratitude (cáris). She recalls, among
other essential points, that for the poet Simonides, poetry and the
memory in the spirit of man (mnastis) were more enduring than the stone
of the grave. This idea is fundamental in the aesthetics-ethics of the anti-
monuments. They abandon the rhetoric of “memory written in stone
forever” and choose materials and rituals that are more ephemeral,
relying precisely on the strength of words and gestures, rather than on
the power of the representations of war (generals on their horses, tanks
and cannons) or of triumph (triumphal arches, altar of the nation etc.).
      The anti-monument develops, therefore, with psychoanalysis, in an
era of catastrophes and theorization of trauma. It corresponds to a desire
of actively remembering the past (painful), but it also takes into account
the difficulties of the “work of mourning”. Moreover, the anti-
monument, which normally arises from the desire of remembering limit
situations, brings with it a dual commandment: it wants to remember,
but knows both that a total memory is impossible in fact and also how
painful a memory is. This awareness of the precariousness of a memory
is manifested in the precariousness both of the anti-monuments and of
the testimonies of these catastrophes. We are talking about works that
bring a mixture of memory and forgetfulness, of the work of
remembering and resistance. These are bumpy works but with no shame
at revealing limits that imply a new art of memory, a new entanglement
between words and images in the post-heroic era. Elie Wiesel, referring
to his testimonial work about the Nazi concentration camps wrote: "I did
not tell something of my past so you may know it, but so you know that
you will never know it."
      This impossibility of memory and its resistance was expressed in a
lapidary manner in the famous phrase of Adorno, in his essay “Cultural
criticism and society”, of 1949: «to write a poem after Auschwitz is a

      2
          See Simondon 1982, passim.


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barbaric act, and it erodes even the knowledge of why today it has
become impossible to write poems»3. We may think both the testimony
and the anti-monument as practices of this writing erased avant la lettre.
This erasure is expressed in many ways and not only in the "bumpy”
nature of the symbolic manifestations. We must remember that there is
something like a trend to literality in the attempts of inscription of the
memory of trauma. Ernst Simmel, author of Kriegsneurosen und
psychisches Trauma (1918), described the trauma of war with a formula
that makes clear the relation between technique, trauma, violence, and
the registration of images: «The light of the flash of terror
prints/embosses a photographically exact print/copy»4. This literality,
however, prevents the flow of symbolization. The testimony and the
anti-monument seek to break this literality and open up a space for the
symbolization.

                     A new culture of memory
     Jochen Gerz is undoubtedly one of the most interesting artists
today, when it comes to thinking about the origins of our new culture of
memory. His art has dealt for years with the recent history of Europe,
and because of the fact that he is German, born in Berlin in 1940, the
centrality of the Nazi past in his themes should not cause surprise.
Another characteristic that makes this artist a particularly representative
example of the current art scene is his relation with literature and
philosophy. Gerz not only studied these disciplines, but incorporated
texts and often the very gesture of writing in his work. He writes with
texts and images. Often these are photographic images and the
photographic device is also central to the new art of memory, as the
photograph is thought, as Gerz himself affirms, as a visual writing


     3
       «nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch, und das frißt
auch die Erkenntnis an, die ausspricht, warum es unmöglich ward, heute
Gedichte zu schreiben» (Adorno 1976: 26).
     4 «Das Blitzlicht des Schreckens prägt einen photographisch genauen

Abdruck» (Assmann 1999: 157; 247)


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Márcio Seligmann-Silva, Antimonuments



(Mesnard 2000: 80), a set of strokes left by the light of the “real”, whose
presentation – and not representation – guides his work.
      In this aspect, his art develops normally in the context of projects
that involve discussions with his students and with the community,
research, collection of information, in such a manner that often the work
"itself" or the final result is the least important. Gerz is a critic, not only
of the seemingly eternal temporality of the traditional – auratic – works
of art and of the element of solace that the identification with this
pseudo-immortality brings, but he is also an opponent of the traditional
institution of the museum.
      I remember, in this regard, that one of his works, “Exit/Materialien
zum Dachau-Projekt” (“Exit/ Materials for the Dachau Project”, 1972), is
based on the pictures he shot in museums: these photos are not of works
of art, but of boards such as “Exit”, “silence”, “no smoking” etc. Gerz
revolts against the museological institution that leads us to respond
mechanically to the ritual of cult of the works: in his words, in the
museum we are «victims of the past» (Gerz 1995: 34). As opposed to
museum exhibitions as embalming, Gerz practices an art that wants to
play with the scene of the processes of embalming this past: he aims to
re-update these processes of suppression and burial of the past –
entombment in a crypt, we would say with psychoanalysts Maria Torok
and Nicolas Abraham (1994) – particularly of events that cannot be
accommodated in the false continuity of the historical. Hence, both the
need to forgo (following the “classic” vanguards) the walls of the
traditional, historicist museum and go to the domain of public space,
and the disappearance and invisibility being at the center of his poetry.
Rather than the romantic paradigm of Pygmalion, that is, of the artist as
someone who should give life to his work, Gerz, in playing the scene of
disappearance, is not only reaffirming the art as something beyond all
illusion, but also making it eminently political.
      The politics of memory, in the noblest sense of the expression, can
be read, for example, in his famous anti-monument against fascism,
made together with Esther Shalev-Gerz in Harburg, Hamburg. This anti-
monument was basically an “obelisk”, twelve meters in height, square,
one meter each side, covered with lead. Chisels were stuck to the work


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and the persons in the audience were invited to write their names or
words on it, in a form of collectivization of the artist's work and
commitment to the theme. When the surface was completely full of
inscriptions, the monument was buried at a depth of two meters and a
new blank surface was made accessible for signatures. Finally, in 1993,
the last two meters were eventually buried and the anti-monument
disappeared. Today, it exists as a column below the ground: the
signatures, anti-fascist words, but also Nazi words – even the shots that
the work received – everything is buried.
      This work is, now, like our pasts: always absent and, in a way, also
buried in our memories. The discussion of this work has endured to
date, as a potent catalyst for reflections on the mnemonic devices. The
surface of lead is particularly interesting in our context: not only because
this is the saturnine metal − and Saturn is the planet that governs the
melancholic ones, in Freudian terms, those who have incorporated a
past that cannot be mourned (Freud 1975a: v. 3) − but also because it
performatizes memory as a wax tablet (a key metaphor of writing
memory for the ancient mnemotechnics). Gerz became fascinated with
the fact that we cannot completely erase inscriptions in lead. We can
only make a partial erasure or overwrite on them – like our biological
memory hardware.
      Thus, there is no possibility of innocent, anonymous erasing. The
column functions as a sort of Freudian magic block (ibid.: 1975c),
defective, without the device for erasure of the strokes on the surface
and in which the layers of the palimpsest end up preventing all
possibility of inscription and reading, at least in the traditional sense of
these activities, that is, in our alphabetical view of writing as a logical
succession of phonemes and lexemes. Writing becomes pure stroking
and spacing, a hybrid gesture of painting/writing hieroglyphs: like the
inscriptions in our own unconscious.
      This meta or pre-semantic element of the writing on the “obelisk”
also mimics our (im)possibility of giving meaning to the fascist past.
This mimesis, however, cannot be reduced, in the work of Gerz, to a
reflex movement: rather, in staging the movement of entombing the
past, it enables reflection on this process. Instead of a figurability, which


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would make the past readable – as occurs, for example, in some works
of fiction about the Shoah – Gerz resorts to a superliterality that assaults
our habits and our inertia, which leads us to not look at our encapsulated
pasts, as we do not look at the huge 19th-century monuments in the
centers of our cities (which Freud rightly compared to the symptoms of
a hysterical individual). Moreover, Gerz called his work against fascism
Mahnmal (a word derived from admonition) and not Denkmal
(monument). While, according to him, the latter term would be
associated with a commemoration of a positive past, Mahnmal refers to
a heavy, negative inheritance (Gerz 1995: 147s.), just as his works and
the contemporary art of memory negate our culture of amnesia and are
games in which it is possible to turn inside out the Unheimlich (uncanny),
revealing its other side, its other aspect, the familiar (our past) that is
within us and is strange to us5.
      Another work of Gerz can be put next to the anti-monument, his
work entitled «2146 Steine, Mahnmal gegen Rassismus» (“2146 Stones,
Memorial against Racism”), of 1993, made in Saarbrücken. The work
resulted from working with the students of the city's School of Arts and
began in an unusual manner: as a nightly activity, in which they
removed the paving stones next to the castle where the State Parliament
is currently located (a former headquarter of Gestapo). The stones were
replaced in the dead of night by other similar stones. After writing the
name of one of the 2146 Jewish cemeteries of Germany under every
stone, it was returned to its place. One of the curious points in this
project is that it involved the survey – unheard of – of all the Jewish
cemeteries of Germany, the registration carried out by consulting all
local Jewish organizations in the country; not to mention, of course, the
very idea of conducting a work that again “unworks” our process of
burying the past. The anti-monument exists only because of the
discussions about it that occurred and still occur – as our “disappeared”

      5
       Mesnard 2000: 89: «Observe his words: "I am not on the side of the
builders of monuments and manufacturers of icons. It is almost an insult to
tell me I make monuments. I do everything that can be done to prevent that
from being made. They are all devices, except for this».


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past also only exists in the present. As Gerz stated in an interview:
«Memory cannot be anywhere outside of us. The work deals with just
that» (Gerz 1995: 157). In addition, he remarks when speaking of this
work that Steinpflaster, paving stone, has a double meaning in German:
Pflaster means both “pavement” and “dressing”, Wundpflaster, wound
dressing: this word (wound) refers precisely to the Greek etymology of
the word “trauma”. The work reopens the scar of the past, but also the
possibility of its approach and release from the crypt that condemned it
to live in the enchanted and prohibited area of taboo and, from this place
where memory was, dictated our mechanical reactions, our Agieren
(acting out), as Freud saw it.
      In our context, we might recall two other works of Gerz: his “The
Bremen Questionnaire 1995” and the “Monument vivant” of Biron, in
1996. In both works, a questionnaire again intervened: in Bremen, Gerz
proposed to its approximately 50,000 inhabitants three questions: «What
is so important to you that you want to see it carried out in the public
space?», «Do you think that it can be carried out by means of
contemporary art?», and: «Would you want to be personally involved in
performing this work?» (Mesnard 2000: 84). The result of this
questionnaire and the discussion that ensued was not the construction
of any of the desired works: Gerz wrote the names of all the authors of
the work – in fact, of the discussion – on a sign that was put in a “space”
that he created on a bridge of Bremen. By looking at this work each one
could remember their project.
      In Biron, a small French town marked by the two world wars, Gerz
was commissioned to create a work to replace the city's old Obelisk for
the dead, which was broken. Instead of replacing it, the artist again used
a questionnaire to involve the entire population, in which he asked what
would be so important to the inhabitants of Biron that would be worth
risking their own lives. The answers were subsequently recorded in a
fragmentary and anonymous manner (in a space equivalent to seven
lines for each) in small signs that were affixed to the obelisk and to its
pedestal. The idea was that this “monument” would continue in
perpetual becoming. Gerz integrated not only the old monument in the
city, but the process of remembering itself. «We only remember that


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which we forgot» (Gerz 1996: 9), says the artist. In his works, this art of
memory gives continuity to the ancient mnemotechnics by intertwining
the cult of the dead, the verbal and visual writing, and the procedure of
making “lists” of names. «In the end, all that remains are lists, listings»
(ibid.: 154), he also said.
      I would also like to address the art of memory of other
contemporary artists such as Naomi Tereza Salmon, Christian Boltanski,
Cindy Sherman, Horst Hoheisel, Andreas Knitz, Rosângela Rennó,
Marcelo Brodsky, Micha Ullman, Anselm Kiefer, and Daniel Libeskind.
In a postcolonial approach, we cannot forget the new art of artists like
Kader Attia, Zanele Muholi and Nandipha Mntambo. (McClusky &
Massaquoi 2015; Von Osten 2018; Fucks 2015) Each of them developed a
particular poetics, in which memory has a role of an agglutinating
nexus, and the arts live up to the fact that they are daughters of
Mnemosyne. In the works of these authors – which I cannot address here
for reasons of space – some of the main characteristics of the
contemporary art of memory emerge.
      If it were to summarize what is common to the works of all these
artists, I would say: the testimonial content. All of these artists produce
from what we can think of as an era marked by the testimonial turn.
They create from their experiences, their place, their bodies, bidding
farewell to the universalizing modalities of art. They also put an end to
traditional narrative modes. They enact both forgetfulness and attempts
at critical recollection. We observe, for example, the procedure of
literalization of the past and of its process of transformation into
crypt/archive/palimpsest/ “geological” layers (see “Asservate Exhibits”
of Salmon and the work of Hoheisel and A. Knitz “Zermahlene
Geschichte” in Weimar, the Aschrottbrunnen [1987] and the “Denk-
Stein-Sammlung” [1988-1995] of Hoheisel in Kassel and the works of
Kiefer with lead and straw), the use of photography as a medium of
expression (in Gerz, Salmon, Rosângela Rennó, Boltanski, Sherman,
Brodsky, Attia, Muholi, Mntambo), a poetics that is much closer to the
tradition of the sublime and abject than to the beautiful (especially in
Sherman, who also employs the procedure of making images shocking
and gives attributes to characters, as in traditional painting that


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inherited the ancient art of memory), the use of words and collages (as
in the work of N. Ramos “111”, in “The Missing House” of Boltanski
[1989], and in the works of Kiefer, which hold a dialogue with the poetry
of Paul Celan).

               Antimonuments in Latin America
     The exhibitions that took place in São Paulo in the second half of
2003, of artists Horst Hoheisel, Andreas Knitz (both from Kassel),
Marcelo Brodsky (from Buenos Aires), and Fulvia Molina (from São
Paulo) make clear to what extent a new art of memory is consolidated in
the international scene. In the two exhibitions, “Free Bird/Vogelfrei”
(presented in the Octagon of the Pinacoteca from São Paulo) and
“MemoriAntonia” (exhibited at Universidade de São Paulo’s Maria
Antonia Cultural Center), metamorphoses of time and of catastrophic
stories of a recent past transform into images that ask to be read and
transformed into voices that want to be heard. In the two exhibitions,
the artists also managed to establish communicating channels between
temporalities and spaces that a traditional historiographic treatment
could achieve only with great difficulty.
     Let’s observe, first, the installation of the Octagon. In the center of
this panoptic space, Horst Hoheisel and Andréas Knitz built on a 1:1
scale a copy of the Tiradentes Prison portal (which remains preserved,
next to the Pinacoteca, as the only reminder of that building that was
demolished in 1973). The portal, however, was not built in stone, but
rather in the form of a cage. The ruins of the prison house are cited by
the artists and morphed into prison. The portal, the place of passage,
through which many prisoners entered and eventually left, was turned
into an allegory to represent the entire building, pars pro toto. During the
exhibition, this portal-prison served as a shelter for twelve pigeons that,
once the show started, were gradually released every weekend.
     Vogelfrei is an ambiguous title and impossible to be translated, to be
shifted from one language to another, to be moved from one cultural
location to another. In German, in fact we have the terms "free bird"
embedded in the word (Vogel-frei) and, at the exhibition, we could


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watch concretely the release of birds. But in German the term means,
first of all, “proscribed”: someone who was decreed “vogelfrei”, who
had a price put on his/her head, one considered an outlaw. The
Tiradentes’ Prison House, which the artists decided to rescue from
oblivion, was an “invisible” ruin on Tiradentes Avenue. Few recognized
its history: during the dire years of the military dictatorship, it housed
hundreds of political prisoners, people who were transformed overnight
into “outlaws”, because a government “of exception” had been installed
and given itself the right to brutally persecute its enemies.
      The work in question (which like Duchamp's art consists of a set of
images in tension with its title-slogan) reminds us that the law depends
essentially on its relation to penitentiary institutions. The law has as the
entrance of the prison as one of its doors, because it is subject to the
possibility of the State of exception. The State of exception is precisely a
legal creation that, paradoxically, allows the established political power
to suspend in toto the Law of the laws, that is, the very Constitution of a
country. Thus, the so-called “sovereign power” is an authority itself also
inside and, at the same time, outside the law, and therefore cannot be
incarcerated, but rather can create laws, incarcerate and sacrifice the
other, deciding not only what the order is in extreme cases of emergency,
but also the actions that should be taken to overcome the political
situation established. The figure of the law that bans, proscribes, has
never been as re-updated as throughout the history of the 20th century.
This portal in form of a prison reminds us, not by chance, of another
outcast who was born from the pen of one of the writers who best
understood this political truth of the legal institution: I am referring to
Kafka, author of the novel The Trial and of the short narrative “Vor dem
Gesetz”, “Before the Law”.
      This narrative, of only two pages, gathers all the law has that is
mysteriously perverse: it tells the story of a country man that wants to
“enter the law”. But it turns out that “before the law is a doorman”. The
man spends his whole life trying to enter but the doorman does not grant
him passage. In the end, when the now dying man asks why, in all those
years of waiting, no one else appeared to enter the law, the doorman
answers: “Nobody else could receive permission to enter here, because


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this entrance was intended only for you. Now I am going to leave and
close it”.
      The law already brings with itself the capacity for generating the
“exception”; it cannot rely on examples, facts, or people, and this
autonomy is the guarantee of its capacity to proscribe, to banish. In the
extreme case of the Brazilian dictatorship – when we even had “secret
decrees” – the Tiradentes Prison House represented symbolically the
barbarism established by power. The building had been erected in 1850
to serve as a slave depot. Little more than a century later, it served as a
prison for victims of political persecution, as well as to practice torture
on common prisoners, as we read in reports of political prisoners that
stayed there6. The political prisons of that period were divided between
the institutions of interrogation (OBAN, DOI/CODI, CENIMAR, DEOPS
etc.) and those of incarceration, as in the case of the Tiradentes Prison
(Gorender 1987: 220). Over 400 political prisoners lived there in the
worst prison conditions imaginable (or unimaginable), entitled only to
the "sun bath" of 2 hours per week, in overcrowded, filthy, damp cells,
locked up the whole time.
      Alípio Freire, who remained imprisoned there, as he was
persecuted by the military dictatorship, released the first of the pigeons
of the Octagon cage. Thinking of this act as literalizing the term Vogelfrei,
free-bird/proscription, shifts it to a field far from the apparent
stereotypical gesture of peace. On this day, also, Alípio took those
present there on a journey into the murky past of persecution and
“disappearances”: on the walls of the Octagon they attached small mug
shots of the faces of many of the victims of political persecution who
were incarcerated there. Alípio recalled the names and some
characteristic moments of the history of those fighters. In this act of
memory, the “transparency” of the Tiradentes Avenue portal stone (that
is, the invisibility of this monument) became opaque. History once again



     6
      See the fundamental text of Jacob Gorender (1987: 215-225) and the well-
documented volume of Alípio Freire, Izaias Almada, and J. A. de Granville
Ponce, 1997.


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gained density and weight. This work of Horst Hoheisel and Andreas
Knitz makes us open our eyes to a past that we resist looking at.
      The works of these same artists, alongside those of photographer
and artist Marcelo Brodsky and artist Fulvia Molina, exhibited at the
Maria Antonia Cultural Center, developed this poetics – ethics – of the
memory. In the room with the works of Horst Hoheisel, one could see
two desks with lamps and two office chairs. Between them, there was a
screen and a banner. On the first desk, the lamps were facing the wall,
forming two circles focusing on two books of Hegel’s Aesthetics, each
one perforated by a bullet. On a monitor, one saw the scene of the
“execution” of the books. A magnifying glass over the hole in one of the
books enabled one to read the word sehen, “see”. On the other desk, a
book also perforated by a bullet was in the open drawer: Norbert Haase,
Das Reichskriegsgericht und der Widerstand gegen die Nationalsozialistische
Herrschaft (The superior martial court and the resistance against the Nazi
dominance, 1993) and a sheet of paper that contained the phrase
“Deutscher Wiederstad”, “German resistance”.7
      Both works depict the violence against books, in an explicit
reference to the context of the exhibition, to the building of the Maria
Antonia street, with the memory of the resistance struggles against the
Brazilian military dictatorship, as well as the Nazi persecution against
intellectuals and the book burnings. The shift to German culture and its
historical and cultural references generate both bewilderment and
resistance, by exposing books pierced by bullets. In addition, it triggers
a dialogue between different memories of barbarism. On the screen
between the desks, there was the projection of a computer-manipulated
scene of the central area of Berlin, with the Brandenburg Gate, which
gradually disappeared. This is a media implementation of the proposal
that Horst Hoheisel had made during the contest in 1993/94 for a
memorial to remember the murder of European Jews in the Holocaust
and that was built next to the Brandenburg Gate. As we read on the
banner, Hoheisel proposed the explosion of the gate (symbol of the

      7
       This work of Hoheisel is at the Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand in Ber-
lin and was lent for this exhibition.


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German national unity: another portal of law, therefore, representing the
constitution of the nation) followed by the dispersion of the dust on the
ground planned for the memorial. Hoheisel proposed, in fact, an anti-
monument: an action that would literalize the murders and the
disappearance of the Jewish corpses in the crematoria.
      In the room with the works of Marcelo Brodsky, we could see a
photographic and video documentation of his intervention the “Column
with the torchbearer” on the edge of the Maschsee, in Hannover.
Brodsky, on one occasion, when he had finished preparing his famous
exhibition “Buena Memoria”, at the Sprengel Museum in Hannover,
realized that only 50 meters from the museum there was a column
known as the "Fackelträger am Maschsee” (Torchbearer in the Masch
lake) by the sculptor Hermann Scheuernstuhl (who, as the better known
artist Arno Breker, worked during the Nazi regime). On a column 15
meters high, a young athlete holds a torch in his left hand and his right
hand makes a gesture that resembles a Nazi salute. The work was made
in 1936, as a landmark to celebrate the Olympics in Berlin of the same
year. Brodsky decided to perform an intervention on the fascist
monument that he called “Images against ignorance”: that is, against the
indifference of Hannover's population concerning that historical
landmark and in favor of not forgetting its significance.
      In this intervention, the poetics of the anti-monument is also
explicit. As the artist Christo showed in his works, an effective strategy
to open our eyes to a past that is “entombed” in huge “invisible
monuments” is precisely to cover them up again. Marcelo covered the
Third Reich Eagle at the base of the column with a Venetian blind. When
closed, this blind alluded to the work “Black square against white
background” of Kasimir Malevitch, which is in the Sprengel Museum.
On its base, we could read: "Nie wieder, nevermore. “On the other two
sides of the column he affixed two huge banners with photographs he
shot of two memorial plates: one of them in Berlin, with the sentence
"Orte des Schreckens, die wir niemals vergessen dürfen" (“Terror sites which
we shall never forget”) followed by the list of Nazi extermination and
concentration camps. Memory is treated here as a law: “Do not forget”.



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      The other plate is identical in shape and is in Buenos Aires,
displaying the words: "Lugares de Memoria que no debemos olvidar jamás,"
followed by the list of the Argentinian camps where political prisoners
were tortured, imprisoned, or “disappeared”. Marcelo's work of
memory – supported by the Sprengel Museum and by the city – was so
effective that it not only raised debate on this and other German Nazi-
era monuments, but also aroused the destructive urge of those who wish
to cultivate the positive memory of that past. Thus, Brodsky's
installation was attacked twice over the period of the two and a half
months it was mounted. According to the police, the possible
participation of neo-Nazis in the attacks "should not be ruled out."
      Additionally, in the same room with the works of Marcelo Brodsky,
one could see photographic works from another of his exhibitions, the
“Buena memoria”, which was represented by photographs of his
colleagues at the Colégio Nacional de Buenos Aires. These photos
feature young people from Marcelo’s class, some of whom would later
be victims of the policy of “disappearance” perpetrated by the
dictatorship, as had occurred with Brodsky's own brother. It turns out
that the photos displayed are actually photographs of photographs: over
those in black and white, of the 1970s, we see reflected on the protective
glass, faces in color of young Argentinians who, in the 1990s,
contemplated the document-pictures and which mixed with the faces of
the past. Again, Marcelo works not only with the photographic and
mnemonic device of copy and repetition, of inscription of the past in
layers on the photographic paper, but also with the topographic
phenomenon of “telescoping”: the overlap of different temporalities in
the same space.
      As memory only exists in the present, the artist works with the
multiplicity of times and generations involved in his work. From
Brodsky’s exhibition, Nexo8, we also saw the photographs of books that

      8
       See the two Marcelo Brodsky catalogs (1997 and 2001) in which the
reader can learn about his many productions, including his works around the
ruins of the AMIA (the Asociación Mutua Israelita Argentina at Pasteur Street
in Buenos Aires, which suffered a terrorist attack on July 18, 1994, leaving 84


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had been buried during the Argentinian dictatorship in the house of
Nélida Valdez and Oscar Elissamburu, in Mar del Plata. These
unearthed works appear on the ground and worn by moisture. Among
them, the book The Wretched of the Earth, by Franz Fanon, reminds other
places of memory, of the anticolonial struggles, but also, with its name,
leads us to think about these books that were condemned to remain
underground, in an imposed oblivion. These books remained in a tomb,
while internment was denied to more than 30,000 people who
disappeared during Argentina's military dictatorship.
     The largest room of the exhibition held the memory of the Maria
Antônia building of the School of Philosophy of the University of São
Paulo concerning the time of the resistance against the dictatorship.
Parts of the annex building that served for many years – after the School
was transferred to the Butantã Campus – as the administration of São
Paulo's prison system: windows, a latrine with lid and a thick layer of
dust, excrement, and pigeon feathers, photographs by Marcelo Brodsky
of the same debris while still in the annex building, before being “saved”
by the artists Horst Hoheisel and Andreas Knitz.
     These aforementioned fragments lead visitors to a field of ruins,
where those pieces demanded a meaning impossible to be assigned to
them. The operation carried out in that room was precisely the recovery
of an "amputated" past, legacy of the dictatorship in the form of a torso.
The artists decided to revive it, assemble its pieces: give a face and a
voice to a traumatic past, difficult to represent, but that calls for a space
and requests a dialogue.
     Fulvia Molina built human-sized cylinders with the photos of the
students killed during the struggles of 1968. She also conducted a series
of interviews with participants of the student movement of the 1960s
(she herself was part of the movement). In her research, she found a list
with more than 300 signatures of participants of an assembly of 1966.
This document was also exhibited in a horizontal window and


dead), as well as his involvement in the construction of the “Parque de la Me-
moria” in Buenos Aires.



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Márcio Seligmann-Silva, Antimonuments



reproduced and overlapped with the photos of the cylinders: building
memory hieroglyphs, using a mix of image and text. Next to the
cylinders, a series of videos presented the interviews of the struggles
against the dictatorship and, within walking distance of the monitors, a
headset enabled visitors to listen to each of the interviews. When a
visitor entered the empty room, it was totally dark, with only a monitor
at the back, showing life, the work of renovation of the annex building.
As the visitor moved along the windows – which also contained
journalistic material on the history of the crackdown against students of
Maria Antônia – the lights gradually turned on and illuminated only the
spot closest to the visitor: a true metaphor of the work of archaeology of
memory, as always, based on the location and ground of the present.
      As we may learn from Walter Benjamin's theory of memory, our
relationship to the past can be compared with a work of collecting the
wreckage of history (which according to him would be only one
catastrophe), the ruins, partly buried, that keep hold of the forgotten.
The one who recalls is shocked by the secret that the forgotten kept. “It
may be that what makes the forgotten so weighty and so pregnant” –
Benjamin affirmed in his book Berlin Childhood around 1900 – «is nothing
but the trace of misplaced habits in which we could no longer find
ourselves. Perhaps the mingling of the forgotten with the dust of our
vanished dwellings is the secret of its survival» (Benjamin 2006: 140).
These new artists of memory that we follow today can and, I believe,
must be thought about from a new mnemonic and cultural landscape
that has come to value this memory of trauma. From the poetry of anti-
monuments we can open a way to better illuminate this new art of
memory. The testimonial element of this art reinvents the political
content of the arts. They become part of life, breaking with museum
walls and white cubes that were too white.
      The works of the artists I have discussed here lead us along the
paths of the archaeology of memory in whose landscapes we recognize,
mixed – sometimes clearer, at other times less so—images that astound
us as they cry out for justice. It is our responsibility to know how to
continue this work of exposing openly what neglect and injustice
managed to conceal and make “invisible”.


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                             The Author
Márcio Seligmann-Silva

      Márcio Seligmann-Silva holds a Ph.D. from the Free University of
Berlin, and he was a visiting scholar at Yale and at the Zentrum Für
Literaturforschung (Berlin). Since 2000 he has been working as full
professor of Literary Theory at Unicamp, Brazil. His publications
include several books and essays in journals in Latin America, USA, and
Europe on topics like Walter Benjamin, Vilém Flusser, trauma-, media-,
postcolonial-, and translation-studies, and about the representation of
violence, with a focus on the Shoah and Latin American Dictatorships.
Since 2018 he has been vice-president of ICLA.

      Email: m.seligmann@uol.com.br



                             The Article
Date sent: 15/07/2020
Date accepted: 20/10/2020
Date published: 30/11/2020



                      How to cite this article
Seligmann-Silva, Márcio, “Antimonuments: Between Memory and
Resistance”, Transmediality / Intermediality / Crossmediality: Problems of
Definition, Eds. H.-J. Backe, M. Fusillo, M. Lino, with the focus section
Intermedial Dante: Reception, Appropriation, Metamorphosis, Eds. C. Fischer
and M. Petricola, Between, X.20 (2020), www.betweenjournal.it




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