Marina GRŽINIĆ: Racialized violence in Europe: The Genealogy of Amnesia Project and the immobilization of refugees? In: PERERA, Suvendrini (ed.), PUGLIESE, Joseph (ed.). Mapping deathscapes : digital geographies of racial and border violence. London; New York: Routledge, 2022. Pp. 148-162, ilustr. Routledge research in digital humanities. ISBN 978-1-032-05657-9. DOI: 10.4324/9781003200611-15.
Book Description
This volume offers a critical and creative analysis of the
innovations of Deathscapes, a transnational digital humanities project
that maps the sites and distributions of custodial deaths in locations
such as police cells, prisons and immigration detention centres.
An international team of authors take a multidisciplinary approach to
questions of race, geographies of state violence and countermaps of
resistance across North America, Australia and Europe. The book
establishes rich lines of dialogic connection between digital and other
media by incorporating both traditional scholarly resources and digital
archives, databases and social media. Chapters offer a comprehensive
mapping of the key attributes through which racial violence is addressed
and contested through digital media and articulate, in the process, the
distinctive dimensions of the Deathscapes site.
This interdisciplinary volume will be an important resource for
scholars, students and activists working in the areas of Cultural
Studies, Media and Visual Studies, Indigenous Studies, Refugee Studies
and Law.
This workshop is envisioned as a conversation that leads toward consultation and education on the proposed topic. It unites a selected group of theorists, researchers and activists in order to exchange different positions of knowledge and interpretations on the proposed topic. The workshop will elaborate on issues of the construction of national identity in Serbia and “Republika Srpska” in the post-socialist era. These issues are based on several relations: the past and present negation of war crimes committed by the regime of Slobodan Milošević’s; the wider effect of historical revisionism; the link(s) between these processes and the suppression of social struggle based on the class issues in the region. Additionally, the workshop focuses on the analysis of the correlation between these and similar processes that are at work in Western Europe in relation to the negation of the colonial past and the lack of confrontation with the Nazi past. The workshop therefore aims to detect and/or decode those common denominators that are forming institutional, ideological and epistemic paradigms in order to halt or suspend thinking on the future of conviviality in the region and Europe.
Ana Isaković has been the archive editor, project coordinator and theatre production organizer at the Center for Cultural Decontamination since April 2011. She used to work as project coordinator and theatre production organizer of the Heartefact Foundation. She wrote for the web portal e-Novine (articles, theatre and art critique, interviews), she worked as a translator, correspondent and sales manager for the company “Dragačevac promet,” she was assistant project coordinator for the NGO CEDEUM (Center for Drama in Education and Art); from February 2006 until June 2007 she worked as an English teacher at the foreign language school INTRANET. She worked as a theatre critic for the monthly magazine “MAGAZIN 011,” organizer at the puppet theatre “Pinocchio,” secretary of directing in the play „Kuku Todore“ by Dragoslav Todorović; assistant organizer of the Meeting of Professional Puppet Theatres of Serbia. She was also a journalist for the cultural section of the magazine “Beorama.”
Nebojša Milikić is cultural worker and producer, researcher and activist, lives and works in Belgrade, Serbia. Studied and worked at the Institute for Regional Geology and Paleontology in Belgrade, attended The School of History and Theory of Image of the Centre for Contemporary Art Belgrade) and The Queer Studies at The Center for Queer Studies, Belgrade. Since 1995, he is involved in political activism, organizational, artistic and curatorial practice in visual and relational arts. Initiated, realized or co-realized many cultural and artistic programs and projects, in Serbia and abroad. He participated in a number of independent research projects and activist campaigns. Milikić writes about cultural and artistic production, political and ideological topics. From 1999 onward works in Cultural Center Rex in Belgrade, as the initiator and coordinator of the debate programs and the programs of democratization and decentralization of culture. One of the founders of the non-governmental cultural organization ReEX, dedicated to struggle against historical revisionism and negationism.
Aleksandra Sekulić—PhD candidate at Faculty of Media and Communication at the department of Theory of Art and Media. MA in Cultural management and cultural policy in the Balkans, UNESCO Chair, University of Arts, Belgrade and Universite Lumiere Lyon 2. Graduated in General Literature and Theory of Literature in Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade. Program director at the Center for Cultural Decontamination (CZKD) in Belgrade since 2010. Initiator and co-editor (with Lazar Bodroza and Radovan Popović) of the project The Invisible Comics in cooperation with National Library of Serbia and Metaklinika Studio, consisting of the digital archive of alternative comics in Serbia, the publication The Invisible Comics – Alternative comics in Serbia 1980-2010 and the exhibition at Leipzig Book Fair in the Pavillion of Serbia. Together with Branka Benčić, she curated exhibitions “Video, Television, Anticipation” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade (2013) and Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb (2014). Since 2006, she is member of the archive and program platform Media Archaeology. Since 2001 member of Kosmoplovci group (digital arts, music, film, alternative comics), and with whom she established the online platform Altarchive.org, online archive of alternative film and video. Editor of books: Performing The Museum—A Reader (2016). Co-ed. with Dušan Grlja, Videography of the Region (2009), Media Archaeology: The Nineties (2009), and more.
Images with violent content are always historical, as what is seen as violent is constructed and is violently managed; therefore nothing is natural in relation to violence. What will be defined as violent is always an outcome of violent hegemonic processes. Seeing images of killings can provoke our rebellion and our insurgencies, unless we are paralyzed by our normativized occidental lives. Europe and the global neoliberal capitalist system in general are well attuned to the hierarchization, control, and management processes of the present neoliberal capitalist states. Especially under attack are migrants and all those not considered to be “natural” parts of the neoliberal capitalist national body in the West: asylum-seekers and refugees escaping war-torn parts of the global world (the Middle East, Africa), from conflicts induced by capital and imperial management.
On the other side and at the same time, we can see, for example, the last election campaign in Austria, with posters by the Freedom Party (FPÖ) containing blatantly racist and fascist slogans and images. My interest is to connect racism with visual narratives, “trophy” artifacts, and culture. I will look at racism from a historical perspective, showing a horrifying trajectory of structural racism that reproduces itself almost always circularly from a pseudoscientific (biological) racism, “progressing” toward “cultural racism” to “return” again to “scientific racism,” though then coined “intellectual racism.”
All events will be held in English. The events will take place online! Registration: info@weltmuseumwien.at
Adela Jušić in conversation with Marina Grzinić Friday, February 19, 2021, 04:30 PM Amsterdam, Berlin, Rom, Stockholm, Wien
Adela Jušić was born on 1982 in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Jušić has exhibited in more than 100 international exhibitions (Manifesta 8, Murcia, Spain; Videonale, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany; Image Counter Image, Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany, Balkan Insight, Pompidou Center, Paris). In 2010 she won Young Visual Artist Award for the best young Bosnian artist in 2010, Henkel Young Artist Price Central and Eastern Europe in 2011, and Special award of Belgrade October Salon in 2013.
Martin Krenn in conversation with Marina Grzinić Tuesday, March 16, 2021, 07:00 PM Amsterdam, Berlin, Rom, Stockholm, Wien
Elisabeth Bakambamba Tambwe in conversation with Marina Grzinić Tuesday, March 30, 2021, 07:00 PM Amsterdam, Berlin, Rom, Stockholm, Wien
Adela Jušić and Marina Grzinić , zoom 19.2.2021
Adela Jušić and Marina Grzinić, zoom 19.2.2021
Adela Jušić, Marina Grzinić and Sophie Uitz, zoom 19.2.2021
Edited by Nicolaus Schafhausen, Mirjam Zadoff (2021)
Tell me about yesterday tomorrow: About the Future of the Past
Historical events and our knowledge of them mould our understanding of today’s world. The interdisciplinary authorship of this volume focuses on the connection between past and future. A bold and unusual publication whose approaches and themes extend from biographical experiences via intergenerational exchange to the discussion of current social phenomena.
With contributions by M. Czollek, C. Deliss, S. Denny, G. Diez, B. Draney, L. Gillick, M. Gržinić, A. Huyssen, I. Küpeli, D. Lesage, C. Lorch, S. Lütticken, K. Müller, V.J. Müller, A. Pető, M. Rinck, D. Rupnow, P. Rypson, Ph. Sands, N. Schafhausen, D. Schöne, G. Schwarz, N. Sternfeld, N. Wahl, M. Zadoff.
The images and chronologies in these displayed materials are coming from the catalogue/publication Words Precede Actions with the subtitle The Context of Language, Racism, Economy and Power by Marika Schmiedt published in 2018 that displays racist genealogies of discrimination and the ghettoization of the Roma people in the West and East of Europe.
One part of her analysis consists of the research of racism, linking them to histories of the relationship between race and physical anthropology. As “racist scientific results” are used in sorting and exposing bones and crania collections in the museum. This takes us via Schmiedt to the Natural History Museum (NHM) in Vienna that has one of the biggest crania collections, assembled by the Austrian anthropologist Augustin Weisbach (1837–1914) in the second half of the nineteenth century in Europe. The anthropological collection at the Natural History Museum in Vienna includes 40,000 objects, human remains, including skulls, bones, hair, and body drains. The collection mostly contains relics from historical and prehistoric times, but also problematic chapters of human remains that mark colonial and National Socialist times.
The other part presents a gallery of “skeletons of important Austrian men” falling out of the closet of Austrian history. All these men are not solely vicious racists, having programmatic anti-Romaism agendas, but they are all anti-Semites:
Albert Geßmann (1852–1920)
Karl Lueger (1844–1910),
Josef Weinheber (1892–1945)
Taras Borodajkewycz (1902‒1984)
Josef Weinheber (1892 – 1945) a “respected” Austrian man, poet and essayist, who was largely under the literary influences of Rainer Maria Rilke, Anton Wildgans and Karl Kraus, was a member of the Nazi Party from 1931 until 1933 and from 1944 on. He committed at the time of the advance of the Red Army, leaving behind a clear-sighted parting letter. He was buried in the village of Kirchstetten, Austria, where he had lived since 1936. The municipality and the citizens of Kirchstetten, have honored for years the “great poet” Weinheber by transforming his house into a museum, dedicating a street, a square and a highway bridge in his name, decided to name a kindergarten in his honor. (From the text by Marina Grzinic in Words Precede Actions, 2018).
Lecture and introduction to Marika Schmiedt’s catalogue
by Marina Grzinic
[…] Words precede actions: language, words, and discourses have a powerful impact on concrete social issues, political decisions, media content, knowledge institutions, labor markets, the shaping of histories, memories, and subjectivities and defining of citizenship. Through mass media, public opinions, and widespread anti-Roma graffiti in public space, words have set in motion actions of constant dehumanization of the Roma, leading their conditions of poverty, segregation, and seclusion to become part of another rhetoric – the rhetoric of naturalization of these conditions. We can find at least three forms of displaying these processes of racialization in Schmiedt’s work. The second form that is as well central to the research Genealogies of amnesia displays mechanisms that I will label the gallery of “skeletons of important Austrian men” falling out of the closet of Austrian history. All these men, we are soon to learn, almost dumbstruck, are not solely vicious racists, having programmatic anti-Romaism agendas, but are all anti-Semites. Reviewing this frightening collection of men, which is by no means exclusively historical, but instead, reverberates persistently in present times, identified by generations of critical positions in Austria as the nation’s post-Nazi times. This past is preoccupying as hyper right wing neoliberal necrocapitalism is at its full power here and now.
The catalogue presentation at the VBKÖ was contextualized by an exhibition of Marika Schmiedt’s recent investigations on the Nazi-past of the Vereinigung bildender Künstlerinnen Österreichs (VBKÖ).
May 27, 2019 Zagreb Workshop: Feminism Between Nation-states and Capitalism
Workshop with Marina Gržinić, Šefik Tatlić, and the participants of the module Feminism Between Nation-states and Capitalism at Centre for Women’s Studies, Zagreb, Croatia
Centre for Women’s Studies Zagreb is the first non-institutional educational center in Croatia. It was founded by a group of feminists, theorists, and scholars, peace activists, and artists in 1995. The Centre provides an interdisciplinary program and expert knowledge on women’s issues and is a meeting point for academic discourse, artistic practice, activist engagement. The Centre’s publishing program is focused on publishing the results of Croatian feminist research and theory, as well as translations of selected key feminist texts. Until today they have published more than 50 titles. The Centre’s feminist theoretical journal Treća – [The Third] was launched in 1998 and has been published annually ever since.
The main quality of the Women’s Studies educational program is its interdisciplinarity and integrality. The program offers an insight into the diverse themes of feminism and gender studies, women’s culture and history, women’s rights and gender equality. During its 20 years of work, the Centre has seen more than 600 participants complete the educational program, and more than 1000 participants involved in various specialized programs.
Module: Feminism Between Nation-states and Capitalism
It is clear that what global capitalism brings in front of us is a necessity to revisit globally racist, homophobic, and discriminatory processes, not as simple identity differences but as processes that are entangled with capital, new media technology and with the change of the mode of life under capital’s brutal modes of racialization and exploitation.
Lectures:
Marina Gržinić
State nation, feminism, capitalism, memory, history
Feminist perspective: from former Yugoslavia turbo fascism to neoliberal postmodern fascist Europe
Šefik Tatlić
Nation-state, feminisms, capitalism
Political analysis of memory and history in the space of former Yugoslavia
Digital Research Travelogues through European Archives creates an interdisciplinary platform for art and science to explore the current politics of forgetting in relation to three traumatic events of the 20th century: Belgium (colonialism in the Congo), Austria (antisemitism in World War II and the post-war period), and the former Yugoslavia (turbo-nationalism, Srebrenica genocide). The platform departs from the research conducted as part of the FWF-PEEK project Genealogy of Amnesia: Rethinking the Past for a New Future of Conviviality (AR 439). It was presented as a digital format to promote emancipatory politics in the humanities through the 2020-2021 exhibition at the Weltmuseum Wien, Austria. It consisted of 42 interviews presented as 42 posters with QR codes. This part of the exhibition was a unique artistic-scientific and collaborative research work, presented as an interactive digital installation. The 42 QR codes were divided into three sections, each with a description and content, and accessible to the viewer via mobile phone. Each user could listen to the interviews in English. As a second level of interaction, an interactive table was presented in the exhibition space, allowing the viewer to spend hours exploring the connections between the three sections presented in parallel through images and texts, as a kind of double index, footnotes and hypertexts through European trauma histories.
A symposium on the silencing of colonialism, anti-Semitism, and contemporary turbo-fascist nationalism in Belgium, Austria, and former Yugoslavia.
The international and interdisciplinary symposium, open to public audiences, is built as a podium for research and exchange, dissemination of knowledge, and discussion.
The two-day-long symposium hosted invited speakers that cover the central topics of our research in the three respective territories: memory and history, archives, and the axis of power and knowledge. The general objective of the symposium was to denote gaps between processes of institutionalized silencing, hegemonic processes of oblivion and amnesia, and processes of instituting power through building counter-memory and counter-history projects, interventions, and resistance. The aim was to demonstrate how processes for the establishment of counter-memory and counter-history can open up spaces for new ways of forming radicalized constituent politics. Collective struggles and oppositionality were investigated as the basis of a possible dismantling of neoliberal and necrocapitalist societies by means of re-empowering history that crushes silences.
Opening: Karin Riegler, Vice-Rector for Teaching, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (image: Christina Jauernik)
Opening: Marina Gržinić, head of the research project “Genealogy of Amnesia,” Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (image: Christina Jauernik)
Opening: Sophie Uitz, researcher "Genealogy of Amnesia" project, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (image: Christina Jauernik)
Opening Keynote: Gloria Wekker (Utrecht University), "A Genealogy of Amnesia in Europe" (image: Christina Jauernik)
Opening Keynote: Gloria Wekker (Utrecht University), "A Genealogy of Amnesia in Europe" (image: Christina Jauernik)
Gloria Wekker (Utrecht Unviersity) in conversation with Birgit Sauer (University of Vienna) (image: Valerija Zabret)
Friday/Saturday, November 9-10
1 of 14
Marina Gržinić (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna): Burdened by the past, re-thinking the future (image: Dominik Szereday)
Marina Gržinić (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna): Burdened by the past, re-thinking the future (image: Dominik Szereday)
Collectif Mémoire Coloniale et Lutte contre les Discriminations (Brussels): The Challenges of De-Colonial Movements – The Afrodescendants Facing the Colonial Denial and the Mutations of the Colonial Propaganda in Belgium (image: Dominik Szereday)
Kalvin Soiresse Njall and Geneviève Kaninda (CMCLD) (image: Dominik Szereday)
Araba Evelyn Johnston-Arthur (Howard University, Washington DC) (image: Dominik Szereday)
Ruth Beckermann (Vienna) in conversation with Michael Loebenstein (Austrian Filmmuseum Vienna) (image: Dominik Szereday)
Sefik Tatlić (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna) (image: M. Gržinić)
Pedro Monaville (New York University Abu Dhabi) (image: Sophie Uitz)
Ruth Wodak (Lancaster University and University of Vienna) and Markus Rheindorf (University of Vienna) (image: Gržinić)
Sophie Uitz (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna) (image: Christina Jauernik)
Max Silverman (University of Leeds) (image: Christina Jauernik)
Nejra Nuna Čengić (University of Graz) (image: Uitz)
Shirley Anne Tate (Leeds Beckett University) (image: A. Sekulić)
Shirley Anne Tate (Leeds Beckett University) (image: Aleksandra Sekulić)
at Weltmuseum Wien October 8th, 2020 to April 3rd, 2021
Curated by Marina Gržinić, Christina Jauernik and Sophie Uitz
Trailer-teaser of the exhibition in Weltmuseum Wien
The exhibition Stories of Traumatic Pasts: Counter-Archives for Future Memories focuses on three European regions, their stories, and their current experiences of collective amnesia in relation to traumatic events from the past: Belgian colonial rule in the Congo, Austria after the “Anschluss” in 1938, and the denial of war crimes since 1990 after the breakup of Yugoslavia.
Participating artists Elisabeth Bakambamba Tambwe Lana Čmajčanin Bojan Djordjev Dani Gal Siniša Ilić Adela Jušić Martin Krenn Monique Mbeka Phoba Nicolas Pommier Anja Salomonowitz Joëlle Sambi Nzeba Arye Wachsmuth Valerie Wolf Gang
Posters and works developed by students of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (workshop with Arye Wachsmuth): Negra Bernhard Henrie Dennis Iklim Doğan Robert Jolly Lars* Kollros Shaya Safaisini Hiba Shammout Sophie Anna Stadler Pia S. Weissinger Ondrej Zoricak
The digital archive: COUNTERING THE GENEALOGY OF AMNESIA
7.10.2020 Opening speeches and performance (closed for public due to Covid-19)
Speeches: C. Schicklgruber (director Weltmuseum Wien), J. Hartle (rector Academy of Fine Arts Vienna), S. Uitz and M. Gržinić (curators). Opening performance by Elisabeth Bakambamba Tambwe and Mani Obeya.
8.10.2020 Symposium (closed for public due to Covid-19)
Taking part in situ or via zoom:
Elisabeth Bakambamba Tambwe Lana Čmajčanin Bojan Djordjev Dani Gal Siniša Ilić Adela Jušić Martin Krenn Nicolas Pommier Anja Salomonowitz Joëlle Sambi Nzeba Arye Wachsmuth Valerie Wolf Gang Lars* Kollros Mika Maruyama Shaya Safaisini Pia Weissinger
Moderation by Marina Gržinić Organisation by Sophie Uitz
