HISTORICAL MEMORY
LOS BUNKERS
LOS BÚNKERS
Los búnkers que se construyeron en la Guerra Civil Española fueron olvidados por todos, o quizás mejor dicho poco se supo de ellos después de la guerra, muchas de estas construcciones eran desconocidas por los propios lugareños, ya que fueron construidas por soldados desplazados que rara vez eran de la zona o por extranjeros (mucho de ellos Brigadistas Internacionales). Esto hizo que muchas de las construcciones de la guerra como trincheras, búnkers y refugios permanecieran durante décadas escondidos en el campo e ignorados por la población.
En los últimos años como consecuencia del interés creciente por la memoria histórica en España y la facilitación de la localización, a gran escala, de los restos olvidados de la Guerra ( gracias a la tecnología GPS y Google Maps) han surgido muchos curiosos en el tema y foros en internet donde los “bunkerhunters” se dedican a intercambiar coordenadas.
Alrededor de este fenómeno gravitan diferentes grupos como aquellos que hacen recreaciones históricas, utilizando para ellos los escenarios de la Guerra Civil originales (en algunas de estas recreaciones los Republicanos ganan batallas que en realidad ganaron los Nacionales), coleccionistas militares que llegan a los lugares con detector de metales y realizan un verdadero expolio.
Dentro de este grupo hetérogeneo también hay ciclistas y senderistas que hacen rutas para descubrir los restos de la memoria histórica española, “geocachers” que esconden tesoros en posiciones curiosas (como búnkers y trincheras) para publicar después sus coordenadas en Internet y realizar una gymcana online-offline, o fotógrafos amateurs que deciden acercarse a estos búnkers por la noche para iluminar su interior y fotografiarlos en mitad de la noche, como si aún siguieran “habitados”.
Este fenómeno reciente aparecerá como telón de fondo en la conversación que el padre y la hija mantienen durante su paseo por la zona de los búnkers y en el encuentro de ambos con un campesino que trabaja en la finca.
CREATING THE WITNESS
Creating the Witness examines the role of film and the Internet in creating virtual witnesses to genocide over the past one hundred years. Leshu Torchin’s broad survey of media and the social practices around it investigates the development of popular understandings of genocide to achieve recognition and response, ultimately calling on viewers to act on behalf of human rights.
https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/creating-the-witness
http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/activistmedia/2012/12/creating-the-witness/
FIRST CHAPTER
Round and Round and Consumed by Fire (2009). Claudia Joskowich
Text by Omer Fast
«Take 16 minutes to learn something about Bolivian history. Or maybe not. Claudia Joskowicz’s two new video works, shown at Thierry Goldberg Projects, depict historical moments dramatically poised on the brink of a violent eruption. At first glance, the actors we see appear frozen even though they’re alive, as if God (or the artist) has buggered off, time has stopped, and the drama can’t or won’t conclude naturally. In Vallegrande, 1967, we slowly approach a dilapidated shed in a rural setting. A few curious locals have gathered to gawk at a dead body lying inside. Nude and supine, the dead man is watched over by soldiers and an eager photographer, who has climbed on the makeshift bier in order to get a better picture. In Round and Round and Consumed by Fire we are again in a rural village of mud bricks and shingled roofs. Two light-skinned men bearing pistols stand in front of a façade. They stand guard, perfectly still, awaiting the arrival of a band of soldiers who appear in the distance.»
Continue reading:
http://bombmagazine.org/article/4711/claudia-joskowicz
To see Claudia´s webside visit:
REMEMBERING IN RUANDA
(…) Every year, at the genocide-commemoration ceremonies during mourning week, scores of Rwandans erupt in this way, unstrung by grief, convulsed and thrashing when anyone comes near to soothe or subdue them, including, at the stadium, yellow-vested trauma teams who carry them out, bucking and still screaming. You can expect it, but you can’t protect against it. All around the stadium, all around the city, all around the country hung misty-gray banners displaying the word kwibuka—“remember.” The lacerating voices in the stadium make the banners seem almost cruel. Is it really healing to keep reopening a wound? (…)
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/04/21/remembering-in-rwanda
LEV MANOVICH’S SPATIAL MONTAGE, DEANN BORSHAY LIEM, GEOPOLITICS AND CULTURAL IDENTITY
What resonated most for me within Manovich’s chapter “The New Language of Cinema”, and which relates to our ‘space-time’ theme, is his discussion of the spatial montage. He cites cultural geographer Edward Soja in prefacing the renewed interest in spatial montage, stating that “…it is only in the last decades of the twentieth century that this mode has made a powerful comeback, as exemplified by the growing importance of such concepts as “geopolitics” and “globalization” as well as by the key role that analysis of space plays in the theories of postmodernism” (323). I’d like to briefly explore filmmaker Deann Borshay Liem as emblematic of this particular claim, specifically drawing on her film In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee (2009). Deann becomes a integral player in this kind of wave of spatial montage (or experimentation with such within the documentary filmic form) in a service to a geopolitical analysis of her identity as a Asian transnational adoptee. The film serves as a sequel to her first autobiographical documentary First Person Plural(1999), and takes us on her journey back to South Korea to find the girl Cha Jung Hee who she replaced years ago at the orphanage and whose identity she has assumed throughout her adolescence. Deann’s personal exploration and journey becomes a story about a collective, historically-infused experience of transnational exchange that stems from neocolonial economics and politics from the 1940s onward between South Korea and the United States. She takes up the use of spatial montage within her documentary in order to provide a visibility as well as spatiotemporal simultaneity to the different identities that she has simultaneously assumed her entire life.