https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7064-1450
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Abstract
In dialogue with ongoing discussions about decolonization of trauma theory that account for cultural trauma and sustained and long trauma processes, this paper discusses Alberto Baraya’s series
Service Included (1997) in order to identify decolonial challenges and possibilities for posttraumatic photography. It argues that this series is a performative work that proposes a critical and decolonial revision of trauma culture, by appropriating the symbolic dimensions of Spanish-Catholic motifs of sacred violence historically and currently employed as cultural mechanisms for representation of cultural trauma in Colombia. This paper recovers and discusses Baraya’s early, forgotten work and original appropriation of analogue photography operations with analogue photography, and proposes that the challenges Service Included offer for posttraumatic photography consist in both retracing symbolic active processes for dealing with trauma, and retracing photography’s history as a medium of expression of cultural trauma, in order to create spaces for “displaced difference” within cultural trauma and trauma culture.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Giraldo, “De la Anatomía piadosa,” 225–227.
2. Medina, Arte, 52.
3. According to historians, La Violencia began with the assassination of Liberal Presidential Candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán (9 April, 1948), and ended in the first years of the “National Front” when Liberal and Conservative Parties agreed to share power in the Declaration of Sitges (20 July, 1957). Gaitán’s assassination significantly increased tensions between both party elites and grassroots, which in turn have been understood as an extension and transformation of violence happening almost continuously since the independence from Spain in 1810. See: Sánchez, Guerras; Palacios, Entre la Legitimidad.
4. Guerrero-Hernandez, “Cuerpos en Dolor,” 137.
5. Pécaut, “Presente, pasado y futuro,” 32.
6. Alexander, “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma,” 10.
7. Mbembe, “The Colony,” 28–29.
8. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 130–131.
9. Christian, “Fanon and the trauma,” 226.
10. Kristeva, The Severed Head, 58, 66.
11. van den Oever, “Cultural Trauma,” 468.
12. Sprinson de Jesús, “57. Head of Saint John the Baptist on a Charger,” 240.
13. Auerbach, “Figura,” 45.
14. Traba, Los Muebles, 64 (my translation).
15. Jaramillo, Beatriz González, 100.
16. Wagner, “Tomorrow is here again.”
17. Mitchell, “An Interview,” 2.
18. Mulvey, “A Sudden Gust of Wind,” 30–32.
19. Taylor, Place and Politics, 48, 165.
20. Interview with the artist. 15 February 2018.
21. Epimenides was honoured as god and regarded as a sculpture type of sleeping busts and heads denoting an introspective man blessed with foresightedness. Laertius, Lives, 109.
22. Giraldo, “De la Anatomía piadosa,” 91.
23. Kramp, “Unburdening Life,” 12.
24. Cull, Theatres of Immanence, 1.
25. Deleuze, Difference, 136 and 293.
26. Pabón, “Construcciones de cuerpos,” 70.
27. Deleuze, Difference, 209 and 216.
28. Hoogland, Violent embrace, 79.
29. Kaufmann, “The Perspective of Shadows,” 259.
30. “Denn wahrhaftig steckt die Kunst in der Natur, wer sie heraus kann reißen, der hat sie”. Dürer, Hierin sind begriffen, folio 99 v (my translation).
31. Rhizomatic photography is understood as photographic exploration that emerges directly from “experience and full-engagement through sense-making with the singularity of each moment of experience”. It interrupts paradigms of traditional representational practice, while researching into body practices, ethos, and cultural and social contexts of production and circulation of pictures/images. Sakr and Kucirkova, “Making the ‘Here’ and ‘Now’.”
32. Ray, “The Age of Light,” 167.
33. Medina, Arte, 52.
34. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 126.
35. Remarkably, in de Voragine’s account the saint-martyr’s relic imposes veneration violently and exerts such violence “tactically” (which also means locally and tangibly) through its “fore” i.e., the pot. And the pot is not only affirmed as the head’s extensive protection, but also as its weapon, which in Latin is said as arm. de Voragine, Golden Leyend, 73–74.
36. Deleuze, “The Actual and The Virtual,” 151.
37. See note 34 above, 123.
38. Since the relic is a seed, it is not rare that the “practice of dismembering or breaking the relic, far from being condemned, is cast as a natural act that envisions the relics as a sort of sustenance […] Paulinus clarifies, ‘those bones of the saint’s body are not choked with the dust of death, but endowed with the hidden seed of eternal life’”. Hahn, “What do Reliquaries,” 295.
39. See note 34 above, 131.
40. Quevedo, Un cuerpo para el espíritu, 213.
41. See note 34 above, 137.
42. Lubbock, Storytelling in Christian Art, 193.
43. Mbembe, “The Colony,” 35.
44. Baudelaire, “Counterfeit coin,” 119.
45. See note 34 above, 137.
46. McCauley, “The Trouble,” 423.
47. Baer, Spectral evidence, 11.
48. Iversen, Photography, 1–9.
49. See note 43 above, 35.
50. Rothberg, “Decolonizing Trauma Studies,” 226.
51. Luckhurst, The Trauma Question, 210.
52. Visser, “Decolonizing Trauma Theory,” 251.
53. See note 50 above, 230.
54. See note 52 above, 252.
55. Craps, Postcolonial Witnessing, 127.
56. See note 43 above, 39.
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Juan Carlos Guerrero-Hernández
J. C. Guerrero-Hernández is an independent scholar and holds a PhD in Art History from Stony Brook University and M.A in Philosophy from Universidad Nacional de Colombia. He researches on memory, violence, moving images and media archaeology in contemporary global art, and currently writes two books about the emergence of video art in Colombia. He was published articles and chapters in Spanish and English.