The archive as construction site: collective memory and trauma in contemporary art from Angola

Abstract

History has become a challenging and demanding space for contemporary artists from the former peripheries of the global art world interested in the documentary, (re)constructive and also fictional dimensions of the archive – in both its physical and metaphorical dimension. The notions of memory and trauma (as absence of memory) are closely related and interrelated to the topic of the archive, especially in regard to the collective or cultural dimension of the archive. In the discussion of some selected artworks of Angolan contemporary artists, the archive is understood from a cultural-historical perspective as part of the collective and cultural memory. The interdependency between memory and forgetting is the focus of this paper. I ask how the artworks address the presence and the absence of collective memory in the archive, showing the different positions in a range of possible engagements with the archive. In the analysis I lean on a set of notions of practices such as excavation, autopsy and performance – used in a metaphorical sense to describe and interpret the artworks, asking how memory and forgetting is made visible.

Keywords:

• collective memory
• archive
• trauma
• memory
• contemporary art
• Angola

Notes

1. The “Frente Nacional de Libertação de Angola” (FNLA) is supported mainly by the ethnic group of the Bakogo in Northern Angola. The União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola (UNITA) is today the second largest party in Angola and was fighting as a rebel movement against the MPLA in the civil war. Finally, the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA) has ruled the country since independence.

2. Foucault was probably the first to use the notion of ‘archaeology’ in relation to the archive in his seminal work, L’Archéologie du savoir (1969). For him, the archive is the background for everything that it is possible to know, because it is the entity that governs what can be said and forgotten.

3. An assimilado was someone who spoke Portuguese and who had adopted the cultural habits of the colonizers. In return they were granted far-reaching privileges, and after independence they constituted the country’s political and economic elite.

4. Cf. also Deleuze’s concept of ‘encountered signs’ (1972), to which Bennett refers.

5. See http://artthrob.co.za/99mar/artbio.htm.

6. For a further discussion of the project, see Alvim and Goffeau (1999). Rory Bester (1998), however, is more critical, asking whether the project was able to consider the question of violence in an adequate way: ‘The exhibition suffers from Alvim’s particular abstraction from the war archive. In framing the future of “memórias íntimas marcas”, more consideration needs to be given to the archive itself and the impact that this archive has on the meaning and understanding of a culture of war. If exhibitions such as this are to move outside of an “art” context, play a role in the transformation of society, and affect people in their everyday lives, it has to engage the contradictions implied by what they seek to investigate’.