Denialism – as a strategy – constructs positions of power through the assertion of truth and its negation, i.e. the denial of facts, historical events or social contexts. The producibility of facts and the dissolution of community have become operative and media agents in the current structures of biopolitical governance. Denialism is very efficient in erasing mnemonic knowledge, which once lost, cannot be regained. The inability to mourn leads to horrific manifestations in contemporary societies. People have been displaced over and over, their deterritorialised memory manifested in a sort of insensitivity towards others, the previous ones and the past ones, the lost ones.
One reason why we started digging, as if we were mnemonic archaeologists, is the fragmentation of history.
We are concerned with the interwoven processes of industrialisation, the formation of modern nationalism and the violent ruptures modernity implied in the shaping of societies. Photography is the modern invention that depicts these processes while simultaneously being itself the optical-technical means of paradigm shifting. THE INFRASTRUCTURES OF DENIAL as they have continuously and rigorously been implemented in nation building, serve to smooth out cultural differences. Since modernity brought us here, we had to resist these constant forceful procedures of annihilating difference. One reason why we started digging, as if we were mnemonic archaeologists, is the fragmentation of history. We began digging for visual traces, and photo-chemical residues created as side products while serving their purpose: observing the building of infrastructure, namely railways in the Ottoman Empire, documenting archaeological finds, surveying territories in military operations during WWI, and “archiving the planet”. These photographic operations in the decline of the Ottoman Empire create a conflict of interests with the attempts of erasing and denying “what had happened”. Thus they were forbidden. But numerous images existed, and persisted. They were published, though with differing modes of recognition. And despite their existence, the denialist voice had the abilities to silence the evidential, to censor, to erase traces, and with it the mnemonic voices of the survivors.
We believe in processes of actualization, to bring the past into being, and in memorialization as an active process in ‘now time’ in the present.
So we hear Deleuze calling the missing people. “The moment the master, or the colonizer, proclaims ‘There have never been people here’, the missing people are a becoming, they invent themselves, in shanty towns and camps, or in ghettos, in new conditions of struggle to which a necessarily political art must contribute”1Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Minneapolis, 1989, 217.. that there have never been people here, means in return that we claim to mourn the missing people, the ones that history has untold. We believe in processes of actualization, to bring the past into being, and in memorialization as an active process in ‘now time’ in the present. We try to make these processes productive, and use the photographic as a materialized tool in the attempt to create a new and different form of memory. Such memory comes from the mnemonic, from sensual processes of taste, smell, place, view, sound, the haptic, the body’s positioning in the world.
Angela Melitopoulos, Kerstin Schroedinger
