Archival DiffractionsA Response to Le Nemesiache’s CallGiulia Damiani

Setting Up a Scene from the Archive

‘The scene is the principal form of reminiscence: a kind of memory cut off from its origins and access routes, isolated and fixed, and reduced to a trace.’66Jane Rendell, Site-Writing: The Architecture of Art Criticism (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), p. 117. In this quote, theorist Jane Rendell reflects on what psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche conceived as a scene. Laplanche believed the scene to be the primary fragmented and repeated trace of the process of translation-repression happening between conscious and unconscious. I am interested in appropriating this notion of scene as it expresses the encounter between several boundaries: past and present, original and trace, and self and other, where ‘other’ can be a being or an object. Laplanche defined the unconscious as an ‘internal foreign body’, and even as one put inside the self by an alien.77Jean Laplanche, ‘The Unfinished Copernican Revolution’, in Laplanche, Essays on Otherness, ed. by John Fletcher, trans. by Luke Thurston, Leslie Hill, and Philip Slotkin (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 53–86 (p. 65). These scenes are traces of aliens; better still, they are ghosts appearing on the frontier between translation and feminine repression, inner and outer worlds, and past and present enactment. They are fleeting sites of encounter with Le Nemesiache’s practice reduced to a trace, or ‘glimpses’. In the writing of the philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman, glimpses are apparitions whose traces last longer than the apparition itself.88Georges Didi-Huberman, Glimpses, online video recording of a public open lecture for the students of the Division of Philosophy, Art & Critical Thought at the European Graduate School EGS, Saas-Fee, Switzerland, 26 May 2015 <https://egs.edu/lecture/georges-didi-huberman-glimpses-2015/> [accessed 25 February 2018]. Glimpses are beings half-seen and already loved. They require a form of investment.

Although scenes are glimpses without a visible origin, the origin of the term ‘scene’ reinforces the ideas of encounter and displacement of the trace. From the Greek skene, the word ‘scene’ originally indicated a tent or booth, something that gives shade or a shadow.99John Oswald, An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (Philadelphia, PA: Key & Biddle, 1836), p. 385. Scenes mark the shadows of sites of encounter, stretching over into the present and future through their trace. In this sense, the scene points to its own excess, to what exists beyond it — the event projecting the shadow. In this case, it is the encounter with a past feminist struggle; however, this can only be experienced differently, through retelling and re-siting — through the trace of the shadow itself. The scene is transformed into a new site for analysis calling for a response: for new incisions. According to Rebecca Schneider, this is what happens to an original event when it is narrated through a trace: the retelling and re-siting become the event itself.1010Rebecca Schneider, ‘Solo Solo Solo’, in After Criticism: New Responses to Art and Performance, ed. by Gavin Butt (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 23–47. The origin is lost. But the scene is also a theatrical event, both spatial when intended as the setting of the scene and temporal when the scene is a moment in a longer narrative. The scene is located in front of an audience. Audience members’ shadows are marked on the scene throughout this process.

Writing Scene-Sites: Scene Number One Is an Image Shot at Campi Flegrei, The Phlegrean Fields

Shadows grow in the encounter with Le Nemesiache’s artistic work. In the 1970s, their experience began overlapping with their environment — the natural volcanic phenomena present in the region of Naples (such as the sulphur fumes from the crater in this image) with the ancient myths that were located there. Their site was one of many repetitions: retranslations of something atavistic and repressed. Although I, the viewer, recognize this feeling, I cannot name it.

The black frame around the image indicates that it was filmed on a Super 8mm camera. This format was widely used by amateur filmmakers throughout the 80s. It is a frame from another time and from a longer feature, a still of something already in movement. In this shot, one woman is following another. The viewer participates in this chase. I understand this scene as a message of the desire to come after, to follow someone else’s steps. The two characters are Dido, the legendary queen of Carthage, and her sister Anna. Dido is the oldest and the most celebrated in the family because of her tragic suicide. Anna walks behind her, ready to accompany Dido in her fate, but her final trajectory will be different. In this ‘coming after’, one after the other, their image will never coincide. A fracture can be expressed through an image still. We are following their steps; we come after. We can rewind and repeat. In telling this story, what is my position in this repetitive structure? Am I acting out something unconscious through the repetition of this trace-scene?

Laplanche’s term ‘afterwardsness’ can be lifted from his psychoanalytic theory to become something different here.1111Jean Laplanche, ‘Notes on Afterwardsness’, in Laplanche, Essays on Otherness, pp. 264–69. Afterwardsness indicates a deferred action — a repetition with difference — that provokes the release of repressed ideas. This occurs through the relation with something from the past that is retranslated in the present. It can be a conscious process but not necessarily a knowing one.1212Rendell, Site-Writing, p. 63. Can this scene be the site of a personal and collective feminist investment? Retelling, displacing this trace onto other countless sites to begin again, to grasp something anew?

Number Two is a Scene of ‘Vulcanization’

The rumble of the volcano (see fig. 2) reverberates in the recording. Volcanoes are objects of scientific studies, subjects of paintings and poems, and background phenomena in contemporary art installations. Philosophers such as Didi-Huberman describe volcanoes as ‘nothing but nature’ when they exist outside of human intervention. They are certainly present, but they are not yet sites.1313Georges Didi-Huberman, The Man Who Walked in Color, trans. by Drew S. Burk (Minneapolis, MN: Univocal, 2017), p. 73. Le Nemesiache possessed the rumble of Mount Vesuvius, the renowned volcano near Naples. The volcano infiltrates their practice, which can be said to, in a metaphorical sense, cannibalize the potentially destructive but also generative force of Mount Vesuvius. For Le Nemesiache, women’s stories were present in the lava. Throughout the 1970s, they said that history was written in their blood, the blood of women. They waited for the explosion of their veins. They would walk in the world splashing their story like lava. ‘Lava, vulcani e sangue’ (‘Lava, Volcanos, and Blood’) was the title of an article by Mangiacapre, published posthumously in the magazine Il paese delle donne in 2004.1414Lina Mangiacapre, ‘Lava, vulcani e sangue’ (‘Lava, Volcanos and Blood’), Il Paese delle donne, May 2004. In an almost mystical language, Mangiacapre discussed how a conception of humanity based on the individuality of the single man as a fundamental basis has produced a society that celebrates straight lines, rigidity, and phallocentric towers. Lava, volcanoes, and blood would make the world start from naught again; naught was intended as a necessary destruction to achieve a new harmony with the cosmos, a new unity with the natural elements, with the volcanoes. This destruction would be led by women. The blood of women, of past witches, and the lava of the volcano are thus interpreted as prophetic actors coalescing the historical suffering of women into the promise of a future regeneration.

The volcano is revealed as a site of investment. The group’s actions did not aim at depicting or altering the functioning volcano. Their intention was, rather, to bring the volcano away from being a separate place and into the city — to recognize the lava in themselves and to see how the alien-ness of the volcano finds a shadow in the self. Thus the volcano has the potential to actualize unconscious structures but also material and patriarchal relationships: for example, in the ruins from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, which authors such as Freud and Derrida have used.1515The ruins of Pompeii became a model for Sigmund Freud’s analogy between archeology and psychoanalysis, the ruins representing what is repressed and preserved in the unconscious. The relief of a female figure Gradiva is famously used by Freud to analyse memory and repression. On this subject, see Griselda Pollock, ‘The Image in Psychoanalysis and the Archeological Metaphor’, in Psychoanalysis and the Image: Transdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. by Griselda Pollock (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 1–29.

Embracing artist Andrea Fraser’s definition of enactment as that which brings into focus ‘the structures of relationships that are produced and reproduced in all forms of activity’, can the volcano be exploded into a performance of such conscious and unconscious structures?1616Andrea Fraser, ‘Performance or Enactment’, in Performing the Sentence: Research and Teaching in Performative Fine Arts, ed. by Carola Dertnig and Felicitas Thun-Hohenstein (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014), pp. 122–27.

In doing so, the performance is made into a volcanic bomb, which is the moment when volcanic lava turns into rocks of different shapes. By leaving the volcano and changing temperature, lava is shaped in flight and can land several kilometres away from its point of origin. Claiming again the power to imagine women’s action as a burning prophecy, we are left with an unforeseeable promise of eruption descending from the rims of Mount Vesuvius.

Number Three is the Scene of a Prophetic Gesture

Can we recognize this prophecy now? The root phēmi belongs to the Greek word for prophecy, prophēteia. Phēmi, in its proto-Indo-European origin, is cognate with fabula, meaning story or fable.1717Chamber’s Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, ed. by James Donald (Edinburgh: William Chambers, 1868), p. 403. The other component of prophēteias is the prefix ‘pro’, meaning ‘before’; in this case, moving one’s hands forward. Prophecy is the putting forward of a fable, held in arms and pushed ahead. It is fabulation from other times carried into sites that are always different. Constantly displaced, it can only be noticed by shifting the gaze, in a glimpse.