Reconstructing Communities. In Spite of all Machinery of Disimagination
Reconstructing Communities. In Spite of all Machinery of Disimagination

Summary/Abstract: This paper investigates the relationship between the real and art in the context of the issue raised by Theodor Adorno by the end of World War II regarding the impossibility of poetic language (which he later extended to culture) after the Holocaust. By observing a few case studies we try to understand how art is possible after the Holocaust and how the concept of community is reflected in contemporary art. We will see how the ephemeral nature of installations (which try to establish a relation of immediacy with the viewer) operates by dwelling on the language of fulgurances and gaps of history. We focus on the way in which the story of a community is told in spite of all machinery of disimagination and we thus try to determine who is given a face and who is denied a face when history is written, who is removed from its visibility, and how this removal is enacted. In the Nazi death camps, when faces are removed altogether with the identity of prisoners who are annihilated in anonymity, the traces of their passage remain muted in the objects that survive them. It is not only history or places of the past which should be revisited with the eye of an archeologist, but also art in the aftermath of its undoing.

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