Building Methodologies for Collective Memory

We have pedagogy to teach history. But is it possible to create methodologies to collectively build memory?

Claudia Ricca, an Argentinian anthropologist, artist, and community activist, would say yes. In fact, she applies visual art methodologies to historical memory.

Ricca ran two sessions of a ground-breaking workshop on the topic with the NGO INCLUIR – Instituto para la Inclusión Social y el Desarrollo Humano (Institute for Social Inclusion and Human Development) – between April and August of 2017. The workshops, held in Buenos Aires, aimed to encourage groups to reflect on forms of self-organization in Latin America’s recent past.

Continue reading for a description of the workshops and a conversation with Claudia Ricca. She speaks on political contexts for collective memory, specifically in terms of state violence in the Southern Cone.

The workshops:

“we designed a model of work that used images at its core, using a practice that extends the visual field outside of the frame of the image, and includes gestures, space, context and verbal expressions in its multiple varieties.”

In the first session, participants brought in images that related to the theme of collectives and other methods of self-organization in recent history. Together, they created and discussed the pictures, which formed the basis of a video montage.

In the second session, Ricca and her colleagues presented the same participants with a collection of 100 images. Some were the photos participants brought into the first session, some were cropped or enlarged versions of these images, and others were screenshots from the video recorded during the first session. After discussing the mass of images on the first table, the participants had to create a collage of all of the images as a group and then, later, organized a sequential narrative from the images. The group built a non-linear, collective historical narrative built on their own associations, personal memories, and even their current experience as participants in the workshop.

A complete description and analysis of the workshops can be found in Ricca and her colleague Alma Scolnik’s article on working with historical memory and self-organization using visual arts methodologies in the Constructive Engagement of Conflict Journal, available online here.

Given this experience with Historical Memory workshops, other researchers are interested in applying Claudia and Alma’s methodologies to different collectives. For example, they might use the same methodology in fábricas recuperadas, factories that were taken over by workers and run as collectives in 2000 and 2001 due to Argentina’s financial crisis.

She also participated in seminars at the National Arts University in Buenos Aires with her piece The Present Body, an installation made up of x-ray images of her own spine, printed onto silky material, and accompanied by ID photographs on the wall and the sound of helicopters. The entire piece, which creates a sense of impending doom, was based on her memories from when she was 10 years old, under the Argentinian military dictatorship (1976-1983).

Claudia Ricca sits down with Artememoria to discuss the concept behind her methodologies and their relationship to the memory of state violence in the Southern Cone:

Artememoria: One of the through-lines that ties together all of these different projects is the connection between very personal memory and larger political contexts. How do you see the relationship between official histories, personal memory, and the collective memory that your workshops foster?

Claudia Ricca: A couple of months ago I did an intensive post-graduate seminar on the Anthropology of Memory. And even though it wasn’t from a visual arts perspective, it was very interesting to read about how memory is a fluid thing that changes according to the present moment.

The state changes the way we remember the past. Up until two years ago we had a government in Argentina that was very intent on portraying a vision of the past connected to justice and reparation. It promoted the trials of those involved in the disappearance of 30,000 people, the kidnapping of 500 babies, and the torture and killings of thousands of others. Since 2015, we’ve had a different administration that has done completely the opposite. It promotes the idea that what happened in the past stays in the past, that remembering the past prevents progress and keeps Argentina from reaching its true potential in terms of development. Of course, that’s an idea that very much relates to an economic model favoring the wealthy, corporations, and landowners who have actually dispossessed hundreds of thousands of other people, particularly indigenous populations.

The new government project is, in some sense, unsuccessful because people are resisting. This year, the march for memory on March 24^th was one of the biggest that Argentina has seen. March 24th is the day on which we commemorate the beginning of the last dictatorship, which was in power between 1976-1983. It’s the day of collective memory, in a way, and everybody tries to go to this huge march in the center of Buenos Aires. I don’t know exactly what it is about Argentina, but our recent history forms part of our identity.

Our recent history is definitely alive in the memory of the people who lived that period, in the grandmothers and mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and all of the different groups that still work to ensure that justice is done, that those who have been convicted for state violence do not receive the benefits of common criminals that would reduce their prison sentences, that the kidnapped 500 kids who today are young adults recover their identities.

All of that helps memory win against history. History has been manipulated. People say that what happened here in Argentina wasn’t that bad, they still question the numbers, they still question if there really was state terrorism or if it was just a war between two factions. Many of the arguments that had been already discarded 15 or 20 years ago are coming back. That, to me, is the lesson for the US, the UK, Argentina. Whatever gains you have in the field of human rights are never really set in stone. We have to fight for them every single day of our lives.

The idea that memory is totally set in the past, or that it refers only to the past, is not quite right. One lives the present by bringing elements from the past into the current moment and re-signifying them. You need to have the past firmly rooted in the present.

I think that young people, students in particular, are picking up that pattern of memory even though they weren’t born at the time of the dictatorship. Their parents were probably my age or a bit older, so their parents might have been students at the time, but somehow they’re not doing this for the parents. They’re doing it to preserve the memory that is being handed down from all of these collectives, from the people that say, this can never happen again. Today, we’re still fighting for the things that the 30,000 people who disappeared were fighting for. We’re still fighting for social justice, we’re still fighting to make sure that indigenous populations have a say on what’s going on in their territories, we’re still fighting to have some kind of sovereignty over the way we feed ourselves and deal with our country’s land.

Artememoria: In the workshop that you did between April and August of 2017, photos of the participants from the first session then appear in the second session of the workshop, making that link between past and present concrete and real. Participants literally saw themselves in the very recent past and have to work that into their construction of a historical narrative. What was your thinking behind that? Is this a main component of your methodology?

Ricca: It was an idea that came out of having two sessions. In the first one, we worked with the pictures, or the objects, that people brought. Then, we decided that we needed to have another session. Something that Alma Scolnik and I discussed for a long time was how to bring in a reflection on what happened in that first session as well as to continue working with images. What ended up happening was everyone looked at the process more than the original images.

INCLUIR works on the basis of parity and mutuality, which means that we all have an equal say in the way that we run things and, when there are specific needs of some of the members, those members may have access to proportionally more resources or more time or whatever they need on the understanding that when we need those things the other members will help us.

The pictures from the first session did enter into the second workshop. We used different methodologies to try to engage people to talk about what had happened in the first process. There, all of the pictures had an equal footing and that’s really important for an organization when we may have hierarchies. People might feel that whatever they’re going to say won’t have the same weight as what somebody else says in society. We discovered that photographs level the playing field, in a way, especially when we’re talking about things from the past and when we’re trying to create a collective discourse. All the pictures have an equal value and the narratives you can create from those pictures is much more horizontal than something that is only based on speech.

It’s a methodology that we consistently use. We always look at the way that we work in previous sessions, for whatever we do. INCLUIR is interested in self-organization in general. In cooperatives, recovered factories, and elsewhere, that’s the main issue that we’re interested in.

Artememoria: The workshops seem to go beyond just the words and the images. How does the spatial organization of the participants in the room affect the exercise?

Ricca: When we were organizing the first session, Alma and I had only recently joined INCLUIR. In general they run their meetings around a long table, but we decided that we needed to work in a different kind of space. When we brought in the images, we decided we were going to put them on a big canvass. We found a piece of cloth big enough to hang it up and pin everything onto it. Just by having that vertical layout, one where everyone was able to go up to it and physically choose where to put their image, people got out of their seats and thought about their relationship to the images and the narratives the images were building. You have to involve yourself, not just intellectually but also physically. You have to get up and do something that requires a personal decision.

In the second session we had two small tables, one that contained 100 photographs mixed together. People had to go and choose from that chaotic bunch of photographs, bring them to another small table, and create a collage. It had to be a new, collective image, and it had certain rules. None of the pictures could completely cover up another, but there could be no gaps. Very similar images couldn’t be put next to each other. The idea was to make people think about the composition. It was such a complex image that it ended up eliciting a very good discussion about the difficulties of working with so much material and figuring out how the photos of us from the first session were a part of everything. Then, we had to create a narrative with all of the photographs. No images could be left out. We did that on the floor because no other space was big enough.

Artememoria: Speaking of that mass of images, one of the participants in the workshop commented that the collection of photos had “too much chaos to distill reason.” There is an accumulation of images and media, and an accumulation of violence when you look into the past, especially in the digital age. It’s dizzying and chaotic and hard to sort through. We’re constantly bombarded by images that are often very fleeting. How can you imbue images with meaning rather than have them be part of this mass? What are the pros and cons of digital technology in fostering memory?

Ricca: In general, there has to be something that somehow lights up an image for you, in its connection to your memories and your past. That’s a very individual thing but it can be brought to a collective consciousness. Some images also become iconic and begin to represent something else, especially in the digital era as well.

I’m currently working with Alma and others on aspects of the Santiago Maldonado case. Specifically, at the discourses in tension with each other, what people who are aligned with the government discourse say vs. what people who were asking for Santiago Maldonado’s whereabouts say. Last year, the question ¿dónde está Santiago Maldonado? – where is Santiago Maldonado? – represented a massive outcry, not just for where he was, but also to not go back to the times when we had to ask those questions. We’re looking at a billboard that in between September, October of last year, there was a kind of tug of war between the different factions. There was a big poster right before the legislative elections with lots of happy people and it said, “3 million neighbors, Vamos juntos.” Let’s go together. And somebody intervened in the image with photographs of Santiago Maldonado. That person took the iconic picture of Santiago Maldonado, the one that everybody used through social media, in the marches, plastered walls on walls, used for big murals, and made a whole bunch of black and white photocopies, cutting out the face in the shape of an eye. Then they covered the eyes of about four people on this billboard with Santiago Maldonado’s face and added little speech bubbles saying, ¿Dónde está Santiago Maldonado?

That intervention by somebody in public space was very interesting, but what happened afterwards was even more interesting. Somebody, we don’t know who, felt offended by the question, so they actually crossed out all the faces, which were the eyes, and wrote several things around the question of dónde está santiago maldonado, things like, “he’s dead,” “stop bothering us,” and other things like “en la concha de tu madre.”

The kind of tension that was graphically portrayed on this billboard is happening in media, it’s happening everywhere. You had the official narrative throughout the disappearance of Santiago Maldonado, which basically questioned that he had been in the place he was when he disappeared, that said he had gone to Chile, that he was alive somewhere else. All along, he actually had been disappeared, and he was dead. So you had that state discourse from the administration mixed with the legislative branch saying, we can all be happy. At the same time massive demonstrations on September 1^st and October 1^st, 2017 demanding to know where Santiago Maldonado was. And then after Santiago Maldonado’s body appeared, there was the killing of Rafael Nahuel, a Mapuche man who was killed in cold blood, shot in the back, which inspired other demonstrations, smaller in scale.

In all of this, images help certain discourses advance, whether they be state discourses or discourses of resistance. Santiago Maldonado became an iconic figure for discourses of resistance. And now, in new discussions, like the debate about abortion, you start to see other kinds of iconic images, like a green handkerchief. I see lots of women in the streets with the green handkerchief attached to their backpacks, wearing them in the streets. It’s an image that actually goes around in social media, and is rarely covered in mainstream media, except for in the newspaper Página12. All of the other publications don’t carry those kinds of pictures.

These viral images aren’t exactly historical memory, but they do carry memories, for example of the women who died in clandestine abortions. These images become symbols organically, and then different collectives that are not aligned to any political party pick them up. In the last five or six years you see movements like Ni Una Menos, indigenous movements, and the movements asking for Santiago Maldonado, all of which are spontaneous and not party-affiliated. Unions are also being shunned in favor of these mass movements that don’t exactly have a fixed form or organization. I think the symbols that get picked up become beacons to guide people who are looking for ways of resistance. Somehow, by the very nature of these images, by the way they’re being used, they become a kind of independent icon or beacon.

Artememoria: You mentioned that recent history is a part of Argentinian identity. I would say that in Brazil that’s not exactly the case. Artememoria recently interviewed author and journalist Eduardo Reina about his very recent uncovering of child kidnappings that took place under the dictatorship. No dictatorship child kidnappings had been reported on or discussed in Brazil until 2016 and 2017, when Reina independently reported on 19 cases. That captures Brazil’s relationship to this period. The memories of how bad the violence was are still very marginal, are still very hidden, and the numbers that are officially published are likely far smaller than what actually happened.

One of your recommendations for modifying this methodology is to keep in mind local contexts. How can researchers and educators alter this activity for a context that really struggles with a lack of official support for memories of state violence?

Ricca: In a way, the Argentinian context also lacks that official support right now. But because of our context, it provokes even more desire to capture memories and to make sure that those are not lost. In the case of Brazil, it reminds me a bit of what happened in Spain, a country that doesn’t basically want to look at what happened in the 1930s. They’re still denying people the right to know what happened to their loved ones.

Context is essential. You can’t just apply the same formula whether you’re working with kids from white middle-class sectors of society or working with kids from migrant families. In this case, I would say that it’s a good idea to use images. There’s no way to know what kinds of associations those memories will produce on the collective that comes together. I would be very interested to know if the people involved in these 19 cases that Eduardo Reina collected have managed to come together and share their stories. That would be one way to begin to unravel what I think is a very knotted ball of memory. You need to start pulling a little bit of the string out of the messy ball of threads. It won’t unravel, but you will slowly be able to get more out of it. It’s painstaking work, but I think it would be good to focus on cases that have been reported on, and collectively build a narrative. If those materials were available to teachers in Brazil, or to anybody who was interested in working on these issues, it might create some sort of debate.

I’m not sure why Brazilians are reluctant to face the past, but I think it might be the mistaken idea that modernity or progress requires us to forget everything that came before us, which includes our ancestors, people who lived in our territories before colonization, whose territories were taken from them. It’s the idea that you can create from zero something that will be better than the past. And that’s just a fantasy. Everything that we are is because of what happened before us.

Artememoria: There are also people who buy into a discourse that supports the civil-military dictatorship, either by saying that it wasn’t really a dictatorship or that it was good for Brazil.

I also think that maybe we need to start looking for new words. Talking about dictatorship might mean that you come up against the wall every single time with certain parts of society. But instead, you can talk about more specific things, like cases of violence. I think that the left and the progressive movement of Brazil needs to find new ways of talking to people about dictatorship, focusing on what happened then and why we shouldn’t stand for it now. There were crimes committed, whether you call it a dictatorship or not. That can be the argument. In a way it doesn’t matter if it was officially a dictatorship. The state had a responsibility for the people who disappeared, the indigenous people who were massacred, and for those kids, even if there were just 20 who were taken from their families.

As long as the past is forgotten, people are going to be excluded. I think it’s that exclusion that is dangerous. With exclusion you create differences, you create inequalities, and eventually that just blows up. Even those who believe wholly in capitalism, almost as a religion, should understand that you can’t leave everybody behind. Eventually, those excluded are the ones who will come looking for answers.

This interview was edited and condensed for clarity. 

Claudia Ricca is an anthropologist, artist and community activist currently living in Buenos Aires. She studied in Argentina, Canada and the UK and has worked in human and environmental rights for over 25 years in Europe and Latin America. Since 2007, Claudia has been working with the artist Alma Scolnik in Buenos Aires, both on individual and collective art and educational projects. She is currently a member of the NGO Incluir, working on social inclusion and human development issues and coordinates the Circuito Cultural Marcos, a cultural collective organizing free activities in public spaces around Buenos Aires.