There are two recurring themes in Mabe Bethônico’s work: memory and stones. Of course, there are more themes, but “memory of stones” constitutes a kind of fundamental “geological stratum.”
Whether found in nature or used for building, stones possess memory. Having spent all day storing heat, they emit it when, after sunset, environmental heat is no longer present. They do this, even more subtly, with the lives of human beings who handle them for their own purposes. If you bring an ear close to the stones of an ancient building, you can still hear—only if you really want to—the murmured voices of past generations of its inhabitants. When you do so, these voices multiply life and redress the erasure operated by the devastating passage of time. Which is why some people would rather live in an old house, in addition to all the other reasons they may have. These walls, these stones are like sponges that have absorbed life. Popular superstition with its talk of ghosts returning from the past to “haunted houses” is only a crude variant of this. Any house worthy of the name is inhabited by specters from the past. If this is true of houses, all the more so in the case of churches, palaces, castles, prisons, temples… places visited by thousands or millions of people over the years, centuries, and millennia. But it is harder to hear them when you are not alone or when the passing crowd is very large or heteroclite. Whereas you can hear them perfectly in a small Roman chapel on a mountain or in a colonial house in Minas Gerais.
But are stones nevertheless innocent? Not quite. The book Phenomenology of Mind (1807) by philosopher Hegel evinced his habitual cold candor: “Innocence, therefore, is merely non-action, like the mere being of a stone, not even that of a child.”1
Only stones are innocent—this statement could be used as a justification for terrorist practices, whether or not by invoking Hegel. And perhaps Hegel was still overly optimistic. In a way, stones are not innocent. Nor is sugarcane, lead, wool, or sheep. Of course, these materials cannot do anything, they merely bow to do whatever human willpower—which is stronger than theirs—forces them to do. They have always runup an endless history of suffering2 nolens volens. Saccharum officinarum, a plant from Southeast Asia led to calamity for Africa and Africans. Wool unknowingly wreaked great devastation too: at several junctures wool was a trigger for a decisive stage in the rise of capitalism. In the 14th century, textile makers particularly in Flanders and Lombardy introduced the first proto-capitalist forms of production based on wage labor and exports. Booming demand for wool required more sheep grazing land, thus putting pressure on English landlords to expel peasants as part of the historical process known as the enclosures. They went on to conquer yet more grazing land in Ireland, where many people starved to death. Hence Thomas More’s well-known “sheep ate men” expression!
This was followed by capitalism’s definitive take-off in late-18th-century England driven by processes involving wool and other fibers, as we know. Before exporting machines (such as mills that replaced slaves in the crushing of sugarcane), the British exported woven fabrics all over the world. Just as Africans deported to the Americas might curse sugarcane, so English children who were then working fourteen-hour days in satanic mills might curse cotton, wool, silk, and linen. If only each wool fiber could tell us what it saw during its multiple metamorphoses…
Only very unhurried metaphysical speculation could attribute memory stricto sensu to matter. But the metaphorical attribution may be of great assistance in terms of comprehension.
With the benefit of hindsight, our understanding of these materials and their processing may be altered. Visiting one of Europe’s few remaining spinning or wool-working shops may be a moving experience. Nowadays, communities founded to get away from industrial civilization and live in the countryside are paradoxically Europe’s sole surviving producers and processors of wool and some have tried to save a few spinning mills. Why do we find these old devices moving, even if they lay at the origin of industrial capitalism and caused their share of misfortunes? Perhaps because this type of industry retains a visible link with craftwork and was designed to meet a real need (for clothing, in this case); above all, because know-how in these activities has not yet become totally abstract: work had yet to be taken over by incomprehensible and even invisible machinery, as is the case of computer-managed industry everywhere. These early devices were still emerging as extensions of the human body and they may have afforded people a personal sense of power. Sometimes their use required a very particular kind of know-how that gave rise to a “labor aristocracy.” The last surviving worker at a spinning mill in France told me that he had spent his whole life working on machinery ordered from the same company that built the Rolls Royce, but he was not familiar with all of its intricacies! Ancient mines too may be fascinating places to visit: there is a magical dimension to them, a contact with primordial matter that exists irrespective of the different purposes—often evil ones—for which men have used mining. Frequent references to dwarf-miners found in folklore and mythologies may hark back to a period when mining was not based on some form of slavery.
Subsequent developments soon severed the link with craft practices as industry evolved to become nothing more than “scientific” exploitation of the workforce. Except for sadists, visitors of a mill observing an assembly line such as Henry Ford’s would not be moved to feel anything but anger or pity.
Getting back to stones, they too caused much suffering, particularly in the case of mining. Some of Bethônico’s works look at mines in the past and the present day. Others refer to precious stones and the mentality of the Europeans who came here—to Colombia, in this case—to catalogue them, whose interest was only in the stones irrespective of the conditions in which they were mined. Memory of objects will in general involve men too. Could an exhibition showing the history of sugarcane or iron-ore mining explain all of the resulting consequences? This would certainly be impossible if an association of sugar manufacturers or mining companies organized this exhibition. Mining companies are some of the world’s most powerful and ruthless ventures, particularly in Africa, but elsewhere too. The current discussion of the need for “traceability of blood minerals” in Africa and the impossibility to accomplish it says a lot in this respect.
In The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil wrote: “If, for instance, someone were to discover that in certain circumstances, never previously observed, stones were capable of speaking, he would need only a few pages for the presentation and exposition of such a revolutionary phenomenon.”3 (Guy Debord quotes this sentence in his film In Girum imus nocte et consumimur igni ur igni.) Can stones be made to talk? Who could do that? Bethôni-co analyzed the ideology at work in mining museums such as Memorial Minas Gerais Vale in Brazil and found that mining companies do not necessarily resort to a straightforward eulogy of their past.4 To get an effect in terms of advertising their business, they may just highlight technological prowess, the utility of their products, or the perfection of their processes while backgrounding the social and ecological consequences. Once again, the industrial system and the capitalist mode of production are intertwined. Rather than admit that society made its decisions in this respect, the industry is portrayed as part of a neutral order of things that are merely useful, having been offered by nature and transformed by Man’s know-how. To round off this story, they add entertaining aspects such as games.
Bethônico responds with words to images shown in museums. Other than explanatory plaques, which few people read, visitors are there to look and to see. By definition, only that which is visible may be seen, and museums, like all discourses, hold back content that remains invisible, kept in shadow, unspoken, unexpressed, hidden. Following Hans Haacke’s historical studies, some artists have looked behind or beyond museum exhibits and their underlying discourses to evince aspects not shown. But this does not happen often. Apart from any other reasons, a trenchant critique of the structure of contemporary museums could not fail to reflect the hypertrophic role of the image in general in contemporary society, and this would be a paradoxical undertaking for artists since they are image producers by definition. Jacques Ellul, one of the great critics of late 20th-century technological progress, claims that the contemporary era has given rise to a “humiliated word.”
The question is posed once again: to whom does memory belong? Do those who “make” history also have the right to decide what posterity is going to say? Will the situation described in the celebrated poem of Bertolt Brecht (1935) last forever?
Questions from a Worker Who Reads:
Who built Thebes of the seven gates?
In the books, you will read the names of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?
And Babylon, many times demolished,
Who raised it up so many times?
In what houses of gold glittering Lima did its builders live?
Where, the evening that the Great Wall of China was finished, did the masons go?
Great Rome is full of triumphal arches.
Who erected them?
Over whom did the Caesars triumph?
Had Byzantium, much praised in song, only palaces for its inhabitants?
Even in fabled Atlantis, the night that the ocean engulfed it,
The drowning still cried out for their slaves.
The young Alexander conquered India.
Was he alone?
Caesar defeated the Gauls.
Did he not even have a cook with him?
Philip of Spain wept when his armada went down.
Was he the only one to weep?
Frederick the 2nd won the 7 Years War.
Who else won it?
Every page a victory.
Who cooked the feast for the victors?
Every 10 years a great man.
Who paid the bill?
So many reports.
So many questions.5
Fortunately, for a few years now, people have been talking about what the French writer Michel Ragon called “the memory of the defeated,” or as the Italian historian Nuto Revelli puts it, “the world of the defeated.”
This “recollection” of those whom the victors crushed under the wheel of history is often associated with the philosopher Walter Benjamin, in particular On the Concept of History, written a few months before his tragic death in 1940. In these writings meant to break with the myth of progress that prevailed even among revolutionaries (dominated by dialectical materialism, supposedly after Marx), Benjamin wrote: “Even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.” He accused traditional historiography of empathizing with the victors: “And all rulers are the heirs of those who conquered before them. Hence, empathy with the victor invariably benefits the rulers. Historical materialists know what that means. Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures, and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment. For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another. A historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from it as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain.”6
In the same theses, Benjamin sharply criticizes socialists for worshipping ‘labor.’ The moral glorification of work by its own victims, and workers themselves being identified with alienated and exhausting toil, may also be attributed to an erasure of the memory of suffering that eventually entails “identification with the aggressor,” as psychoanalysts would say.
Brecht and Benjamin remind us that even in relation to the past “the dominant ideas are the ideas of the ruling classes,” as the Communist Manifesto of 1848 proclaimed. However, there have been—and there are—efforts to rescue the victims from oblivion. Historically, the first monument to the memory of the vanquished—a veritable revolution in representation—may have been Albrecht Dürer’s unbuilt design for a monument commemorating the German peasants defeated in the great revolt of 1525–26.
In the latter period of his life, Dürer was working on a book on proportions that was published in 1528, a year after his death. At the last minute, he added this sketch of a “column to the victory over the defeated peasants,” a kind of bitter parody of a victory so typical of the culture of lords and masters. Dürer envisaged the crowning of “a sad peasant pierced by a sword” like the traditional figure of Christ of Piety (also known as “Christ of Assisi”): the defeated rebel peasant would be the successor of Christ and his fate would be a contemporary form of Christ’s Passion.
Memory has now become a major political issue and is usually posed as a means of emancipating “subaltern” layers. To mention a few quite different examples, New York’s Monument to Slavery in front of the United Nations building; the memorial museum on the site of the Mexican State’s massacre at Tlatelolco’s Plaza de las Tres Culturas, in 1968; the “Porte de Lampedusa – Porte d’Europe” monument honoring migrants drowned trying to reach the Italian island of Lampedusa (Mimmo Paladino sculpted this privately commissioned monument in 2008). The Stolpersteine [obstacle-stones] started by Gunter Demnig in Germany, in 1992, took the form of stones placed on sidewalks, each bearing the name of a person deported and murdered by the Nazis, placed near their former homes. More than sixty thousand stones were placed in twenty European countries, making it the world’s largest “decentralized monument.”
Battles over Memory, however, may lead to paradoxical effects. In Chile, for example, the left undoubtedly won the battle in terms of memory: Pinochet’s coup is now officially condemned and Allende is hailed as a national hero. There is a street named for Allende in front of La Moneda presidential palace, where he died, whereas none have been named for Pinochet. In an act of symbolic revenge, Allende’s daughter Isabel presided Chile’s parliament. President Michelle Bachelet inaugurated a Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago in January 2009. However, all of this amounts to a merely symbolic victory. On the economic and social front, the Pinochet government’s ultraliberal policies have not been substantively challenged for nearly thirty years, not even by “left-wing” administrations. Real-life conditions in Chile have remained, by and large, that which coup masterminds envisaged. Retrospective appropriations of history may turn out to be minor concessions made to those who have lost the battle. These battles over memory seem to be of particular importance in Latin America, especially in countries such as Brazil, Chile, Guatemala, or Colombia, where dictatorial or genocidal regimes of the past have not been overthrown by new political systems aiming to establish different collective memories. Instead, acting on their own initiative, these regimes stepped back to allow more “democratic” forms of government that run into difficulties if they attempt to sever all continuity with the past.
Indeed, it is easier for everyone today to demarcate their differences in relation to openly dictatorial and criminal politi¬cal forms of government such as Nazism, Stalinism, or military regimes. It would be much more difficult to battle for the memory of victims of the free market, industry, progress, repression in democratic periods, for victims of psychiatric asylums, prisons, hospitals, seminaries, housing for the poor, hospices, workplaces, orphanages, assembly lines, mines, offices, police precincts, immigrant detention centers, refugee camps—in short, places where human beings have needlessly suffered, merely to fulfill the requirements of the social organization they are living under.
How should this battle be started? Commemorative plaques of this genre could be placed in certain houses: “Jean and Jeanne Dupont lived here from 1950 to 1987. Jean left every morning to work at the plant, where he repeated the same gesture five thousand times every day for life, totaling fifty million times. Jeanne dusted and cleaned, washed clothes, and cooked without ever leaving the home. In exchange, they could buy a brick-built house, a television set, and eventually a small car.” A plaque at the entrance to a school could read: “In this sad building, throughout the 20th century some ten thousand children have had their youth spoiled. Almost none of them learned anything.”
This would undoubtedly produce a satirical effect, somewhat comparable to the signs showing street names in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1966 film Uccellacci e uccellini [Hawks and Sparrows]. The streets are named for characters such as Benito La Lacrima (unemployed), Antonio Mangiapasta (garbage collector), or Lillo Strappalenzola (ran away from home aged twelve) (their names mean Benny Crybaby, Antonio Pasta-Eater, Lillo – Sheet Ripper). Pasolini’s plaques gained fame in Italy.
But these would be more alternative monuments, as in the cases of monuments to slaves, victims of Nazism, or the above¬mentioned migrants. In addition to good intentions, the pro-posal shows the danger of alternative rhetoric. Authorities may show their concern for victims as part of a political strategy too. In France, there is much talk about the “duty to remember,” which may have quite dubious consequences. A place I saw in France was a roundabout (these places are real fairgrounds of ridiculous monuments and installations in France) on which the letters M.E.M.O.I.R.E. [memory] had been outlined on stone placed on sloping ground. The local council probably felt “duty bound” to organize a competition to build a monument in memory of World War II, so this “work” was finally chosen for lack of anything better, or because it was the most “consensual.”
Monuments may be built to honor a boy killed in a mine or a slave who had been whipped, but they eventually join ‘unknown soldier’ monuments and soon meet with the same attitude of indifference among the public. Indeed, during the period when some countries boasted “real socialism,” there was no shortage of statues glorifying workers and they were usually worse than bourgeois monuments for their use of hollow rhetoric.
Mabe Bethônico tried a different approach. Rather than tak¬ing elements that are currently invisible and moving them into the visible area of official culture, she sought to discuss non¬visible—hidden or forgotten—aspects of collective memory. Instead of posing a ready-made or off-the-shelf alternative narrative, her Museum of Public Concerns attempts to create a space—an ephemeral one by vocation—in which participants themselves may decide what should be conserved in a museum, and how it should be shown. The recovery of the “memory of the defeated” will not be the work of some managers eager to act on their behalf—for a century we have seen many of these “representatives”—to set up other showcases with bored and distracted school pupils filing past. Bethônico believes that a real museum is one in which people themselves reflect on what they would like to display. Everything is up for discussion, start¬ing with mineral classifications. Because, lest we never forget, not even stones are innocent.