Stories

By taking on a multi-method, multi-sensorial, multi-experiential approximation to the materialization of memory, it allows us to go beyond the selection of certain materials and the discarding of others, and to prompt to think about the selection of materials that were once considered as leftovers. In the same way that curation of archives leaves out certain items, structured in conventionally constructed bounds, this dissertation is not an the exception. When talking about displacement, I displace other items since this is a necessary function of curation, just as forgetting does when thinking about the construction of memory. I too leave objects behind in order to fit the form of the academic enterprise. However, I want to be cognizant of the power dynamics of displacement, and how these practices in themselves exclude modes of thinking and modes of being-in-the-world, which is a recurring problem for communication and media scholars. It is precisely these objections in displacement that bring me to make these interventions in the dynamics of power that circumscribe them: the displaced –subjects and objects alike.

My work centers in the unthinkable, where silence and absence are seen as affective discourses, and emotion as it relates to haunting, both as ways of knowing the past and the present. It also ties to the digital and visual process of memorialization that comes from the removal of traces and signs of erasure, by wrestling with the confronting affective relationships of the objects and their obfuscation. Exploring ways of reclaiming narratives and the attributions to residue in archives allows for exploring non-spaces that shape the analog and digital territories. Also, by means of visual and audible aesthetics, I aspire to inspire potential collaborations with colleagues working on different approaches to the archive, to material culture, and memory.

There are assumptions that are made about the stories brought forward by displaced populations and their objects. Their belongings –or those that once were– help tell their stories particularly when the objects become an afterlife of their owner. By doing so, they contain a story, a life that got them thus far. My scholarship also centers on art and artists, as I understand their work not only as live-giving and life-sustaining, but as a way of exacerbating the limitations of the objects, exposing them to other modes of communication that may steer from more traditional models of understanding objects. It is by recognizing the role that art and artists play in this exploration that I also acknowledge the ethical questions that arise from their different approaches of handling sensitive and complex objects and narratives. Even when studying these objects and their relationship to their process of becoming, I draw a specific route for enquiry, that of borderlands as sites of pain and precocity, where movement represents survival (Anzaldúa, 1987).

My research is in itself a process that returns the agency to the leftover object, which in their way allows the researcher to feel, sense and hear the narrative in a way that other materials would prevent from happening. The process I trace attempts to demonstrate that memory is materialized as a thing and not as an absence or aporia. Each of the projects I have engaged in offers a particular modality of hearing, of place-making, and of spiritual fellowship that make the archival endeavor a practice and a process by which different routes to the becoming of memory are traced. These curated paths are shaped by the frequency of nostalgia airing towards futurity because these stories are as present and future as they are history.