Lingering With Objects from Mauthausen and Gusen

Abstract

In my doctoral research, I investigate Clara Furey’s sensitive solo dance performance, When Even The (2018), by focusing on the ethical and political stakes inherent in the sensorial ways this artistic work relates to a history of genocidal violence. In Vienna, Furey performed alongside a flat metal object that Austrian writer, publisher, and photographer Heimrad Bäcker (1925-2003) found on the sites of former Upper Austrian concentration camps Mauthausen and Gusen. Bäcker’s lifelong critical analysis of National Socialism was rooted in his enthusiasm for the “Führer” as a teenage Austrian, finally resulting in his well-known literary work of “transcripts”, and collecting seemingly insignificant, everyday items. The found object on stage is made legible within Bäcker’s practice of “transcribing” existing linguistic material that can predominately be assigned to the agency of the perpetrators and profiteers of National Socialism. Without knowing about the object’s past, while watching the piece, Furey’s intimate meditation evoked an ambiguous feeling in me. On the one hand, the gentleness and slowness with which she performed her movements made me feel at ease, but at the same time, there was some sense of unease. In retrospect, due to the object’s history. A complex sensual experience that needs to be carefully situated and understood within the postnationalsocialist society of perpetrators and profiteers.
When Even The implicitly raises crucial questions about the relationship between past and present, memory and violence, body and document. On the one hand, I analyze When Even The as an embodied form of “Eingedenken,” a concept coined by Walter Benjamin that can be defined as an awakening act of remembrance instead of a recalling one – a practice borrowed from Jewish mysticism. On the other hand, I conceptualize When Even The as an embodied mode of “Critical Fabulation,” a practice introduced in Saidiya Hartman’s feminist writing from the African Diaspora that represents a critical engagement with historiographical inquiry. The practice of “Eingedenken” and “Critical Fabulation” not only express an ethical necessity of constructing a specific relation to the past, but they also reconsider the relationship between historian and historical event as contested. Though in very distinct ways and in response to specific, yet entangled histories of violence, both concepts enable an approach to time that enacts the past in the articulated present at hand – a temporal confusion that is particularly generative in relation to performance. In order to investigate present modes of relating to histories of genocidal violence, I try to think of the act of remembering that is innately relational through affect, based on a performance theory-oriented approach. In this regard, rather than in legal reform or state-controlled recognition (whose memory politics privilege historical “data” based on affective detachment), I am interested in how When Even The seeks modes of reparative sensibility in intimate and affective-aesthetic dynamics of cultural memory.

Short biography

Martina Gimplinger is a theatre scholar whose current research focuses on aesthetics, philosophies of temporality and hauntological histories of the Holocaust, slavery, and colonialism. Her doctoral thesis at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna was supported with a doctoral fellowship program of the Austrian Academy of Sciences – ÖAW (2018-21) and a dissertation completion stipend of Literar Mechana. She gives lectures, holds artist talks and works with independent choreographers.