Challenging the placeless imaginary in digital memories: The performation of place in the work of Forensic Architecture

Abstract

This article discusses the imaginary that digital memories are ‘placeless’, which refers to the notion that, among the changes that memory has experienced under the impact of digital media, one is the loss of a significant link to place. I contend that digital memories are not placeless memories, but, on the contrary, that place is central for digital memory work. Drawing on the concept of ‘performation’, I seek to demonstrate how place is created, executed and staged in the digital ecology. To illustrate this, I analyse two works of the research agency Forensic Architecture, ‘Hannibal in Rafah’ and ‘Saydnaya: Inside A Syrian Torture Prison’, in which ‘place’ plays a central role in the shaping of digital memory. Digital media’s ‘inherently archival’ nature acquires a different meaning in these works: it is the process of collecting and mapping the dispersed fragments of data that transforms the archive into memory.

Digital war diaries: Witnessing the 2022 Russian War against Ukraine

“…Forged and driven by new dynamics of digital environments, contemporary memories evolve ‘along unpredictable trajectories, undergoing constant transformations and becoming more dynamic, ephemeral and fluid’ (Camarda 2022, 339). Silvana Mandolessi argues, that today ‘it is impossible to understand the mnemonic practices [ … ] without addressing the changes brought about by the digital turn’ (Mandolessi 2023, 1513). Studying the evolution of collective memory and remembrance in the digital age, she claims that now ‘the collective memory may be conceived of as a process, mediated and remediated by multiple media with the participation of dynamic communities that perform rather than represent the past’, where the digital not only stores but also organizes the memory, reshapes the agency of individuals, and provides space for the emergence of dynamic mnemonic assemblages instead of isolated mnemonic objects of the past (Mandolessi 2023).…”

Memory in the digital age

“…The idea of placelessness is linked to the changing traits of the archive and the database as the privileged cultural forms of the digital era. The notion of the traditional archive as static, selective, organised, and restricted to a particular place, has been replaced by a dynamic, non-selective, and multimedia online archive, whose logic is fluidity and ubiquity, and which is always ‘in becoming’ ( Mandolessi, 2021 )…”

“…However, this imaginary has been questioned by highlighting how digital memory practices actively engage in place-making, rather than succumbing to the logic of hyper-connectivity and all the attributes upon which it is predicated ( Mandolessi, 2021 ). Rather than deterritorizaling memories, digital archives become key tools for new engagements with place (for different approaches on the issue of digital memory and place see the Special Issue “Locating “Placeless” Memories: The Role of Place in Digital Constructions of Memory and Identity”, edited by Huw Halstead, Memory Studies 14.3 (2021).…”