Where the Air Feels Heavy: Boredom and the Textures of the Aftermath

Abstract

Set between an evocation and an ethnographic documentary, this essay explores aspects of aftermath of terror as an affective experience. Working through visuals and writing, I recall banal moments that disrupt the politics of forgetting by showing forms of remembrance through spaces, looks, or moments of simplicity. These moments signal leakages in official definitions of memory in otherwise classified spaces of nothingness, lethargy, and apathy. The article thus extends the evocative potential of photography and narrative writing as means to engage with multidimensional and hazy expressions of the experience of the aftermath of terror. [Colombia, evocative documentary, memory, photography, terror] * Boredom is a warm and gray fabric lined on the inside with the most lustrous and colorful of silks. In this fabric we wrap ourselves up when we dream. We are at home then in the arabesques of its lining. But the sleeper looks bored and gray within his sheath. And when he later wakes and wants to tell of what he dreamed, he communicates by and large only this boredom. For who would be able at one stroke to turn the lining of time to the outside? Yet to narrate dreams signifies nothing else. [Benjamin 1999, The Arcades Project] Juan Orrantia (b. Bogota, Colombia) works on long-term nonfiction projects that explore the evocative possibilities of documentary photography. With a background in cultural anthropology and documentary studies, his series also rely on sound, text, and diary narratives as ways of addressing questions of intimacy, memory, violence, and the everyday. His work has been exhibited in South Africa and Colombia, he received awards such as the Tierney Fellowship in Photography, and he participated in various group shows

Comentario sobre el artículo “‘Por eso uno sabe hoy, pero no sabe mañana’. Presencia fantasmal de la violencia y vida cotidiana en un pueblo colombiano”, de Gabriel Ruiz

“…La vida cotidiana acumula los residuos del terror de una manera densa en la que se imbrican las huellas de los acontecimientos traumáticos (Orrantia 2012). Una de las primeras víctimas de la violencia es la esfera pública, esto es, los procesos de cohesión, las conversaciones, los vínculos comunitarios (Rodríguez 2011).…”

“…Fantasmas son también los muertos que conviven con los vivos cada vez que su memoria los trae al espacio que habitaban o donde murieron. Esos fantasmas activan sensaciones de letargo y apatía (Orrantia 2012), así como la asociación de determinados espacios, sonidos u olores con acciones violentas y su repetición que acecha como amenaza. Incluso los Estados pueden hacer uso de los fantasmas (héroes, mártires, víctimas) para mantener el terror, la vergüenza o el remordimiento con fines políticos (Lincoln y Lincoln 2015).…”