8.16. Creative Sites of Resistance and Countermemory [ES/EN]

This presentation explores how vocal performance can be used to dramatise and initiate collective memory in experimental essayistic cinema. Specifically, the presentation will scrutinise performance in relation to multi-vocality and its capacity to render visible collective memory and shared recollection. To do so, this presentation will examine vocal performance in films such as India Song (Marguerite Duras, 1975) and News from Home (Chantal Akerman, 1976) and engage with the theory of authors including Michel Chion (1999), Albertine Fox (2019) and Davina Quinlivan (2020), among others. This presentation will also examine the process of developing and creating Transforming Voices, a digital platform exploring the creative use of aural testimonies in experimental essayistic cinema. Through interviews with participants and filmmakers, as well as close analysis of short films made in the context of Transforming Voices, the presentation will scrutinise how experimental essayistic cinema can contribute towards initiating the audiovisual collective memory of individuals and groups hitherto underrepresented on screen, including women undergoing reproductive treatments or suffering early miscarriages, among others. Furthermore, this presentation will consider how filmmakers and participants working in Transforming Voices engage with the aesthetic and ethical implications of dramatising the participant's memories through their aural testimonies. References: Chion, M. (1999). The Voice in Cinema (C. Gorbman, Ed. & Trans.). Columbia University Press. Fox, A. (2019). Vocal Landscapes: Framing Mutable Stories in De l’autre côté (2002) and Une voix dans le désert (2002). In M. Schmid & E. Wilson (Eds.), Chantal Akerman: Afterlives (pp. 115-126). Legenda. Quinlivan, D. (2020). Composite Memory, Reparative Pleasure and the Shedding of a Filmic Skin: Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir. Free Associations: Psychoanalysis and Culture, Media, Groups, Politics, 79(September 2020), 142-153.

This research examines how collective memories of Peru's internal armed conflict (1980-2000) are constructed through artistic-cultural expressions during commemorative activities in Ayacucho. Using ethnographic methodology during key commemorative moments in 2022-2023, the study reveals that art serves as a fundamental vehicle for memory-making and resistance. Participants perceive continuity between past violence and present-day social injustices, viewing current political crises as extensions of unresolved historical conflicts. Traditional elements—Quechua language, indigenous musical genres—function as resistance against hegemonic narratives, while younger generations fuse traditional and contemporary forms (hip hop, trap) to convey protest messages. These artistic manifestations—music, poetry, dance, performance—create spaces where historical memory dialogues with present struggles, demonstrating that the conflict's legacy remains active. Art generates emotional climates that facilitate discourse otherwise constrained by state repression, allowing open critique through creative expression. The research concludes that artistic-cultural supports are essential for collective memory preservation and ongoing social resistance, proving that Peru's past conflict continues shaping present-day justice movements.

ANFASEP has been an active group in advocating for the visibility of those affected by the Peru’s internal violence (1980-2000) and unsatisfied with the conclusions reached by the nations Comisión de verdad y reconciliación. Despite the importance of the organization in representing the interests of the family members of the disappeared, the Museo de la memoria founded and maintained by ANFASEP has received little academic attention. Specifically, there is a lack of work that describes the characteristics and expressions of the memory of Ayacucho through art particular to the area. This presentation seeks to expand the academic discussion of Peru’s internal violence taking into account these representations of memory and the activism within which they are created, as well as the artistic innovation that this activism provokes. This goal is realized through the analysis of a retablo displayed in the Museo, “Historia de la violencia y fundación de ANFASEP” by Sergio Huamaní Mitma as representative of the memory of Ayacucho. I use an interdisciplinary framework: I understand memory in Ayacucho through Halbwachs’s (1925) and Jan Assman’s (1995) theories of collective memory, which I contextualize in the Andean region through the work of Andean scholars such as Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (2010) and Betina Campuzano (2024). Finally, I use Frederic Jameson’s political unconscious (1981) to situate the art object and understand its role within the political discourse of its creation. My analysis furnishes two principal conclusions: first, that the memory of Ayacucho is explicitly aspirational of closure and historically cyclical; second, that this memory is expressed through culturally specific artistic forms (the retablo) that are modified in novel ways through their representation. This presentation is intended to be presented in Spanish.

Soon after the end of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), a memory culture of "no victor, no vanquished" emerged. The various memory cultures that have emerged after the end of the wars such as state-sponsored amnesia, and the war of the others, have been criticized for their inability to confront the events of the war and hold the perpetrators accountable. While the public sphere has been unable to face the memory of the war directly, Lebanese literature has become instrumental in presenting a countermemory of the war (Lang, 2025). The aim of this paper is to explore how countermemory of the Lebanese Civil War is represented in Lebanese anglophone literature. Questioning the definition of a countermemory and looking at how popular memory cultures of the war pervade literary works on the war, this paper aims to dispel the binary of "state-sponsored amnesia" and "countermemory", and explore how memory cultures of the war complement and counter each other. Looking at novels and memoirs of the postwar era, I employ sociological memory work on Lebanon (Haugbolle, 2010; Hermez, 2017; Larkin, 2012) in my close reading of postwar Lebanese anglophone literature, namely Rabih Alameddine's Koolaids, Jean-Said Makdisi's Beirut Fragments, and Naji Bakhti's Between Beirut and the Moon. The three works represent different perspectives on the war, yet they both act as a countermemory as well as propagators of prominent memory cultures of the Lebanese Civil War.

The 1930s, especially 1933, the year of Hitler’s frightening victory in Germany, for many constituted a period of fearful anticipation across all strata of society. For visual artists, caricature became a coping mechanism and a vehicle for conveying political resistance, rather than just a means to an economic end. This was also the case in Czechoslovakia, a surprisingly democratic new polity surrounded by more authoritarian states. As the walls began to close in, eventually ending up with the Munich agreement, Czechoslovak painters, illustrators and intellectuals vented their own, but also popular frustrations and anxieties in print media. This contribution will therefore consider predominantly humouristic and satirical media and individual caricaturists with a stark antifascist standpoint. Based on previously conducted archival research, a higher number of Czech antifascist content is to be featured in the contribution, as Slovak artistic attention was more directed towards one’s own search for identity via the reiteration of folk symbolism. With this inquiry, this research aims to ask these questions: What did this anticipation with growing inability to stop what is coming look like? Were there any particular tropes that emphasized the seriousness of the impending crisis? What memory community did this particular form of resistance create, what was necessary to understand in order to belong in it? The answers will be facilitated through a mix of archival research findings and subsequent visual analysis of the sources. One of potential discoveries is that interwar Czechoslovak caricature aided with the collective realization and served as a visual testament that fascism was also actively produced within the country, not just received from political forces abroad.