Traces of Destruction

Abstract

In this paper, I present the relationship between destruction and traces in order to investigate how it is possible to materially reconstruct that which has been destroyed. I analyze the visual work Stellar (2015), by Peruvian artist Giancarlo Scaglia, and the film Nostalgia de la Luz (2010), by Chilean director Patricio Guzmán, to show how both artifacts propose destruction as the production of other materialities (in the form of traces) capable of giving hints about their previous form and make feasible a type of political sense that the material totality does not allow. To this end, I find in these artifacts different mediation technologies that question the legibility of the traces. Stellar uses the technique of frottage as a way of making absence present by means of tracing and reveals in its materiality the vestiges of an event of the past and the difficulties that limit its memorialization. Nostalgia de la Luz, on the other hand, proposes both a visual training on how to read the fissures of material destruction, the result of state policies of erasure, and a sophisticated review of the complexities of the policies of archiving human bones as forms of violence that configure other traces to be read. In this way, the two objects I study in this paper allow me to propose ways of understanding destruction as a process that we can only read about through traces. The traces of destruction not only allow us to reconstruct a story, but also revitalize a memory that resists despite its erasure linked to state policies of oblivion. Reading the traces of destruction means reversing the procedures of political dismemberment, even if this does not imply resolving a past conflict or putting an end to mourning, but rather the possibility of remembering in spite of everything.