The University of Bath’s David Clarke finds that his research into the role of cultural practitioners in shaping people’s memories of disputed territories takes an ‘affective’ turn, during a visit to Polish project partner Fundacja Pogranicze (Borderland Foundation).

I was privileged this summer to spend two months in north-eastern Poland as a guest of Fundacja Pogranicze (Borderland Foundation) at its premises in Krasnogruda and Sejny, near the Lithuanian border. The purpose of my stay was to work on a literature review on the role of cultural practitioners in shaping people’s memories of disputed territories, as part of the DisTerrMem project.

Fundacja Pogranicze is based partly in the old yeshiva and synagogue in Sejny and partly at a manor house that once belonged to relatives of Polish Nobel laureate, Czesław Miłosz. It provided the ideal location for thinking about the role of cultural practice in working through the complex memories of these borderland spaces. Not only was I able to read extensively in the research library that Fundacja Pogranicze has developed over the three decades of its work, but I was also able to talk with Foundation employees and volunteers, to witness artistic performances, and to travel around the borderland area. Witnessing artistic performances and events in Krasnogruda and Sejny had a profound impact on the direction that I took in exploring the literature around culture practice and disputed territory.

I very vividly remember one event in particular, during which I was asked to perform a poem by Miłosz in English translation alongside many other participants speaking in different languages, as well as in Miłosz’s own Polish. As we stood in a semicircle facing the woods that fringe the lake at Krasnogruda, I could feel something in the air, a kind of atmosphere - yet it was something that my theoretically and analytically trained understanding as a researcher found hard to process.

At a performance of the Foundation’s Klezmer Orchestra in the White Synagogue in Sejny, I heard local people from across the generations playing joyful (and at times riotous) music which both honours, and further develops, the musical traditions of the Jewish community that was destroyed in the Holocaust. Here, too, I had a sense of being part of a significant and moving event in a very special place. The video in the link above gives you some sense of what the music sounds like, but it is quite a different thing to actually be in the space with them as they play, not least when that space has such strong historical associations.

Ritual, participation, emotion, co-presence, atmosphere, sense of place: all of these non-linguistic elements are key to the work that the Fundacja Pogranicze does in Sejny and Krasnogruda. This does not mean to say that language is not important. Their practice also incorporates storytelling across the generations, theatre and poetry. However, cultural practice that is understood as more than the communication of a meaning or message that can be expressed in words, presents an intriguing ‘problem’ for the field of memory studies, which is my chosen area of specialism.

Memory studies often focuses on narratives of the past and on the struggle to control or define those narratives. In other words, it tends to see the interpretation of history as the key issue. Thinking about our emotional, embodied and situated experience does not necessarily replace such interpretation, but memory studies’ focus on the discursive, in other words on what can be put into words, arguably misses out on significant dimensions of our engagement with the past when we inhabit specific territories.

Influenced by these and other experiences in Krasnogruda and Sejny, my reading has increasingly focused on scholars whose work has something to tell us about the relationship between memory, territory and the non-discursive. Although it may be widely recognized that territory is constructed through the stories that people tell about it and the relationship of their group to it, the ways in which territory is experienced or felt are less often the focus. Nevertheless, when we are thinking about conflict over territory, people’s feelings about place and belonging are surely just as important as the stories they tell. Furthermore, artistic practice intervenes precisely at this affective level. The question, then, is how such artistic practice can engage with the felt sense of place in a productive way that perhaps does not (only) rely on narrating new understandings of that place.

As a consequence of being forced to think about these questions more deeply during my secondment, I began to explore new literatures that seemed to offer some partial but provocative solutions. Following authors who are part of what has been called the ‘affective turn’ in the humanities and social sciences, I spent a lot of my time thinking about how emotions and embodiment are part of our experience of art, and about how this might feed into what social scientist Margaret Wetherell has called ‘affective-discursive practice’ in disputed territories.

Wetherell makes the important point that emotional and physical experience are not separate from the way we talk about an issue, but are in fact part of the way we talk about it and why we talk about it. Simply put, how we feel and where we are changes our talk, but talking also changes how we feel about where we are. An important question for me is how artistic practice in disputed territories might not change merely the way that we talk about the past, but also about how we feel about that past and about each other when we participate in cultural events, projects or spaces.

Thinking about art and memory in this way throws up many methodological challenges that I will need to address as our research progresses, particularly around capturing the role of emotion and experience in our engagement with memory and cultural practice, but I would certainly have never been motivated to explore these avenues if I had not spent time at Fundacja Pogranicze myself, experiencing its work and engaging in my own situated, affective-discursive practice.

David Clarke is Professor in German Studies at Cardiff University’s School of Modern Languages, and Visiting Professor at the University of Bath’s Department of Politics, Languages and International Studies. His research focuses on the politics and culture of memory in Germany and Europe. Find out more about David at www.disterrmem.eu/university-of-bath

The importance of being there: the role of felt experience versus narrative in shaping memories of disputed territories