Dig Site

As we scroll down, the directional gesture of doing so attempts to suggest two dynamics: The first exists as a merging between the top-down, historicist approach to history, which finds authority granted selectively and restrictively, and a bottom-up alternative, which gives voice to microbes, rocks, social settings, and lived experience.

Within a top-down approach, meaning is foisted upon circumstances, distilled and curated from a selective interpretation of events and capped with a totem, whilst an alternative, bottom-up approach acknowledges that the surrounds are in constant flux. Here lies the archive of all agency and within it meaning slips; the flows of agency chart new lines of flight, underscore old ones, treading over the past, like a vast palimpsest. But these traces are not discrete, they mix with what they contact. This domain is multi-vocal, poly-valent, indiscrete.

The spomenik is the example par excellence of the top-down approach to history which Benjamin (2019: 198) labeled historicism. While its significance derives from actual events which this discussion does not seek to downplay, it is a caricature of these, an avoidable simplification put to political ends. It is also an attempt to freeze time, to deny forgetting, and to state a final, unimpeachable claim. 

Whereas events are the calling cards of an historicist approach, memory is anarchic and dynamic. For Pierre Nora, “memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name. It remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived. History, on the other hand [by which he means historicity], is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete of what is no longer” (Nora 1989: 8).

A Spectral Geology presents the spomeniks as lieux de mémoire, representative of this heritage notion of history, whilst the monument sites are the locations of personal memory which are by nature “multiple and yet specific; collective, plural and yet individual” (Maurice Halbwachs quoted in Nora 1989: 9).

These surroundings, which make up the spomenik site (as distinct from the spomenik itself) are in constant flux and are suggestive of the monument’s folly. Flows of agency are constant and often oblivious to the neighboring structure. Whereas the monument is an example of the sedentary state apparatus, its surrounds are a complex intermingling of smooth and striated space where the smooth is unconstrained (movement of animals, sound that bleeds in from the surrounds) and the striated is disciplined (roads, fences, paths, ownership) (Deleuze and Guattari 2014: 552). Even the assumption that the spomenik can remain in its state of petrifaction would appear naive. Its patina – worn, weathered and discolored – demonstrates the futility of any claim to immutability. In many instances, the spomeniks have been razed, erased, relocated, dismembered and stolen, smelted and repurposed (Horvatinčić 2020).

Overlaid upon this top-down/bottom-up historical dynamic is a second, geographical axis – connecting the terrestrial to the subterranean. Poetically suggestive, the terrestrial is the domain of air, vapors, and fleeting existence, whereas the subterranean is the resting place of material subjected to gravity. It is the domain of sequestration, dormancy, and deep time.

As we scroll down we encounter fragments related to the site – photographs, textual excerpts, train timetables, mineral specimens, and handwritten notes serving as audits of a listening. Together these chart the site, albeit incompletely. They suggest through lines, lateral connections, the looping back of time on itself. The site becomes a plateau in the Deleuzian sense (Deleuze and Guattari 2014: 22-23) with the articles representing rhizomes spreading out, moving towards other places, connecting elsewhere, highlighting the porous nature of site which can never be considered discrete.

The provenance of the fragments remains intentionally blurry. The use of citation convention is subverted. On occasion they lead to actual sources, whilst at other times they merely contain oblique or poetic references. In some instances they are left blank. Some texts appear to derive from the hand of the artist, whilst others exhibit voices with which the work is in conversation. This obfuscation parallels the intermingling and slippage of memory and historical sources. The spomenik sites are not, and can never be, exhaustively catalogued archives.

The visual articles attempt to suggest just some of what we should be listening out for in the field recordings, while their apparent arbitrariness reminds us of the unquantifiable mass of connections and forces that exert themselves on site, in the process creating it anew, over and over again, albeit with chaotic variation. If for Foucault “the archive is the first law of what can be said” (Foucault 2002: 145), the present work entertains a less restricted congregation of voices.