T H E D A R K
P R E C U R S O R
International Conference on Deleuze and Artistic Research
DARE 2015 | Orpheus Institute | Ghent | Belgium | 9-11 November 2015
O P E N - A C C E S S R I C H - M E D I A P R O C E E D I N G S
Edited by Paulo de Assis and Paolo Giudici
T H E D A R K
P R E C U R S O R
International Conference on Deleuze and Artistic Research
DARE 2015 | Orpheus Institute | Ghent | Belgium | 9-11 November 2015
O P E N - A C C E S S R I C H - M E D I A P R O C E E D I N G S
Edited by Paulo de Assis and Paolo Giudici
Anna Barseghian / Stefan Kristensen
Utopiana, Genève, CH / Université de Genève, CH
No Voice is Lost
Day 3, 11 November, Sphinx Cinema, 10:00–11:00
In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari write that “There is always a woman, a child, a bird to secretly perceive the secret. There is always a perception finer than yours, a perception of your imperceptible, of what is in your box.” Our proposition is concerned with the perception of this imperceptible through the practice of the refrain (ritournelle) and how this is able to make visible long-hidden experiences and reunite scattered memories. The core argument is that the ghosts remaining after a catastrophe such as a genocide are still active as long as their role has not been properly worked out. One way of doing so is to let the ghosts speak through the gestures and words of the living, and the way they speak can be described using the notion of refrain, introduced by Deleuze and Guattari. Our project tells the story of Gülizar (1875–1948), an Armenian girl who became a legend during her lifetime because she was abducted by a powerful Kurdish tribe chief as a fourteen-year-old girl, but resisted him and managed to return to her village. Gülizar’s story lives on not only in Armenian communities but also among the Kurdish people living today in the area where she lived, in the Plain of Mush (Eastern Turkey). We have explored different ways of letting her presence be felt, and found that the different versions of her story, from the Armenian or Kurdish oral traditions, formed a territorialising refrain that asked many important questions connecting the unconscious, memory, and the politics of resistance.
The legacy of historical collective traumas has been widely discussed in psychoanalytical contexts. The works of Abraham and Torok, or of Janine Altounian, among many others, have shown that collective traumas can be transmitted through several generations. But this approach is centred on the individual perspective; the collective dimension of the traumas requires an approach to memory free from the individual psychic space and on another plane. On this question, Deleuze and Guattari’s suggestions in the “Refrain” chapter of A Thousand Plateaus, as well as Guattari’s own developments in his Machinic Unconscious, are useful. They understand the notion of refrain as both the intimate and the collective “temporalisation of our relation to landscapes and to the living world”; as such, it seems to be a necessary component of collective memories.
The issue is then on two levels: first it is about bringing a collective unconscious to the foreground; second, it is about mobilising a vivid memory in order to favour social change. The contribution will show the video No Voice is Lost, featuring the memory of Gülizar’s story through the testimonies of different people (Kurds and Armenians) for whom this story is important, along with the landscapes where she lived before 1915. The song (lament) about Gülizar is the refrain able to reconnect the living and the dead with this space, with this landscape, and cast a bridge over the breaches of time.
Anna Barseghian, après des études d’architecture en Arménie, a continué comme artiste visuelle. Elle a obtenu un diplôme postgrade en communication visualisation infographiques à l’Université de Genève. Parallèlement à son travail en tant que directrice artistique d’Utopiana, Anna Barseghian développe un travail artistique et curatorial. Dernièrement, elle a conçu et réalisé l’événement Désir sans destin qui a eu lieu au Théâtre Saint-Gervais en collaboration avec Stefan Kristensen, la compagnie Sturmfrei de Maya Bösch, en mai 2013 à Genève. En tant qu’artiste, elle est co-auteur de deux grands projets de recherche documentaire : Arménographie (2005–8) en collaboration avec Stefan Kristensen, et Spectrographie (2010–11), en collaboration avec Stefan Kristensen et Uriel Orlow. Le premier est un essai sur la représentation de la dispersion des Arméniens à travers des photos, des interviews vidéo et des textes, tandis que le second est une exploration de l’existence des « fantômes » dans les anciennes terres des Arméniens en Turquie orientale, à travers des vidéos et photos.
Stefan Kristensen est docteur en philosophie (Genève et Paris I) depuis 2007. Il est actuellement postdoctorant à l’Unité d’histoire de l’art de l’Université de Genève et boursier de recherche de la Fondation Alexander von Humboldt, à l’Université de Heidelberg. Il a publié de nombreux articles au voisinage de l’art, de la philosophie et de la psychologie du 20e siècle. Il est cofondateur de l’association Utopiana avec Anna Barseghian et a participé activement à la conception et à l’organisation de la plupart des événements et des projets. Il mène également avec Anna Barseghian une démarche artistique centrée sur la figuration de l’absence.