Natalija Arlauskaitė (PDF)
https://doi.org/10.53631/DIS/2014.6.6
At the moment of their production, Soviet atrocity and repression archives were not intended to be watched. When their initial status is being subverted, one cannot ask what it means to read these archives and make them visible. What does looking at them mean, and how can the archive’s visuality be approached and handled? The article scrutinises the second book in the framework of a project, ‘About Love’, by artist Kęstutis Grigaliūnas. The book is a collection of 130 silk prints, the material from files of 130 victims of political persecution, killed in Tuskulėnai Estate in Vilnius from 1944 to 1947. The aim of the article was to show how the visualisation of the atrocity archive, the very scopic regime and its alteration participate in the subversion of the archive and the creation of new orders of historical memory. This kind of de- and re-archiving relies on the ‘indexical power’ of the photographic image as an intermediary stage in producing silk prints. Montage techniques introduced in ‘About Love’ strengthen and multiply indexicality effects in various ways, thus complementing the strategy of making the trauma archive visible despite being initially deprived of presence in the visual sphere.
Keywords: archive, regimes of visuality, indexicality, scriptural photography