Non-sites of memory: areas of post-anthropocentric alliances in the post-violence era.

Non-sites of memory are a special type of Holocaust space, defined by the presence of unburied and uncommemorated victims. Overlooked, unacquainted, left without intervention, locations enter into alliances with their immediate surroundings: human and non-human. How can we currently try to understand these complex “assemblages”: are they ecological museums of the Holocaust? Necro-communities? Subversive political entities? Simply: objects of research on the environmental history of the Holocaust? If these are “spaces in which memory is grounded”, then how does the social order of memory mix here with the past of material witnesses: land, terrain, vegetation? The works of artists and theoreticians trying to understand the memory of the Holocaust in the era of posthumanism will allow us to build further hypotheses.

Roma Sendyka works at the Department of Literary Anthropology and Cultural Studies at the Jagiellonian University, co-founder and director of the Centre for Research on Cultures of Memory. He works on theories of literary and cultural studies, especially research on visual culture and cultures of memory, and is currently working on the theory of non-sites of memory and visual research in the context of genocide.