ACT 20 PHILOLOGY, MEMORY, AND FORGETFULNESS, Lisbon 2008 Abstract proposal, Jacob Lund Pedersen Aesthetic Kentridge From

m 1904 to 1907 the German colonial power brutally exterminated three quarters of the Herero people in South-West Africa (present day Namibia) in a massacre considered to be the worst atrocity upon a single people in colonial history and the first genocide of the twentieth century. This almost forgotten slaughter of about 70.000 Hereros is the point of departure for South African artist William Kentridges piece Black Box/Chambre Noire commissioned by Deutsche Guggenheim in 2005, a hundred years later. The highly poetic piece is a many-layered multi-media installation consisting of animated films, kinetic sculptural objects, drawings, and a mechanical miniature theatre. The show begins with the figure of a megaphone stepping onto stage announcing a Trauerarbeit, and runs for 23 minutes in a dark lit room. This paper seeks to investigate how the work of mourning and memory becomes a sensuous, aesthetic matter in Kentridges piece; how the past is actualised in the present through an appeal to the senses, through an invitation to engage aesthetically with the distant, traumatic historical material and how his work also unrelenting and self-reflexive explores its own medium and the process of signification in an endeavour to avoid a spectacularization of memory. Author presentation: Remembrance and Trauerarbeit in William

Jacob

Lund

Pedersen,

Assistant

Research

Professor,

PhD,

Department of Aesthetics and Culture, Institute of Aesthetic Studies, University of Aarhus. Editor of The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics since 2007. His publications include Livs-form perspektiver i Giorgio Agambens filosofi (Form-of-life: Perspectives in the Philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, 2005, ed. with M. Bolt) and Den subjektive rest (The subjective Remnant, 2008). Current research on The Phenomenology of Testimony: Memory and Representation in Artistic Testimonies.