Events

This paper introduces some key arguments from my book 'Promises Beyond Memory: Archives, Art and the Afterlives of Violence in Latin America' (Duke, 2026) and that continue to inform my research on archives of violence. In thinking the archive, the paper offers five propositions. First, since archives are less about the past than they are about the future, they embody the promise of memory and respond to present concerns. As such, the impulse to archive violence is infused with a pessimistic aura, and yet the archive of violence also enacts an optimism. Second, that the archives hold traces that in the case of the social institutions I have researched, invite us to ruminate on how documentality enrols and constitutes our modes of belonging. When these are removed, the ‘paper cadaver’ that remains allows us to see the lines of power and violence that constitute the ‘order’ seemingly at stake. Third, while what the archive holds does not appear to change, when it appears it inevitably appears anew, as every new context makes it so. That is what the archive must hope for; it is also what we must fear. The risks that the archive takes cannot be avoided but creative re-envisionings are what may keep the archive alive as things do not, it turns out, speak for themselves. Four, when they re-appear, archival contents offer themselves as materials on which we must do further work. It is in these new contexts that our propositions about the past must be tested, and our modes of sensing the past, experiencing and perhaps even understanding it, cultivated and explored. Five, beyond the legal decisions/records and accounts in history books, accounts of past lives become enfolded into contemporary ethical even normative worlds, informing the normative compass requested of modern political subjects.

Vikki Bell is Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she has taught feminist, critical and cultural thought for many years. Her funded research has addressed transitional justice within societies emerging from periods of conflict, with a focus on Latin America and an emphasis on questions of aesthetics and ethics. Vikki is the author of five monographs including Promises Beyond Memory: Archives, Art and Afterlives in Latin America (Duke University Press, 2026), The Art of Post-Dictatorship: Ethics and Aesthetics in Transitional Argentina (Routledge, 2014) and Culture and Performance (Bloomsbury, 2007). She has also written over fifty academic articles and chapters. Her research has attracted funding from the ESRC, the AHRC, the British Academy, the Newton (BEIS) fund. She is currently the recipient of a Major Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust to research the archive of the UK charity INQUEST that supports the families of those who have died ‘state-related’ deaths.

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