“They Put the Knife into Enceladus’s Wound”
Newspaper ELEFTHEROTYPIA, 26 May 2000
Interview by Anna Stergiou
DOES IT EVEN NEED ASKING…
…BECAUSE seismologists have repeatedly explained that in Greece we must learn to live alongside earthquakes. Because the memories of 1986 were revived in Kalamata, though less intensely, by the seismic tremor of two days ago. Because collective fears develop through experiences of tragic events or through the accounts of loved ones. Because earthquakes are a traumatic experience for those who perceive the wrath of Enceladus and human powerlessness before it. Because Kalamata was the first city which, on the initiative of cultural anthropologist and author Nadia Seremetakis, and in collaboration with the local authorities, “put the knife into the wound” a few years ago by organising multifaceted commemorative events devoted to the earthquakes.
Kalamata dared to look once again at its ruins, before another earthquake struck, through photographs and exhibitions of personal objects…
“The photographic depiction of the city in ruins presented a tragic landscape. It is not only the parts of buildings that were violently separated and torn away from one another. It is also the people themselves, who were severed from the structures of which they had formed a part. There are images of skeletal buildings and of people exiled from their buildings. They expose devastated interiors—of both people and homes. A photograph, for example, showing someone’s glasses lying among scattered papers on top of the rubble, is an eloquent sign of the violent interruption of private life.”
– How much did the earthquake change people’s everyday lives?
“The fear or aversion that ruins provoke, both then and now, stems from the fact that they confront us with an iconography of the present that is suddenly transformed into the past. The event of destruction has violently exiled its victims from their own present. Photographs depict citizens trying to recreate elements of their former everyday life inside tents—for example, cooking, bathing and grooming…”
– It is striking that several citizens of Kalamata had kept objects in their homes—broken or damaged by the earthquake—for an entire decade…
“They were objects—or, more often, fragments of objects—of emotional rather than economic or aesthetic significance, which citizens had salvaged and which, for them, embodied the memory of the earthquake… Knowledge of both the past and the present is produced within the context of everyday life. Popular memory circulates through everyday speech and personal narratives, or is recorded in letters, diaries, photographic albums and collections of objects from the past, even in anecdotes that often acquire the power and universality of myth. Usually, this history remains at the level of personal recollection and often stays silent in the background. Through the events that were organised, an attempt was made to bridge public and private memory.”
– Did the participatory commemorative events constitute a form of resistance to future earthquakes?
“The 1986 earthquake was one of the most significant events in the history of the region. Today, however, we all live in the age of the earthquake. It is clear that we need new methods in order to apprehend historical experience and transform it into public knowledge, into education. The built environment and architectural space may now need to relinquish their aspirations to eternity, for example through ancient monuments. The latter may no longer adequately express the reality of today and tomorrow—local, national and global. Perhaps the built environment should become a more living membrane within which citizens can inscribe and grasp the fluidity, immediacy and indeterminacy of everyday life.”
