Keynote conferences > Erika Diettes

 THE RIGHT TO AGONY

Wednesday, October 1st from 11:30 AM to 12:30 PM

Centre des colloques, Amphitheater 250

Erika Diettes is a visual artist and social communicator, with a degree from the Pontifical Javeriana University and a Masters in Social Anthropology from the University of the Andes. Her artistic work focuses on the concept of grief caused by violence, and has developed mainly from her work with victims of the Colombian armed conflict.

Diettes began her artistic career with her work Silencios (2005), a creation born of the testimonies of Jewish Holocaust survivors who found refuge in Colombia. From then on, she has been interested in the socio-political situation in her country, in a process of listening, research and creation that has continued to this day, giving rise to the works Río Abajo (2008), A punta de Sangre (2009), Sudarios (2011) and Relicarios (2011-2016). This journey also includes the publication of the books Silencios (2005) and Memento Mori (2016). The artist is currently creating her next work, Oratorio, which will involve Colombia, Argentina and Uganda.

Erika Diettes' artistic work is embraced and supported by every bereaved person and victim she has worked with. She is also known nationally and internationally, not only through the various venues where she has exhibited, but also through the awards and recognition she has received. In 2015, she was nominated for the Visionary Awards, where she was a finalist and won the Tim Hetherington Trust Fellowship and the World Press Photo Foundation Fellowship (2017-2018). In 2017, she was invited to be part of the Transformative Memory Partnership network, an international and interdisciplinary research group that seeks to exchange knowledge and practice on the ways in which memory is used, representing Colombia in various meetings held in Canada, Uganda and Colombia. More recently, in 2019, she was selected to be part of the group of women artists, leaders and intellectuals invited to Rise, a Season of Female Artist, Thinkers and Leaders as part of a program born in commemoration of Women's Rights Day, where the Sudarios exhibition was chosen to open this cultural calendar at Liverpool Cathedral.

Finally, it's worth mentioning that the archives of Diettes' research and creative processes are currently housed at Tulane University's Latin American Studies Library, which in 2019 decided to receive and preserve this historically valuable information, as well as at the University of Bologna Library, which in 2022 received the Relicarios 3/3 portfolio for preservation and consultation.

Conference :

From every point of view, it's clear that enforced disappearance takes on an infinite cruelty. The monstrous imagination it awakens foreshadows the tortures feared and endured by the loved one. Images that the heart conjures up and which, in turn, torture the soul of the bereaved loved one who, out of love, submits to the eternal wait for the return of their loved one, unjustly hoping that he or she will return, if only lifeless. However, there are other iniquities associated with enforced disappearance. Undoubtedly, the fact that death allows us to say our goodbyes is a privilege that nature has granted to some, and that violence has denied to so many others. Thus, those who use violence, by extending their hold over the way we relate to death, shatter all hope. For, having subjected life to their perverse forms, they also impose their domination over this intimate moment of relationship with the other. A moment which, beyond life itself, represents its departure and links us to our deepest, most existential truths.

Agony is beautiful because it allows us to act to offer our loved one the care that soothes their pain, to seek to calm their fear of death... to help them die "well". On the other hand, it is certain that the fate of a loved one is synonymous with unremitting pain. You can't help or console them; you can't accompany their death. Moreover, enforced disappearance condemns the victim to agonize in solitude, in intense bodily pain, compounded by the despair of knowing that only death can soothe him, and by the deep anguish that his body may never be found. That his family, including the women in it, will suffer an endless search, indifference and deteriorating mental health.

Although agony is a very deep suffering, when accompanied, it allows us to make peace with ourselves, with each other, with life and with death. This forever unfinished farewell gives rise to interactions with the loved one that are prolonged in this suspended mourning, misunderstood by the immediate entourage of the grieving relative.

In this sense, Oratorio stands as a threshold, a necessary transitional space where the relatives of the missing can inhabit these absences and perform the actions proper to this suspended mourning with dignity and solemnity. It is thus conceived as a place which, although similar to a cemetery or an ossuary, cannot be built in the same way. Indeed, unlike the latter, it will always be incomplete in the absence of mortal remains. Its structure cannot be concrete, nor massive, for it houses not bodies but images and words; on the contrary, it seeks to translate, through its open architecture and elements such as translucence, the concept of suspended mourning that is lived indefinitely, without ever fully closing or opening, without doors to delimit mourning. Its lines, rising towards the sky, express both the gesture of elevating desires on the one hand, and the prayers of the bereaved on the other.

Debate moderated by Emmanuelle Sinardet (CRIIA, Université Paris Nanterre)

 Erika Diettes