Matter matters in the memory politics of post-conflict societies. Artefacts and affective personal objects reveal the tangible legacy of conflict, physically ground memory work and situate commemorations and actors. Pinning memories to a particular material object is a useful and long-known mnemonic device in collective commemorative practices.Materiality ensures the permanent transmission of particular memories, but can neither guarantee the continuity and hegemony of a particular narrative nor can it settle competing narratives about victims or victors.
Against this background, this paper calls for a careful rethinking of the interconnectedness between memory and materiality and asks how matter affects the unfolding of memory-making in relation to peace formation. Material approaches to memory are valuable in that they acknowledge that monuments, memorials and artefacts produce meaning. The past they refer to through such meaning-making processes are not beyond contestation and allow us to examine the struggles over the "right" interpretation of the past. For instance, murals contain information and produce meaning in a metaphorical but also in a highly material way. We suggest that non-human materiality can also possess agency in the sense that monuments, memorials and artefacts affect social outcomes and can thus be conceptualised as imbued with "entangled agency".
Focusing on the representation of women in public space, this paper therefore juxtaposes the materiality of the "Women's Quilt" mural in Belfast (Northern Ireland) with the "Here come the Women" installation in the military bunker of Konjic (Bosnia-Herzegovina) to demonstrate the entanglement of human and non-human agency in the production of meaning in memory-making. We will show that the texture, location and physical make-up of the artefact in question allow us to theorise the ability of objects to not only materialise history in creative ways, but also to re-imagine different ways of commemorating a conflictive past by fictionalising a different peace through alternative materialisations of the past.
