Part of a larger research project on the complex materializations of political, terrorist violence in Europe, this paper focuses on the specific theoretical-methodological questions that arise when trying to theorize affect-filled encounters with more-than-human memorials, while trying to create a transdisciplinary dialogue between memory, trauma, and new materialist studies.
Starting from a particularly haunting encounter with the 22/3 memorial erected in Belgium's Sonian Forest to commemorate the 2016 Brussels attacks, this paper wishes to examine how certain materializations of memories and commemorations of terrorist violence and the traumas and counterterrorist responses this violence has engendered, transcend the purely representational. Experimenting with field philosophical (Brister and Frodeman 2020), post-qualitative (Lather & St. Pierre 2013, Somerville 2016, St. Pierre 2020), but mostly new materialist (Barad 2007, Chen 2012, and Haraway 2016), approaches, the 22/3 memorial is shown to be a more-than-human memorial, whose victims-honoring birch trees, Belgian blue carved-out stones, and precise architectural setup, take us beyond the 32 bodies that are supposed to become present in their absence through this nature-embedded commemorative artefact and the act of with-nessing (Ettinger 2006, Haraway 2016) when encountering said artefact. Pushing Derridean (i.e., memories-as-traces) and Deleuzoguattarian (i.e., memories-as-affective-micromaterials) approaches versus memory and trauma studies to their limits by means of a new materialist perspective that explicitly takes the affective relationality between the researcher and the memorial in question into account, the analysis presented in this paper will also examine that what is not being represented, together with that what exceeds representation, such as traumatic affective experiences, vivid embodied memories, micropolitical messages, … Specific attention will furthermore be paid to how the 22/3 memorial relates to the bio-/necropolitical (Braidotti 2007; 2013), and how it, depending on the situated researcher's encounter with the memorial, rematerializes life, death, or both.
