Programmatic Incompleteness:
A Conversation Between Kader Attia and Cuauhtémoc Medina

Cuauhtémoc Medina (CM): I feel that this dialogue has to start by specifying the motives for screening Reflecting Memories, which are far from a matter of mere artistic routine. Last March, you shared with me a remarkable email from a Russian psychotherapist living in Ukraine. She wanted to know where to watch Reflecting Memory at a time when the Russian Empire pretended to open all kinds of wounds by invading Ukraine, which evidently appeared as some sort of “phantom limb” of the Soviet empire. Her request was truly moving: she wanted to show the film to her friends in Ukraine, right in the middle of the war.  She was a Russian citizen and had seen your work at the Ludwig Museum in Koblenz three years before. She kept on thinking about your film when reflecting about “collective trauma, soviet heritage, fascist regimes, etc.” As you pointed out in your message, her plea demonstrated vividly “why we need Art more than ever.” My response was to immediately ask you to broadcast the video from this platform. Would you like to comment further on the exchange with the Russian psychotherapist and how that connects with the history and stories around Reflecting Memory? 

Kader Attia (KA): Both because of its anonymous nature and because of the path it has taken to get here, this message has indeed made a strong impression on me. First of all, the initiative of an anonymous person, a person I do not know, makes the hope of this message resemble that of the messages found in bottles thrown into the sea, in order to be read, during one of the last two world wars. The strength of the content of these messages is also linked to the survival of the message, despite all the obstacles the bottle had to go through. Which might seem obsolete today, with the Internet; however, this message could have never reached its destination. At a time when space has been abolished and distances reduced by digital technologies, time has also been reduced, and because of our distrust of spam and the little time capitalism leaves for the freedom of our attention, we are the major obstacle to reading emails from strangers. This message sent deserves our attention... The other strength of this message is that it makes visible what’s invisible in a work of art: the film Reflecting Memory, which has left a space of possible encounter between different subjects of collective traumatic experience in the memory of the author of this message. The effects of a work of art on the audience are often invisible, particularly for the artist—except for musicians and singers, and stage actors and dancers, who are in direct contact with the audience in the experience of the work performed live. With the visual arts, it is rare to experience the audience’s live impression of the work. That is why the memory that the author seeks to reactivate so that the different traumatic histories of the Russian and Ukrainian experiences can shimmer makes this message exceptional. The use of the word “mirror” here reinforces the metaphor produced by the verb “to mirror”—i.e., to make visible the invisible wounds, and to learn to look at them. The traumatic dimension of the invisible, of individual and collective invisible wounds, makes their repair complex... I am not saying that the visible is therapeutic, but that collective and individual invisible wounds haunt our traumatized societies and that we do not have the tools (and perhaps the courage) to treat them. They are complex because their symptoms are painful, furtive and make the wound elusive. Hence the near impossibility of “repairing” them. One of the Lithuanian psychoanalysts interviewed in the film, Professor Grazina Gudaité, says that the worst thing to fear from a traumatized society is an inferiority complex. This complex is invisible but always present somewhere in all societies traumatized by others, cultivating the ground for fascism…

CM:  In that regard, a key moment in the video is the intervention by Fethi Benslama, who suggests that the way human communities tend to refer to a “mystical common body” allows us to think about the way political “phantom limbs” also relate to the history of loss and trauma in contemporary societies. Apart from the seductive way he explains how we administer the presence of the dead as part of our social fabric, he warns us about the consequences of the way history is written, in terms of posing a past that needs to be recovered, avoiding the task of elaborating loss. He refers, in particular, to the way the attempt to restore the caliphate and empire seems to haunt Islamist narratives, in relation to the loss of the Ottoman Empire and the history of Arab nationalism. One would feel that a significant part of contemporary world politics appears inscribed in those observations.

KA: If we consider the imperialist character of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we are indeed very close to what Fethi Benslama describes as the reclamation of the loss of an empire, with the particularity that it is deployed against another imperialism, that of the American empire. The radicality of this neocolonial discourse and act mimics another imperialism, which is itself based on the warlike agency of capitalism. It bases the renewal of its society on the mimesis of an imperialist expansion antagonistic to that of the communism it experienced, using the rhetoric of the reappropriation of a sovereignty of this mystical body, individuating the subjects that compose it through the dislocated narrative of the history of which they are objects. In other words, the writing of contemporary history cements the collective consciousness of belonging to this mystical body of the community. This is related to a very important thought by Jacques Lacan that Fethi Benslama once quoted in an article. Speaking about the future of mysticism in the twenty-first century, Jacques Lacan once said that the twenty-first century will be scientific and not religious, and that the globalization of the capitalist economy, driven by the universalism advocated by modern discourse, will produce a segregating counter-reaction. Indeed, moving from an initial modernity, then to a second and finally to a third, the human subject grew up in a world where he had little chance of working in a profession different from that of his parents and, at best, a few kilometres from where he had grown up, in societies that were clearly different from others, whether one was from the south or the north, from the city or the countryside. In a globalized world where the difference between living in Hong Kong, Moscow, Paris or New York is no longer as marked as it was two centuries ago, where professional opportunities are changing at an exponential rate, the social and geographical desegregation that accompanies it produces a desire to resegregate in the human subject. A withdrawal into oneself and a withdrawal into one’s own identity, which create the strong cleavage specific to our time, and whose individualism, as a counter-reaction to the violence of universalism, a concept imposed by modernity, is the lever of consumer capitalism, itself an unequalled imperialist force. It is possible that the strength of recent radical Islamist movements is one of the forms taken by this need for “resegregation,” a consequence of the universalist globalization of capitalism embraced by all hegemonic ideologies, such as communism, political Islam, etc. Fethi Benslama, who has been working for years with very radicalized Muslim subjects, deduces that this desire for resegregation also produces a violent individualism, that of the lone wolves who commit suicide attacks, sometimes claiming to be Islamic, sometimes Christian and sometimes other beliefs…

CM: I was wondering about the image that you keep on developing in Reflecting Memory: the use of a mirror to reconnect the subject with the missing limb, so as to undo the phantom. I would love to ask you what the significance of “reflection” is in your work, in view of the importance that mirrors have in the visual machines you produce, from the Holy Land (2006) installation on the beaches receiving immigrants on the Spanish coast to the Mirrors and Masks series (2005) and the endless bibliographic abyss of The Light of Jacob’s Ladder (2013) in the Whitechapel Gallery. More than a material resource, it would seem to me that your fascination with mirroring implies a moment of hallucinatory examination, in terms of the vision of a shattered and repaired identity implied in your stitched mirrors, made either with canvas or glass.

KA: Here again, we could evoke another psychologist, Henri Wallon, who inspired Lacan’s work on children and their reflections in the mirror. The mirror stage is a stage of psychological development where seeing his or her image in the mirror leads the child to become aware of his or her body and distinguish it from other bodies. From the age of five, the mirror stage completes the vision of the finished individual body for the child. From the image of his or her body as endless and fragmented, the child, through the mirror stage, discovers that he or she is whole, or rather that his or her limbs and himself or herself are one person.  The mirror stage makes the perception of the body of the subject who lives through it transition from a fragmented stage to a whole stage: the mirror stage is one of repair. The reflection is changed by an arrangement which binds it forever to what it reflects, as the shadow is bound to the illuminated object. It is sometimes a furtive element, even abstract, sometimes a figurative and static complement, but in both cases it is always inherent to what nourishes it. The multitude of roles that reflection plays haunts me. Sometimes a shadow, sometimes a complement, sometimes a fragment, but even if it is elusive, reflection is a virtual prosthesis; like the elusive object of desire, it is lost forever... This prosthetic function characterizes human nature in projecting itself outside of oneself, which is associated with techne and nature. Reflection is the first technological image produced by the human subject. This projection is perhaps driven by the desire of the object. The experience of the mirror plays a fundamental role in the insertion of the human subject into the technological society he or she belongs to, since the earliest invention of tools. It unifies a dislocated and pre-repaired body (the perception of this body) into a subject. The mirror has marked my individual history through the myths which are associated with it and the physical violence which the shards of the broken mirror exercise. When I was two or three years old, mirror shards cut the soles of my feet: an old enough memory, since my sister took me in her arms to bring me home when she was only eleven years old. And then there are the mirrors in the house that, every night, my mother used to cover with an opaque cloth or turn towards the wall, for fear that evil spirits would come out and take possession of our bodies during the night. The mirror is inherent to the body... It is the physical prosthesis of the imaginary body. In Reflecting Memory, I show this. The mirror becomes the imaginary prosthesis of the missing limb. It is this double absence-presence that characterizes the action of the mirror, that makes this fascinating object the earliest and most eternal product of our prosthetic nature as a being capable of projecting itself outside of itself into the world through what Socrates called techne. The analogy between the virtual image produced by the mirror and current virtual technology is all the more relevant, as it is continuity through the image. With one worrying particularity, which is that the agency that motivates it makes it move away from us more and more. More than ever, the object (of desire) is lost forever.

CM: There is a significant detail in the video that one only detects after several viewings. There is always an incomplete reflection in the scenes of people suffering from missing limbs. Am I right in feeling that such incompleteness is programmatic, that it corresponds to the notion that, even in terms of image making, repair ought to be a recognition and, to a certain extent, an ethical and aesthetic reworking of the scar?

KA: Yes, there is always an incomplete reflection in the scenes of people suffering from missing limbs. It is on purpose. You are right in thinking that such incompleteness is programmatic. And I think there is something that is beyond and before us, the human hermeneutical understanding of the movement between “the pre-repaired and the post-repaired,” which binds injury and repair in an impossible association. That’s why I like to think that repair is an oxymoron. It is a race between the wounded and the repaired states of things, which are condemned to endlessly run after each other. Whenever we think about repair, we are thinking about an injury.