Representing the Material Infra-Ordinary of the Perpetrator

This article explores the role played by the material objects of perpetrators in the representation of their lives, crimes and memory legacies. To locate and situate these objects, I concentrate not on the propaganda monuments built during regimes but on the domestic arena, that is, on places connected to the private lives of perpetrators that now feature in memorial sites. In the cases examined here, these feature within artistic exhibitions at such sites. In the first part of the article, I propose that these cases also provide a particularly fruitful opportunity to question the ‘infra-ordinary’ of perpetrators. In this, I borrow Georges Perec’s notion (1997) that the study of apparently trivial things unveils the most ‘authentic’ dimension of the real. In the context of perpetrator heritage, what emerges is a very thorny infra-ordinary, as it is overlaid topologically and phenomenologically with the space of violence. Having outlined this reasoning, in the second part of the article, I examine two examples of artistic practices which integrate the objects of perpetrators into the site’s narratives. The first is a temporary exhibition entitled 'Bilder, Stimmen und Klischees' (Pictures, Voices and Clichés), which was hosted in a part of the SS Auxiliaries’ quarters at the Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück in Germany. My second example is the permanent artistic installation at the ESMA Museo Sitio de Memoria, (Museum and Site of Memory), in Buenos Aires. The analysis of these two artistic practices sheds light on the strategies adopted to represent perpetrators through the material infra-ordinary, thereby challenging the stereotype of absolute evil.