Dialogue Forum_Aferim Yavrum

the other. The loss of responsibility must necessarily involve –and is synonymous with– replacing proximity with a physical or spiritual separation.

These processes of rupture of social relations deploy themselves in a manner that finds also a manifestation in space. The targeted populations are either physically isolated by concentrating them in certain areas, sealing them off in ghettos, or expulsing them through massive deportation. But they can also be margined from social life through daily practices of segregation. In either case, hierarchically different categories of space are produced in the city, giving place to differentiated spatial practices. After the murdering, the physical traces of this separation must be erased as well. These traces may testify of a destroyed social bond but also of complicity, fear or indifference. They might be a testimony of shame.

Visible material remnants of the missing are thus removed. This can be actively produced, destroying them or wiping them out from the public sight, or it can happen passively when ignorance, indifference and indolence turn them imperceptible to the pedestrian eye. What can art do to help to render visible these absented presences in the social space? Which strategies and resources can artists display in order to symbolically repairing this fractured collective net? How do they account for mourning and loss and what possibilities do they have –if at all– of healing the wounds left by the destruction of social relations? Or might art just help by pointing at the void?

In the Western world, the modern urban experience was contemporary to a crisis of memory and identity. The dissolution of old community ties and the need to adapt to new existences in the emerging metropolises gave place to new urban subjectivities, sharply described by Georg Simmel as early as 1903: lives where empathy gives way to mistrust, interest on the others is replaced by indolence, and affection is overshadowed by intellectualization in the