Paper short abstract:

The paper explores how temporality is "felt" and negotiated in a bounded field-site, a landscape that triggers nostalgic memories and a certain sense of "being stuck in time". It discusses temporality both as an affective field of experience and as a site of political contestation.

Paper long abstract:

Our being in time and space is entangled in a make-believe world that is always already open to other worlds, other beings and other time-spaces. The non-synchronicity of that experience and the regimes of temporality that different commemorative practices impose upon landscapes allows for a reconsideration of commemorative geographies informed by new materialist approaches (Navaro-Yashin, 2012; Waterton, 2014) and recent debates on the politics of time (Bevernage, 2011). The paper draws upon ethnographic and historical research on Portbou (Spain), a small town marked by the haunting figure of Walter Benjamin, the Spanish republicans defeated in the Spanish Civil Wars (1936-1939) and the violent nature of national boundaries.

In this paper I'll attempt to reconceptualise temporal experience in political terms by looking at how different regimes of temporality emerge in encounters with landscapes that are haunted by histories of violence. My argument will thus aim at bringing together research on temporality, historiography, cultural geography and new materialist studies. The questions that runs through this paper are: how do people experience that chronological porosity in places that are associated with violence and suffering? Through which spatial, narrative and performative tactics are the continuities or discontinuities distributed and negotiated in post-conflict landscapes?