Paper short abstract

This paper is a reflection on an ongoing project that bridges research, and art, exploring through materiality and technologies, the intertwined connections among ecologies, collective memories, and the temporalities of places that hosted "human zoos" in Europe during the 19th and 20th centuries.

Paper long abstract

This paper includes observations and reflections on diverse moments of an ongoing project that bridges research, and art, exploring through materiality, the intertwined connections among ecologies, collective memories, and the temporalities of places that hosted the so-called "human zoos" in Europe during the 19th and 20th centuries. The project, developed since 2022, does not focuses on an specific case, also it does not try to speak for a particular human group, and also, it does not try to be a project specifically about "human zoos," rather than that, it has consist in developing a methodology on how to put attention to the visible and invisible traces of violence of diverse temporalities of places that share this common past. This evolving and unfinished methodology has helped to bring to light some clashes and contradictions between those temporalities, and through that exercise, explore the potentiality of certain materials that can be perceived as fragile, to become holders and evidence of a link between the spaces where they come from and other territories and other silenced collective memories. By iteration, samples of water or sand, together with a virtual body that is built by diverse techniques, becomes a holder of diverse temporalities, a substance that is both a tangible representation of a specific memory and also an archive for the intangible, which is not visible. Tracing this colonial violence has transformed the trace itself into an analytical tool, a ritual, and a new framework for better understanding the cities of today.