Reenactment and Reconstruction

As a Polish researcher interested in performance and reenactment, I encoun­ter a linguistic problem: there are no good equivalents for these two terms in Polish. Although performance studies is quite well established in Polish scholarship, the term performatyka (performatics) has an odd ring to it.

The term “reenactment” cannot be literally translated into Polish, as the language lacks a similarly versatile equivalent to the English prefix re- that allows for a multiplication of the levels of repetition, functioning dif­ferently from performance. Although the English term is sometimes used, especially in frames of artistic practice, Polish scholars tend to describe historical and artistic reenactment with the word rekonstrukcja: reconstruc- tion.¹ This Polish word means “to recreate something on the basis of pre­served fragments, remains, accounts, and so on” (Slownik Jζ∑yka Polskiego PWN) and also describes the recreated thing itself. In the Polish language, one can physically reconstruct things, buildings, institutions, as well as photography, films, and sound recordings with the application of digital technology. But one can also reconstruct situations, chains of events, and crimes. Comparing this to the English-language definition of reenactment as “the action or process of reproducing, recreating, or performing again; especially the action or process of acting out a past event” (Oxford English Dictionary), one can see that the Polish word focuses less on acting and pro­cess, and more on the fragments, remains, and accounts, and therefore on the evidence and traces that are the basis of repetition.

DOI: 10.4324/9780429445668-4 is concerned with time in bringing to the present what belongs to the past, reconstruction is centered more on the material conditions of the repetition process.

By referring to this linguistic problem, I am not interested in discuss­ing the issue of translation and translatability itself. Rather, I would like to propose a certain theoretical gesture, one that moves in the oppo­site direction to transmission of knowledge and theoretical terms that, like “performance,” migrate from English to Polish, from centers to periph­eries. After all, they establish not only foreign, transcultural, multivocal categories but also dominate the local language and make it less diverse and precise. I am aware of the fact that the term “reconstruction” is pres­ent in the semantic field of reenactment and is widely used in English as well to describe certain aspects of historical and artistic repetition. However, I would like to use the experience of the Polish language, in which rekonstrukcja describes the whole field of reenactment, to reflect on reenactment’s entanglement in matter. Reconstruction shifts the focus from the acting body that repeats past gestures to the fragments, remains, and evidence by endowing them with a performative potential. In recon­struction, it is more materiality than body that makes it possible “to bring [the past] time—that prior moment—to the very fingertips of the present” (Schneider, 2011, p. 2).

The material dimension of reenactment practices will be shown through the example of two works of art that I define as reconstructions. I will first analyze Forensic Architecture’s film Rafah: Black Friday, available on the group’s website, which showcases the results of the inves­tigation Forensic Architecture conducted in 2014 and 2015; I then turn to Robert Kusmirowski’s 2014 Traumgutstrasse, shown at the Warsaw gallery Salon Akademii. Both works refer to war. In Kusmirowski’s case, it is a Nazi bombing of Warsaw during World War II; for Forensic Architecture, it is the 2014 Israeli attack on the Gaza Strip.