Assembly of Sleepless Matter: On traces of Jewish and transit migrant Cemeteries in Greece

My practice-based research, Assembly of Sleepless Matter, investigates minoritarian memory, rebellious mourning and death at the border in post-austerity Greece. The project starts from the vanished Jewish cemetery in Thessaloniki and the recent ‘refugee cemetery’ in Lesvos, both contested sites that point to reminiscences of traumatic traces and produce spatial-autotemporalities (Parr, 2008) of nomadic matter through city and landscapes. It is developed through a video essay (Thessaloniki) and essayistic text (Lesvos) based on research interviews and fieldwork around the two contested cemeteries. This results in resonances that relate traumatic histories to each other, thus creating a sensitivity for different (transgenerational) affects that make critical memory work possible. The border, difference and racialisation are inevitable aspects of migration and diaspora history that persist in their singular memory despite attempts at ‘purification’ and ‘civilising’ (Hamilakis and Greenberg, 2022; Goldberg, 2009) within official commemoration. Fragmented gravestones and neglected cultural material of the dead become legacies of racial violence and ‘bad debt’ (Harney and Moten, 2010) that circulate through the soil and oral histories of local agents. My research, situated at the intersection of multidirectional memory studies (Rothberg, 2009), philosophy, and cultural studies, illuminates the pressing question of responsibility between the dead and the living. It traces a complex interaction between cartographies, sites, cultural matter, and affect. I investigate cemeteries as cartographies and burial grounds as sites to challenge neoliberal abandonment, ‘implicatedness’ and places of transcultural (co-) figurations. I rethink by questioning necropolitical theoretical fields (Mbembe, 2003, 2018, 2019) with materialist philosophy (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, 1987, 1992, and 2009): How does port-austerity shape transcultural memory activism? What affects are produced by the violation of the dead and their resting places? And how do ‘ambiguous loss’ (Boss, 1999) and ‘ungrievabilty’ (Butler, 2009) shape the need to rethink ethical imbrications?