Stateless Memory

Abstract

Responding to current conditions of statelessness by way of Hannah Arendt’s mid- twentieth century reflections, this article proposes the aesthetic encounter as a practice of alternative, counter-national community and belonging. Artistic works exploring the vulnerabilities and the vicissitudes of statelessness by Mirta Kupferminc and Wangechi Mutu inspire a defnition of stateless memory as a suspension or hiatus in time and space. Stateless memory, the article suggests, can mobilize the memory of painful pasts in a different time frame than the progression toward preordained futures that often seem inevitable in the space-time of the nation-state and the catastrophes it causes and suffers.