Life of Crops: Notes on Investigative Memorialisation

Abstract

At Aflenz an der Sulm in south-eastern Austria, digging into the soil to see what material evidence of recent history it holds reflects a broader process of investigation. It uncovers the entanglements that produced landscape as a material and an immaterial construction. The article focuses on Aflenz unpacking its contemporary landscape that covers layers of (invisible) history – obliviated relations of politics, finance, and business – which formed it as a WWII labour and concentration camp. Considering also the subsequent processes of forgetting unearths the land and its soils as the constant and thus an unwilling archive and thereby the necessary object of inquiry. The article proposes investigation and ‘investigative memorialisation’ put forward by artist Milica Tomić, to consider such knowledge as a public matter, positioning it as an open-ended public form that can speak of the complexities afforded and deposited in the soil as memory.