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‘Making Audible in the Mouth Whereof One Cannot Speak’, Spectral Adoptions in Juan Manuel Echavarría’s Requiem NN

2018; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 27; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13569325.2019.1570916

1469-9575

Juliana Martínez,

South Asian Studies and Conflicts

Puerto Berrío is a small town on the banks of the Magdalena River, Colombia. For years, its inhabitants watched unidentified corpses, known as NNs, float down its waters. But instead of letting them pass along they chose to rescue and adopt them. Requiem NN (2013), a film by Colombian artist Juan Manuel Echavarría, documents this practice, providing a stunning testimony of a community’s resilience and advancing fundamental questions about the relationship between mourning, memory, ethics, and representation in the context of extreme violence. Through an analysis of Echavarría’s film, a reflection on the ghostly practice of adopting the NNs, and an exploration of the ethical potentiality of the spectral (Derrida, Gordon, Demos), I argue that Requiem NN highlights how the extension of kinship based on the will to mourn truncates the desire for radical annihilation and silencing that NNs embody; it mobilises a way to unpack the complex relation between representational practices, historical violence, and ethical concerns, and invites the viewer to reflect on the ways in which the thousands of disappearances caused by the armed conflict make Colombia a haunted country, that is to say, a country that needs to acknowledge, converse with, and seek justice for its ghosts.