The first image is an apartment building in the center of Berlin; the second is the Natural History Museum in London. The small round holes on the surface of the Berlin building could be from bullet marks from the Battle of Berlin. The larger, shallower pockmarks on the Natural History Museum are likely from shrapnel, from bombs dropped by German planes. These acts of violence were not planned as form-giving, aside from the perversion of leaving ruins in one’s wake as a sign of victory. They are physical signs of the war, of the irruption of something irrational and destructive. The pockmarks, now, make that original irruption present again and again, not necessarily as reminders (these marks are invisible or meaningless to most people), much less as metaphors, but as indexes. What is the point of asking about the meaning of a scar beyond the feeling of loss and pain, or the memory of pain, or phantom pains? We surely could read meanings into these forms, trying to imagine what it felt like to be in a bomb raid or live in a war-torn city; we could imbue them with logic and rationality by reading their historical origins, forensically as it were. Along these lines, we could be wary of aestheticizing violence by looking at the marks as visually arresting. Yet, for me, what is most poignant about these marks is neither scientific nor symbolic, but sensorial: being struck by their visual and tactile presence. The marks cannot be fully understood, and still embody some of that irrational violence that produced them.
Post by Daniela Sandler
