LIAS Panel Discussion “War Memory and Infrastructure: Where is Art”

Date: Wednesday 3 June 2026, 6–8 p.m.
Location: Campus | Central Buidling | C40.501

Wars create memories – personal and collective, both in the forms of lived-in experiences and inherited narratives. Then the memories, through passage of time, are annotated and circulated through complex and sometimes contesting infrastructures - preserved monuments, negotiated museums, published documents, validated testimonies; as well as forbidden tales, obscured signifiers buried in landscapes, semi-legible soundscapes, broken objects and so on. It can be broadly categorised as the former is a declared action committed to reminding and the latter as some kind of localised instinct for remembering. The tangible characteristics of action account and the watery nature of instinct may or may not correspond with each other.

Moreover, the scale of an event / experience alters depending on whether it is perceived from the local context or on a global stage - making the spatial distance do the alteration. Yet, certain assertive actions / principles of a colonized people to challenge the hegemonic / colonial power, over the passage of time, may turn into a weapon for post-colonial toxic nationalism. In both scenarios memory remains the most vulnerable to the change of seasons.

What role can artistic endeavours and people’s archives play in these conflicts between different registers of memories? Can art interventions develop some safety mechanism to ensure the porosity of memory and yet resist the status-quoist appropriation of the same?

These are some of the concerns that will be addressed in the panel discussion on “War, Memory and Infrastructure: Where is Art”. The panelists are practicing artists and archivists engaging with narratives of conflicts, memories and post-colonial nationalisms.

Madhusree Dutta: Post-youth Female Body and War

In the universe of war women’s bodies are infrastructure in multiple ways - repository of memories, locations of invasion and occasionally but not rarely, resources for resistance. I would like to deal with the instance of a specific women constituency that altered its function from being recipient of state violence, to staging organised resistance to militarisation, to perpetuating war and sex crime on behalf of their clan – within a span of 50 years. This is a less-known story of Manipur, a border land in India that are infested with militarised violence as well as clan-based identity politics.

These elderly women have cultivated a militant discourse and practice built over their post-menopausal bodies and managed to elevate themselves to the political leadership. The memory of a traditional matriarchal society in the past may have helped in shaping this initiative. The contemporary artistic and activist campaign of celebrating the post-menopausal female bodies and giving them visibility in public spaces may have also enriched the agenda. Yet the prevalent politics eventually turn the initiative as a mere infrastructure in the service of patriarchy and ultra-nationalism.

Learn more about Madhusree Dutta.

Maddalena Fragnito: Managed Futures: Facts Do Not Speak for Themselves

Starting from a policy brief—How to Build Public Support for Defence Spending (Centre for European Reform, 2026)—this paper treats culture as infrastructure shaping what becomes acceptable. Following Edward Said, it asks under which conditions facts circulate, and how these conditions are produced across governance frameworks that organise what can be said, when, and with what effects. It then turns to memory: how to work with it within managed futures, where it is not erased but pre-shaped in advance.

Learn more about Maddalena Fragnito.