The traumatic experience of violence marks social orders and imbues history. How does it reach beyond distress and pain? This collection of works interrogates alternative narratives: The traces of trauma may also comprise a subversive potential, which withdraws from the hold of power and instead makes room for a sense of history’s vulnerability.

Thoughts, artistic contributions and text, most of them produced especially for this volume, move around notions of trauma, in an attempt to encircle moments, at which translation of meaning seems suddenly suspended.

‘This book tiptoes between aesthetics and ethics; it proposes to rethink trauma in its necessity as well as impossibility to be represented and understood.’

Supported by Centre d’Art Contemporaine Genève.