PARSE - Platform for Artistic Research Sweden

Walking Backwards: Fabulation, Political Memory, and Imagination in “Postwar” Guatemala

Andrea Ancira

What does it mean to remember in a country where official narratives of peace have displaced the revolutionary and collective aspirations that shaped decades of struggle?

This article investigates how practices of fabulation and embodied gestures of remembrance can unsettle dominant frameworks of memory and reconciliation in "postwar" Guatemala, approaching memory not as settled ground, but as a contested field shaped by competing narratives.

Against hegemonic accounts of peace and humanitarian closure, the article proposes walking backwards as a fabulative and disorienting method, one that resists linear temporality, archival neutrality, and reconciliatory finality. Drawing on a family archive linked to Guatemala's armed resistance, it explores how this gesture transforms archival materials from stable records into traces that foreground absence, opacity, and relationality.

Central to the article are two works: The Names of the Camps, written by a guerrilla fighter, and its reactivation in The Silence of the Volcano, a curatorial research project bringing together Guatemalan artists to engage memory as a shared and relational process.

Through these rehearsals of memory, fabulation emerges as a methodology of unlearning the archive, one that attends to contradiction, asymmetry, and the entanglement of Indigenous and ladino-mestizo histories, and imagines futures through the latent traces that persist within vernacular archives.

Keywords: fabulation, political memory, archive, walking, rehearsal, relation, solidarity

Visit https://parsejournal.com/article/walking-backwards/ to read the text in full⁠

image: Rosa Chávez Tijax, “Mis ojos de tortuga triste”, Site-specific intervention, 200x50cm, 2025 in “El silencio del volcán” curated by Andrea Ancira, Improper Walls, 2025. Foto: Miloš Vučićević

A Conversation about Filmic Fabulations
with Nnenna Onuoha, Joseph Steele and Hope Pearl Strickland

In a roundtable conversation, filmmakers, artists and researchers Nnenna Onuoha, Joseph Steele and Hope Strickland share their reflections on their practices and respective films: Memory Guardians (2024), Untitled Essay Film [poiēsis] (2024) and I’ll Be Back (2022). The exchange builds on a post-screening conversation held during the PARSE “Fabulations” workshop hosted in Gothenburg in April 2025.

Keywords: fabulation, embodiment, archive, redress, not-knowing, documentary, relation

Image 1: Nnenna Onuoha, The Memory Guardians, still, 2024
Image 2: Joseph Steele, Untitled Essay Film [poiēsis], 2023, still showing Smithson’s Broken Circle/Spiral Hill in Drenthe (NL), HD Digital Video, 27 min. 55 sec., JD Steele Productions/Les Melezes, the Netherlands/USA
Image 3: Hope Strickland, I’ll Be Back!, 2022, still showing reversed archival footage from the North West Film Archive at Manchester Metropolitan University

Visit https://parsejournal.com/article/a-conversation-about-filmic-fabulations/ to read the text in full

New issue announcement!

Issue #23 Fabulation
Editors: Ram Krishna Ranjan, Jyoti Mistry

Fabulation, the blending of history and fiction, fact and imagination, the mythical and the mundane, has operated under many names across scholarly and artistic contexts. Over the past few decades it has expanded into speculative fabulation (Haraway), critical fabulation (Hartman), afro-fabulation (Nyong'o), afro-futurism (Dery, Nelson), and feminist fabulation (Barr), each strand inviting artists and scholars to engage what is otherwise deemed irrecoverable or unrepresentable. Rather than simply filling historical gaps, fabulation opens space for imagining alternative futures. This issue of PARSE explores its affordances in artistic practice.

With contributions from Andrea Ancira, Nicky Coutts, Regina Dürig & Wiebke Leister, Mafalda Gamboa, Edith Marie Pasquier, Nnenna Onuoha & Joseph Steele & Hope Strickland, Emily Orley, Gabriela Sá, Pierre-Antoine Vetterello.

Reach the issue here:
https://parsejournal.com/journal/

Featured articles for June 2026, chosen by Sanskriti Chattopadhyay, doctoral researcher in Artistic Research at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg, on decolonial possibilities of cinematic image.

Today we go for a walk. In a world where systemic, relational, and perceptual modes of violence enact, enforce, and engage under the conditions of mobility, it often becomes most visible, not where it originates, but where movement is interrupted: in sites of containment, extraction, and enforced stillness. I present a walk through a series of selected works that palimpsest upon each other to illumine this disruption. Across these works, mobility is neither neutral nor liberatory. The ability to move, freely, invisibly, or at scale, is unevenly distributed. Bodies, histories, and materials resist, insist on situated experience, and the limits of relational thinking that dissolve difference. To navigate these works is to encounter multiple, overlapping frames, contested attention, and unfixed meanings assembled on top of each other. What becomes visible depends on how you move through it.

What is the Agency of Money by Daniel Jewesbury: https://doi.org/10.70733/psnc2fh73xd0

Voor Vrij Nederland by Robert Glas & Natasha Marie Llorens: https://doi.org/10.70733/qdy9o2x0welk

There are no Extinctions in Relations without Bodies: On the Violence of Flat Relational Ontologies by Silke Panse: https://doi.org/10.70733/ldogd836bbdw

The Book of the Dead by David Kelley: https://doi.org/10.70733/mxcwsu07li9v

The Ocean Is Us by MAP office: https://doi.org/10.70733/6dnbdy2lmdsb

Ethics of Violence by Catherine Dormor: https://doi.org/10.70733/087dhmc4snkj

Who Holds? (Annotations on the Notes Involving a Story of Possession) by Alejandro t. Acierto: https://doi.org/10.70733/bx7bsdhd4jdi

Kufamba-famba: A Walk, A Man, A Memoir by Robert Muponde: https://doi.org/10.70733/9dhduwvi26ej

# # !!! by Jennifer Walshe: https://doi.org/10.70733/ncuc3s45kou8

We are pleased to introduce the new PARSE Practitioner Miriam Hillawi Abraham.

Miriam Hillawi Abraham is a multi-disciplinary designer from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. With a background in Architecture, her work deals with experimental preservation and the continuation of both material heritage and immaterial knowledge from the African continent. Her methodology places Abraham in the role of a weaver, interlacing threads that connect scattered worlds with one another.

With PARSE Miriam will be devising a summer school syllabus which responds to her existing research into situated technologies and embodied cartographies. The school will take place in summer 2027.

For more information about the Practitioner Programme visit: https://parsejournal.com/practitioners-programme/2026-miriam-hillawi-abraham/

Welcome Miriam!

Image credit: Onassis AiR Spring Open Days 2026 © Margarita Yoko Nikitaki for Onassis

Featured articles for May 2026, chosen by Lucy Cathcart Frödén, artistic researcher based at Malmö University.

This selection is a gathering around the theme of sonic epistemologies. The featured works inhabit multiple, collective, and often multilingual forms of sounding and listening that open up new possibilities for creating, recognising and sharing knowledge. As a material that is layered, kinetic and situated, sound can help us to question the idea that it is possible to ‘approach’ a static research question from an imagined external position, instead placing us already inside the question, and allowing it to resonate around us. Silence, too, is critically and epistemically generative here, as Nana Oforiatta-Ayim reminds us (cited by Kitso Lynn Lelliott): "In the Akan language, knowledge was constituted anew with each retelling; elasticity of silence as important as authority of sound."

Luis Berríos Negrón, William Cepeda Román, Karla Claudio, Omar Monzón Carmona, Juliann Rosado Pagán, and Raquel Torres Arzola⁠, “Grito transhemisférico: remediación de Juracán // Transhemispheric Call: Hurricane Remediation”: https://parsejournal.com/article/grito-transhemisferico/

Victorial Karlsson, “Queer Listening: On Love, Danger and Affect”: https://parsejournal.com/article/queer-listening/

African Fashion Research Institute (AFRI), “before cutting, wrap the scissors with yarn to spare yourself the sound of separation*”: https://parsejournal.com/article/before-cutting-wrap-the-scissors-with-yarn/

Heather Warren-Crow, ““[I]t Seizes [sic] To Be Heard”
Sound Art, Music, and Disability Aesthetics”: https://parsejournal.com/article/it-seizes-sic-to-be-heard-sound-art-music-and-disability-aesthetics/

Ming Tsao, “What is Speculative Music Composition?”: https://parsejournal.com/article/what-is-speculative-music-composition/

Salome Voegelin, “Transversal Sound Studies
Sonic Contagions and How We Breathe. Together.[1]”: https://parsejournal.com/article/transversal-sound-studies/

Jens Haendeler, “Atlas al-‘Aīn: The Performativity of “return” and Common Memory Production”:
https://parsejournal.com/article/atlas-al-ain/

Kitso Lynn Lelliott, “A More Than Four-Hundred-Year-Long Event”: https://parsejournal.com/article/a-more-than-four-hundred-year-long-event/

Laura Balboa, “Breaking Free To Improvise
Bulla Radio Conversations On Music, Sound, Free Composition, Experimentation, And Gender In Mexico”: https://parsejournal.com/article/breaking-free-to-improvise/

Diana Agunbiade-Kolawole, “Oral Origin of the Village”: https://parsejournal.com/article/oral-origin-of-the-village/

Eva Rowson, “Adventures in Concrete”: https://parsejournal.com/article/adventures-in-concrete/

Open Call for External Editors⁠
Call Closes Monday 20 April 2026⁠
⁠
PARSE invites submissions for external editors to propose content for a journal issue. Two proposals will be selected, one to be published in Autumn 2027 and one in Spring 2028. We are looking for proposals which collapse clear subject and disciplinary distinctions and demonstrate a desire to allow different knowledge forms to meet. We wish to work with editors who think of publishing not only as a form of dissemination but as a process through which forms of writing as well as themes are experimented with. We invite interested applicants to look through previous PARSE issues as well as our guidelines on article format, as the working group is particularly interested in proposals that expand the thematic reach of the journal and put forward article formats which contribute to the development of the field of artistic research.⁠
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Please share!⁠
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Visit https://parsejournal.com/opencall/open-call-for-external-editors/ to reach the full call

April 11, 15–16:30
Skogen, Masthuggsterrassen 3, 413 18Göteborg

A reading by artist, interdisciplinary designer, and researcher Johnny Chang, presented within the context of the PARSE Practitioners Programme.

A New Gourmet, Moving Heaven and Earth is an in-progress lecture performance that traces how everyday foods—fruit, sugarcane, sweet potatoes, wild weeds, sticky rice dumplings, noodles—carry the entangled histories of survival, extraction, and everyday resilience across Taiwan and its diasporas.

This event is open to all and free to attend, please reserve your place by via the Skogen website here: https://www.skogen.pm/activities/j5FX24NGNrPfEpJ9d

Featured articles for April 2026, chosen by Steven Henry Madoff, Chair, MA Curatorial Practice, School of Visual Arts, New York; curator; art critic; poet.⁠
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Mirroring

Mirror, speculum, speculation… “Mirror” has three distinct turns over time from origins in Latin and Nordic usages to more recent ones. So, the Latin origin gives us “to wonder, admire,” from the Vulgar Latin mirare, "to look at," variant of the Latin mirari, "to wonder at, admire.” The Latin speculum or its Medieval Latin variant speglum) is the source of words for mirror in neighboring languages: Italian specchio, Spanish espejo, Old High German spiegal, German Spiegel, Dutch spiegel, Danish spejl, Swedish spegel. The Nordic yields a distinctive turn toward a sensibility of melancholy and darkness. So, the Gothic skuggwa, Old Norse skuggsja, Old High German scucar, which are related to Old English scua "shade, shadow." And then come the later figurative aspects of mirroring as a model for behavior (to model oneself on) and a mirror image as both reversal and twin, "something identical to another but having right and left reversed.” Concerning this last figuration, we might speak as well not simply of plain reflection, but of interpretation and distortion, of the chiral and the chimerical. In each of these, the catoptric (Greek katoptrikos, from katoptron "mirror," from kata "against" and optos, "seen, visible") quality of observation toward both characterization and action glimmers in sociological, psychological, and political optics that transact between world-as-speculum and speculum-as-world. Both orientations of reflection lie atop the fact of vulnerable bodies, whether flesh, architecture, or larger topoi of domination, subservience, and resistance. They can even manifest as the speculum as a haunting of rituals. And, of course, we can think of research as a speculum, the archive as speculum, and the speculum materialized in artifacts of many kinds. The texts I’ve chosen here all address these various types of mirroring that reflect our desires to capture the world and its tissues of subjectivity, tumbling our bodies in the pit of being: turned in the light, turned in the shadows, held up and emptied out, violated and admired. Each of these texts, in their reflections on artistic production and/as social apparatuses, are also intentional or inadvertent speculations on objectification, and therefore on the “museum-ing” of people, populations, and things, or all as things: displayed; historicized and memorialized; “de-feralized,” which is to say schematized as a condition of the dead—static and no longer able to live in the struggle.
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Lisa Godson, "Scripting Scenes from a Material History:
the Truncheon and the Speculum": https://parsejournal.com/article/scripting-scenes-from-a-material-history/

Paula Chambers, "Feral Interventions: Objects and Artworks on the Periphery": https://parsejournal.com/article/feral-interventions/

Kim Anno, "In the House of Humanity Catastrophe and Ecstasy Hold Hands": https://parsejournal.com/article/in-the-house-of-humanity-catastrophe-and-ecstasy-hold-hands/

Ivan Vladislavić, "Cast in Stone: German notebooks, 1999": https://parsejournal.com/article/cast-in-stone-german-notebooks-1999/

Cheryl Stobie, "Storying in Four Colours: Narrative Empathy in the Memoirs of Anastacia Tomson and Landa Mabenge": https://parsejournal.com/article/storying-in-four-colours-narrative-empathy-in-the-memoirs-of-anastacia-tomson-and-landa-mabenga/

Mira Asriningtyas, "We Followed Our Curiosity to the Forest: On Laku and Getting Lost": https://parsejournal.com/article/we-followed-our-curiosity-to-the-forest/

Oscar Hemer, "Going to the Dogs": https://parsejournal.com/article/going-to-the-dogs/

Silke Panse, "There are no Extinctions in Relations without Bodies
On the Violence of Flat Relational Ontologies": https://parsejournal.com/article/there-are-no-extinctions-in-relations-without-bodies/

Salad Hilowle, Jyoti Mistry, Temi Odumosu & Katarina Pirak Sikku, "Necessary Labour(s): Doing the Work of Undoing": https://parsejournal.com/article/necessary-labours-doing-the-work-of-undoing/