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Best Water Rowing Machines In Canada – Our Picks!
Enjoy the most authentic rowing feel with one of the top water rowers for home use
Indoor rowing is one of the best exercise regimens for a number of reasons. The smooth and fluid motions of the rower provide a great workout on the water that many wish they could enjoy year-round. You can bring the power and natural feel of outdoor rowing to your home with ease thanks to an indoor rowing machine with water resistance. Whether you prefer cardio or weight training, a water home rower can provide full-body, variable exercise regimens that help you reach your personal fitness goals from home. For athletes who love rowing but prefer the feel of water resistance, indoor water rowing machines are the foolproof solution for you.
If you're looking for an efficient and low-impact workout that combines both cardiovascular strength and weight-training, water exercise rowers in Canada are the top choice. Good water resistance rowing machines in Canada generate consistent and hard-working workouts. Water-based rowing machines in particular generate power, ergonomic drive, and naturalistic exercise in any environment. Designed to rely on the aesthetic, raw force of water to generate strong resistance and hard-working cardio exercise, these sleekly designed water rowers are the best of the best in terms of technology that perform highly with every exercise regime. All kinds of rowers can easily develop a consistent and reliable workout routine on our ten favorite durable water machines.
Best Water Rowing Machines In Canada – Reviews + Buying Guide
First Degree Fitness Apollo Pro V Indoor Rowing Machine
Aesthetic, ergonomic, and built to maximize the natural rowing experience, this elite rower from the First Degree Fitness brand offers a high-performing workout on an aesthetic and streamlined machine that creates a statement piece for your home. Sporting an ultra-smooth fluid gliding rail roller system combined with a realistic and natural water resistance system, the First Degree Fitness Apollo Pro V Rowing Machine offers innovative rowing exercise that feels smooth, natural, and realistic.
The Apollo Pro V Rowing Machine offers a natural ash woodgrain finish and tempered frame that strikes an elegant balance between functionality and heavy-duty reliability. The entire machine stands on end for elegant and space-efficient storage. This home water resistance rowing machine is fairly portable and could be used and set up by most users thanks to the use of its portable storage wheels.
Measuring 83 x 21", the Apollo Pro V Rowing Machine has a pretty lengthy footprint, but its low height and simple, elegant wooden exterior make it a sleek and pretty piece of equipment. The sleek water container relies on fluid water-powered technology, generating natural and smooth resistance through each stroke of your rower and a specialized rowing wheel. The rower offers varied resistance levels you can select and flawlessly reproduces the natural catch of water.
A petite, simple, yet effective multi-function fitness monitor tucks neatly on the side of the water tank and tracks time, count, distance, calories, watts, heart rate, split rate, and more. The monitor is Bluetooth compatible and highly efficient, offering auto-adjust capabilities that sync to your rowing needs for instant adjustments. The rower is also customizable, offering a seat back kit for people who need extra back assistance but still want to be able to row. You can also attach an optional smartphone attachment for phone mounting while you ride.
The First Degree Fitness Apollo Pro V Rowing Machine offers powerful, natural workouts and ergonomic comfort for every level of rower. The machine itself offers reliable resistance and exercise, with the smooth, fluid technology of the water container providing an extra special benefit. The machine is expensive for a home rower at $2,350, but when you consider the water resistance, elegant appearance, and natural feel, the higher price is more than fair.
PROS: Powerful spinning paddle, elegant style, sleek pull, adjustable resistance levels, Bluetooth compatible
CONS: Expensive, long, not foldable
WaterRower 100 Natural Rowing Machine in Ash Wood
The WaterRower Natural Rowing Machine calls to the rower's love of the open water while still providing an elegant and efficient way to practice your indoor rowing skills. This is one of the sleekest and most efficient water resistance rowing machines out there, offering everything you need for a steady and powerful rowing workout in the comfort of your own home while exercising every major muscle group.
Built to last and designed to be aesthetically and ergonomically effective, the WaterRower Natural Rowing Machine in Ash Wood with S4 monitor brings a whole new dimension to the indoor rowing world. The WaterRower is carefully constructed to replicate the authentic feeling of rowing on the water. The machine is amazingly compact, featuring a small but powerful water container and fly paddles.
Measuring 2.11 x 0.61 x 0.53 meters and weighing 117 lbs, this indoor rowing machine is more realistic and bulky than most, but it stands on end for simple storage until you're ready to use it again. The WaterRower machine also comes equipped with built-in wheels that make transport simple and straightforward. The rower doesn't fold, but it does stand on end for elegant and space-efficient storage.
Sporting an elegant, dark ash and stained honey oak wood mainframe that's as durable as it is beautiful, the solid wood construction absorbs sound and vibration from your workout, making it a great machine for parts of your home where there are a lot of people. Combined with the enclosed water tank flywheel, your workout is virtually silent and subtle. Rowing is even more rewarding thanks to the smoothly turning paddles that regulate resistance depending on the intensity of your drag and rowing stroke. You can track your workout resistance, intensity, and biometric feedback on the included Series 4 performance monitor display that's designed to balance technical requirements with user-friendliness.
The WaterRower demonstrates many of the best qualities of water rowing machines, including an elegant and aesthetic appearance, quiet and consistent resistance, and powerful resistance-based rowing strokes. The sturdy wood machine can support all levels of riders and maximizes rowing strokes while maintaining an ergonomic drive that won't drain your energy or strain your muscles. Any outdoor rowing lover looking for a machine that works indoors will enjoy the realistic power and natural drive of this machine despite its price of $1,500.
PROS: Quiet water-driven resistance, solid wood frame, Series 4 power computer
CONS: Pricier, heavy, no resistance level options, not Bluetooth compatible
First Degree Fitness Viking II Water Rowing Machine
Experience the best parts of rowing fitness through this exciting Viking II Indoor Rowing Machine. This rower helps you realize all the benefits of rowing, including cardiovascular health and increased muscle strength, while combining technical and water innovations for a smooth ride. Blending triple-bladed water propeller technology and increased ergonomic comfort for an enjoyable fitness experience, the Viking II is a sturdy behemoth of the water rowing world.
The Viking II is equipped with several features designed to enhance comfort and convenience while creating an intense workout. The machine offers an oversized and elevated seat, padded rowing handle, ergonomic handles to prevent wrist strain, textured footplates with adjustable straps for extra security, built-in transport wheels, floor stability plates, and a high-quality steel and ash solid wood frame for maximum user ease and visual appeal.
Weighing a whopping 158 pounds and measuring at 84 x 22 x 21", the Viking II is a personal exercise machine that provides powerful and fluid fitness achievements. The indoor rowing machine stands on end for easy storage, though you'll want to be careful hauling this heavy machine upright. The patented adjustable water flywheel combines the power of fluid resistance with sheer muscular pull into one fluid system, creating a blended exercise routine that captures the natural feel of rowing despite being indoors.
You can increase your workout intensity easily on the Viking II by adjusting the included resistance dial to one of the levels of specially calibrated resistance, ranging from beginner level to advanced and elite athletes. Monitor your workouts through the included multi-lever computer monitor, which tracks time, count, distance, calories, watts, heart rate, split rate, and more.
The elegant Viking II provides an exciting workout that operates with precision and durability to craft the perfect row that will leave you exhausted but ready for more. Priced at $1,999, the Viking II is not necessarily a cheap piece of equipment, but you're paying for a handcrafted work of technical art that will last a lifetime and withstand any level of workout regimen.
PROS: Quiet and fluid drive, adjustable water resistance levels, solid ash frame, good digital monitor
CONS: Pricey and heavy to lift or move
Clean Dall Foldable Water-Resistance Rowing Machine
Enjoy your daily workout more than ever thanks to the natural and exciting Clean Dall Rowing Machine. This fun and functional seated rowing machine is well-suited for every level of rowing expert and will help you build up to an intense full-body workout in no time. The Clean Dall Rowing Machine works up over three quarters of your body's muscles in just one workout, making it a highly effective and maximizing routine for fitness enthusiasts.
The Clean Dall Rowing Machine is sleek and streamlined with a contemporary exposed wood frame that's as elegant as it is useful and was designed to protect your body while you work. The stunning solid wood construction provides stability and performance to this powerful fitness tool that elevates the quality of its rowing even higher, all while maintaining a good performance. High quality and smooth, this water resistance rowing machine is a great fit for all kinds of rowers.
The Clean Dall rowing machine is surprisingly lightweight despite its bulky looking flywheel and solid wood frame, weighing 35 kilograms with a full reservoir of water and featuring a footprint of 2130 x 550 x 530 mm. This rowing machine stands on end for easy storage, occupying minimal space while in use or at rest thanks to its slim length. Made from premium, durable solid wood dual rails that are constructed for noise optimization and vibration distillation, the Clean Dall rowing machine is built with the rider's convenience in mind.
This indoor, all-season workout generates hard-working yet ergonomic workouts perfect for anyone looking for a low-impact option that will still deliver a high-intensity workout. The smooth dual-rail glide track reduces impact on knee and ankle joints, and the powerful churn of the water creates variable resistance that won't pull or strain your muscles. The intensity on the Clean Dall rowing machine is somewhat customizable; the harder you pull on the rowing handle, the more resistance you'll be rowing against. Track your exact workout burn using the compact included LCD display tucked onto the side of the flywheel, which tracks time, count, distance, strokes, SPM, watts, and calories burned for immediate and useful workout feedback.
The Clean Dall indoor water resistance rowing machine is designed to highlight the strengths of aesthetic water rowing workouts for any level of fitness enthusiast while also providing safe and stable exercise. The strong water resistance set-up creates silent and gliding resistance that feels just like you're actually out on the water. Sleek, powerful, and easy to use, the Clean Dall is a great way to jump into the water-rowing experience.
PROS: Low-impact exercise, affordable, durable solid wood frame, noise optimized
CONS: No adjustable resistance levels, not Bluetooth compatible
Xterra Fitness ERG600 Home Water Resistance Rower
1 used from C $439.77
One of the best rowing machines in Canada, indoor water rowing has never been easier than with the Xterra Fitness ERG600 Water Rower. This affordable and high-energy rowing machine is ideal for all levels of rowers and will help you get an intense full-body workout in no time. The Xterra Fitness ERG600 Water Rower is an efficient full-body workout that provides consistently great training for rowers and recovery programs that involve gentle full body exercise.
The Xterra Fitness ERG600 Water Rower is aerodynamic and streamlined with a modern and minimalist aluminum and plastic rowing machine that's as elegant as it is useful, designed to protect your body through every ride. The stunning plastic frame provides stability and performance for his powerful top-rated home rower in Canada that elevates the quality of its rowing to a new level, all while maintaining a great price of $700 considering all the features you'll get access to.
Providing high-quality and effortless rides time and time again, the Xterra Fitness ERG600W water resistance rowing machine is great for all rowers who are ready to introduce an aesthetic and powerful piece of exercise equipment into their home. The Xterra Fitness ERG600W Water Resistance rowing machine is surprisingly lightweight despite its water-driven flywheel, weighing only 82 pounds with a full reservoir of water in the tank and featuring a footprint of 2.05 0.56 x 0.84 meters.
This rowing machine folds and stands on end for easy and portable storage, occupying minimal space while in use or at rest and featuring simple transportation. The smooth glide track reduces impact on knee and ankle joints thanks to the elevated saddle you row on, and the powerful churn of the water creates variable resistance that won't pull or strain your muscles. The intensity on the Xterra Fitness ERG600W is somewhat customizable thanks to the power of your own row; the faster you pull on the rowing handle, the more resistance you'll be rowing against. Track your exact workout feedback using the included LCD display, which tracks time, count, distance, strokes, SPM, watts, and calories burned for immediate and useful workout responses that can help you tailor your workout to your goals. Add on your own pulse tracking options through Bluetooth connectivity for even more resources.
The Xterra Fitness ERG600W water resistance rowing machine is designed to highlight the strengths of aesthetic and powerful water rowing workouts for any level of fitness enthusiast while also providing exercise at a bargain price. The dual-glide track ensures twice the safety and stability of your seat while you row. The combination of powerful water paddles and rotors with the water resistance set-up creates a silent resistance that feels just like you're rowing in a real boat that can naturally adjust based on the speed and force at which your body rows. Affordable, simple, and powerful while still easy to use, the Xterra Fitness ERG600W is a great rower.
PROS: Functional, noise optimized and quiet, natural resistance, Bluetooth compatible
CONS: Minimally adjustable resistance levels
Sunny Health & Fitness Phantom Hydro SF-RW5910 Rower
An innovative modern take on the water rowing machine experience, the Sunny Health & Fitness SF-RW5910 is the perfect power-heavy cardio machine that offers endurance-building, high-energy workouts for every rower in a minimalist setting. Streamlined but powerful, the SF-RW5910 Water Rowing Machine can seat up to 300 additional pounds, weighing 88 pounds by itself and taking up a mere 2.07 x 0.54 x 1 meters. Athletic and designed with optimum water-based performance in mind, the SF-RW5910 Water Rowing Machine is an affordable and ergonomic workout choice for all at a great price of $770.
The SF-RW5910 Water Rowing Machine is a versatile piece of fitness equipment that's ideal for indoors and outdoor workout areas. Manufactured to quality precision, the SF-RW5910 Water Rowing Machine uses premium-grade materials that ensures the perfect rowing balance between performance and affordability. This long-lasting rowing machine is engineered with a powerful water resistance system that features sixteen hydro blades offering strong, quiet splashing resistance for a responsive and soothing workout.
By exerting more force in each pull, you will feel heavier strokes during the workout that helps you automatically increase your resistance level in the innovative 60 degree angled water tank. The ergonomically designed and elevated seat pad ensures that you stay comfortable throughout your entire workout. It also features foam-covered handles and textured footplates made with an anti-slip finish, letting you keep a firm grip on your rowing despite any sweat or movement.
A digital LCD screen display is mounted on top of the resistance flywheel for clear feedback tracking during your workout, monitoring your time, stroke count, distance, calories burned, SPM, calendar, temperature, clock, and pulse. The SF-RW5910 is an efficient and powerful workout tool that combines sleek and tech savvy appearances with a reliably steady performance.
The water resistance flywheel powers consistent drag that generates power and muscle growth without putting additional strain or stress on your body. One of the more affordable models on the market, the SF-RW5910 water rowing machine incorporates innovative components and quality rowing design to create a lasting, natural feeling rowing experience.
PROS: Athletic, mid-range price, decent digital monitor
CONS: No Bluetooth connectivity
QBERT Home Water Resistance Rowing Machine
The power of water-resistance comes to full fruition thanks to the QBERT Home Rowing Machine. The QBERT Home Rower combines high-powered water based resistance with technological components and innovative designs for a smart rowing experience that tracks your progress and pushes your workout regime in newer and better ways than ever before. Built with the rower's comfort in mind, the QBERT Home Rower powers smooth and steady rowing experiences with every stroke.
The QBERT Home Rower generates a full-body exercise regime with realistic performing water resistance that feels natural and gentle on your body. Row into your workout with ease using the water resistance that's designed to strengthen muscle and provide powerful cardio benefits. The durable water propeller blades are built to last through the toughest, most vigorous exercise regimens.
The hydro blades on the QBERT Home Rower work in tandem with the water resistance to create a powerfully reliable current that keeps up with six adjustable levels of water resistance. The portable machine stands on end for simple storage, and the sturdy rail and oversized seat pad and footrests accommodate users of many sizes. Compact yet powerful, the QBERT Home Rower is not necessarily feather light, but its solid footprint guarantees a sturdy base and a durable workout that will perform reliably again and again.
A final highlight of the QBERT Home Rower is its high quality fitness tracker. Exercise is easy with your QBERT screen display, which will showcase your watts, distance, strokes per minute, total strokes, time, average time, and calories burned. The machine also offers five key programs that help you target specific training goals through maximum exercise.
The QBERT Home Rower provides an integrated and effective approach to home rowing. The foldable and portable rowing machine provides great cardio and strength training in addition to overall rowing and fitness health. It's easy to store, easy to read, and easy to use, making it a great machine for people looking for simple and no fuss exercise at a reasonable price of $1,170.
PROS: Ergonomic build, hydro-blade water resistance, adjustable resistance levels
CONS: Heavy machines, no Bluetooth compatibility, unclear dimensions
Allkpoper Water Rowing Machine For Home Use
The Allkpoper Water Rowing Machine drives enthusiastic and realistic water rowing, emphasizing combined high-powered water-based resistance that provides great indoor training for all levels of rowers at an amazing price of just $600. The Allkpoper Water Rower is powerful and athlete centered, featuring ergonomic and space efficient components that tie into a smart rowing experience that tracks your progress in newer and better ways than ever.
The Allkpoper Water Rowing Machine transforms any simple rowing workout into a powerful full-body exercise regime through its surprisingly simple and powerful water resistance system. The durable propeller blades that power your flywheel and are built to last through the toughest, most vigorous exercise regimens.
Each workout is powered by your own ability, making it a perfectly personalizable exercise plan: the resistance of the rowing machine is regulated by the water and by your own effort. The higher the level of water in the water tank, the higher the resistance, and the harder you row, the more resistance you generate. This rower simulates the natural feel of rowing on the water and maximizes water-force resistance in order to generate top quality exercise.
The portable Allkpoper Water Rowing machine folds vertically for simple and space-saving storage, and the sturdy aluminum sliding rail and machinery accommodate all sizes of users. Measuring 81 x 20 x 20 inches and boasting a weight capacity of 220 pounds, the Allkpoper guarantees a sturdy base from which to base your powerful workouts. You can track those powerful workouts via a power training computer with a built-in LCD screen that tracks speed rowed, time, distance, heart rate, and calories burned for instant workout feedback.
The Allkpoper is a great addition to home gyms due to its lightweight sturdy steel and realistic ship design that sits snugly in any corner or gym space. The Allkpoper is designed to bring the natural feel of the waves to your home whenever you're ready, making it a perfectly functional, portable, and effective home workout tool you're sure to love.
PROS: Lightweight, compact, natural rowing resistance feel, good included monitor
CONS: No externally adjustable resistance levels, not Bluetooth compatible
BATTIFE JR-RW-001 Home Water Rowing Machine
The latest sleek and elegant addition to today's rowing machines, BATTIFE combines chic aesthetic design with powerful and comprehensive full-body exercise to create an appealing and rewarding physical workout experience. With its red walnut wooden exterior and glossy hardware, the BATTIFE rowing machine stands out in your home as a piece of statement equipment that's as practical and functional as it is beautiful.
One of the best rowing machines in Canada under 1000, it is designed and made from real, solid red walnut wood. The BATTIFE indoor rowing machine is a thing of true beauty. Featuring a glass water tank and padded hardware, this elegantly designed machine fits perfectly into any home exercise space. Weighing just 27 kg and measuring in at a compact 210.1 x 56.9 x 50.8 cm, this machine is the epitome of style and grace while also providing functional workouts and exercise.
With built-in wheels for easy transport and a simple but sturdy frame, it's easy to store the BATTIFE rowing machine; simply stand it on end for flat and space-efficient storage and cover it with the included protection cover. Using actual water in the glass tank not only provides authentic resistance but also maintains a quiet sound; BATTIFE rowers can exercise at all hours of the day without waking up anyone.
The equipped monitor keeps track of important statistics during your workout like strokes per minute (SPM), workout length, distance rowed, and caloric burn, with Bluetooth equipping that helps you track and build on your progress with each workout. Similar to other water-tank resistance rowers, the rowing paddles are durable and anti-rust, making them long-lasting and powerful as they consistently carve out strong strokes in the water.
Beautiful, functional, and efficient, the BATTIFE Water Rowing machine exemplifies all the best qualities of a home rower. With sleek and ergonomic designs pared with a smoothly moving elevated saddle and comfortable textured foot pads, rowing on the BATTIFE feels as natural and realistic as if you were rowing a very elegant and comfortable boat. Powerful, beautiful, and hard working, the BATTIFE Water Rower is a solid piece of exercise equipment at a reasonable price of $1,300 for such an elegantly engineered rower.
PROS: Powerful water resistance drive, straightforward and streamlined use, Bluetooth compatible
CONS: No adjustable resistance levels, not foldable
Goplus Indoor Water Rowing Machine
The Goplus Water Rowing Machine is our high-quality water resistance rower review. This rower delivers full body and cardio exercise benefits to every user, generating powerful workouts that are ergonomic and easy on your joints and body while still building muscle and cardiac strength. A great investment for any level of rowing enthusiast, this commercial-grade realistic water rower is recommended for all levels of rowers and fits perfectly into every home or gym space.
Sporting dimensions of 73 x 12 x 24.5 in and weighing a light 66 pounds, this rowing machine is heavy-duty but more compact than most other water rower models. The Goplus Water Rower stores upright for compact and functional vertical storage that takes up less than twelve square feet of space. The aluminum frame supports all types of riders, and the wide-set saddle and ergonomic footrests keep riders stable throughout their entire workout.
Resistance is generated by a powerful hydro-spinning PC water flywheel that can be filled with water to meet your desired resistance level in addition to offering several different resistance levels that you can adjust to simply by the amount of water you add into it. The water enhanced flywheel is built to perform at any level, and with any level of intense rowing, so you can really personalize it to your rowing needs.
The included multi-functional LCD monitor displays time, distance travelled, paddle frequency, pulse, calories burnt, and average speed, supporting your rowing training by providing instant and useful feedback for riders. The molded handlebars and footrests are not only efficient but also ergonomic, helping to relieve spinal pressure, shoulder and back pain associated with long periods of sitting and prevent muscle strain from rowing, all while protecting your knees and other points of impact while you row.
The Goplus Water Rowing Machine is a great purchase for most fitness users. The powerful yet lightweight machine is made for challenging workouts that feature relaxing yet challenging water-based resistance, making it a good pick for rowers or seasoned athletes ready to put some muscle into their naturalistic rowing journey. Whether a beginner or a pro, the Goplus Water Rowing Machine is a worthy investment on your indoor rowing equipment journey.
PROS: Multi-functional LCD monitor, comfortable ergonomic design, naturalistic water rowing
CONS: Limited resistance adjustments, not Bluetooth compatible
A Buyer's Guide to Water Resistance Rowing Machines
Natural feeling water-based resistance rowing machines can be one of the best purchases you ever make in your fitness routine, but there's a few essential reminders you'll want to keep in mind when you're shopping around. Remember these tips in order to find the perfect water resistance rower for you.
How Much Control Do You Have?
With water-resistance rowers, the major differentiation is often in how much control over the water resistance rowers have. Is resistance solely controlled by how much water you pour into the water tank, or can you use other incremental adjustments to adjust your resistance drag on top of your existing water resistance? Whichever method you prefer, understanding exactly where your resistance is coming from will help you decide if a machine is the right fit for you while still preserving the natural flow of your rowing stroke.
What's Your Budget?
Water resistance rowing machines are typically more expensive than other models because of the extra equipment and water technology involved in creating that natural flow. Keeping an eye on your budget when navigating between models is key to finding a machine that works for you. There are plenty of affordable rowing machines and bargain water resistance models on the market, so take your time and comb through all the options in order to find a top-performing model that still serves your needs well.
Water rowers are probably the most difficult to store compactly thanks to their large water tanks. Overall storage and portability is a major issue with these machines. If you're planning to fold or store them upright, you'll need to decide whether you'll be draining your water tank in between every workout or how you'll protect your tank from leakage during storage. If you're leaving your machine fully extended, you'll want to know just how big your machine will be so you can determine when and where you can afford to leave it out.
The Final Verdict
Water-resistance rowing machines are top-notch because of their natural and sleek rowing experience that feels just like the actual water. However you fell in love with water resistance rowing, when you're searching for your dream at-home water resistance rowing machine, you want a durable, high-performing, and bargain rower machine that can provide all the benefits of rowing exercise for a fair price. For a quality, durable, and worthwhile water rower in Canada that provides the ideal natural rowing exercise, the Xterra ERG600W is our top selection. The Xterra Fitness ERG600W offers rower and performance-centered, hardworking exercise, combining total tech integration (Bluetooth connectivity is a huge plus here!) and innovative water resistance that generates natural-feeling and full-body exercise, all at the affordable price of just $700. For quality exercise at bargain prices, you can't do better than the Xterra ERG600W.


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Friday, 06 February 2015 08:07 AM EST
The United States and Europe must stand together over Ukraine as it battles for survival in the face of escalating Russian military involvement, Vice President Joe Biden said during a visit to Brussels on Friday.
"We, the US and Europe as a whole, have to stand with Ukraine at this moment," he said, amid reports of transatlantic divisions over whether to send weapons to support the Western-backed Kiev government.
"Russia cannot be allowed to redraw the map of Europe."
Biden also criticized Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is to meet the leaders of France and Germany in Moscow later Friday, of riding roughshod over peace efforts.
"Ukraine is fighting for their very survival right now," Biden told reporters alongside EU president Donald Tusk.
"Russia continues to escalate the conflict by sending mercenaries and tanks and, as we euphemistically say in the United states, little green men, without patches, very sophisticated special operations soldiers.
"President Putin continues to call for new peace plans as his troops roll through the Ukrainian countryside, and he absolutely ignores every agreement his country has signed in the past."
Tusk -- the former Polish premier who has spoken out strongly in the past against Russia's alleged support for pro-Kremlin separatist forces in Ukraine -- said the West must keep up pressure on Russia.
EU officials said Thursday that the bloc will blacklist more Russian individuals over Ukraine, but divisions within the 28-nation bloc, particularly with the new Greek government, have prevented further broad economic sanctions.
"The European Union and the United States need to continue standing shoulder to shoulder, coordinate our efforts and uphold the pressure on Russia for as long as necessary," said Tusk.
In an apparent warning to German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande as they visit Moscow, Tusk warned against any deal with Moscow that would break up Ukraine.
"We cannot compromise on Ukraine's independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity," he added.
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subset: commoncrawl


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Silhouettes: Choreographies of Remembrance Against Enforced DisappearanceDownload PDF
Martín Zícari*
KU Leuven
When analysing cycles of protest against enforced disappearance through history, one sees a wide range of visual practices used by activists to present and reinforce their grievances. In this article I will reflect on one such practice, the use of the silhouette of the human body to denounce enforced disappearance. In so doing, this paper will discuss a series of artistic actions in the context of social mobilisation to analyse the construction of collective memories of the disappeared.
I will assess the use of silhouettes in two different contexts, Mexico and Argentina. Why compare Argentina with Mexico in the shaping of collective memories of the disappeared? The particularity of this relation lies in the clear differences that exist in remembrance tradition between the two countries. While Argentina is a central actor in the memory processes of post-dictatorship Latin America, there is a significant absence of attention paid to and mobilisation on behalf of the disappeared of Mexico, despite a significant rise in disappearances in the country (current government estimates indicate 33,125 disappeared or missing persons in Mexico since 20061). Furthermore, despite a history of state-sponsored repression through enforced disappearances during the "dirty war" of the 1970s, Mexico is conspicuously absent from the transnational memory of enforced disappearances in Latin America. In this infamous context, the Ayotzinapa case is a pivotal moment in the construction of memory in Mexico.2 It rapidly became a global issue, raising awareness of the crimes and the responsibility of the Mexican state. Moreover, it allowed national civil organisations and family members, with a long history of pressure and protest, to leverage international pressure into beneficial regulations that had in the past been repeatedly denied to them. In this sense, the adoption of representations, actions and repertoires from the Latin American tradition in the cycle of protests after Ayotzinapa, inscribes the case in the long memory of enforced disappearances, and in so doing explicitly named a crime that has been elusive in Mexican history.
I will show how the silhouette was crystallised as a memory device after World War II, later remediated into a graphic action in Argentina in 1983, and then used in two different actions in the cycle of protests after the enforced disappearance of the Ayotzinapa students. As this memory device is not created ex nihilo, it combines and updates representations and narratives of previous traumatic events. Following Diana Taylor (2003) and Rebecca Schneider (2011), I characterize these actions as performances, and part of an "immanent archive", one that has been re-opened and actualised throughout history in different historical and sociopolitical contexts, creating meaning and connecting experiences and genealogies. The notion of "immanent archive" I want to mobilize (one that is mainly bodily and affective) is constructed in tension with performance studies' orientation to the ephemerality of performance, as well as with the traditional notion of "the archive" of western epistemology.
My hypothesis is that through the lens of the notion of "performance," the immanent side of transmission arises, allowing new conceptualizations to take form amid performance, dance studies and affect theory. Within these lines of inquiry I will delve into the affects that are shared and recalled within performances, allowing participants to cypher collectively the contemporary panorama of state-fostered crime and oblivion. I will propose that this collective cyphering is coloured by "dignified rage" in opposition to the threat and violence that enforced disappearance creates. With this "dignified rage" participants create and rehearse a new social order within the kinaesthetic, contesting the state imperative of social disintegration.
I would like to address the following questions: why a silhouette? Or, how can a silhouette represent the disappeared? How can moments and situations of memory be created? How are those moments shared? With intensity? With danger? Under threat? What are the emotions that arise in those moments and situations? What kind of organisation do they require? How are they re-shaped side by side with technology and the internet?
I will first briefly present the graphic actions, to characterise them subsequently as performances. I will then draw on discussion of the two different remediations of the silhouette and its effects within the performative to finally present the analysis on the affects circulating among them. During the course of my research I conducted interviews with the organisers of the artistic actions, which will be included in the argumentation.3
The Graphic Actions
The core actions I will analyze are the siluetazos of the Argentinian artists Rodolfo Aguerreberry, Guillermo Kexel and Julio Flores. These actions were developed to demand the presence of missing people during the military dictatorship in Argentina in the 1970s. The first action took place during the Marcha de la Resistencia ("resistance march") organised by Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo on September 21, 1983. This action consisted of a public workshop, during which the artists and the general public painted human-sized silhouettes on cardboard and then placed the silhouettes on walls, monuments and trees. Participants used their own bodies as models, lying on the paper while others drew their silhouettes. As the action developed, some people started writing the name of a disappeared person and the date of disappearance, or drawing physical characteristics (such as eyes, noses, faces) on the silhouettes. Some silhouettes represented abducted pregnant women or children.
The silhouettes remained in place once the protest was over, placing the figures of the disappeared in the public sphere and challenging the government's silence. After the first such action, the production of silhouettes intensified. Human rights activists and artists connected to Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo prepared a second action in December 1983. They wanted to cover the city with 30,000 silhouettes, representing the total number of disappeared. The action was repeated a third time in March 1984, this time spontaneously.4
Image 1. "El Siluetazo". Buenos Aires 21/22 September 1983. Photography by Eduardo Gil.
According to Julio Flores, the inspiration for the siluetazo came from the Polish artist Jerzy Skąpski (Longoni and Bruzzone 91). In October 1978, UNESCO Courier republished a poster created by Skąpski, where he used silhouettes to commemorate the victims of Auschwitz. The caption of the poster reads, "Every day at Auschwitz brought death to 2,370 people, and this is the number of figures represented above." In this relationship we can find the first remediation of the silhouette as a memory device, a remediation which modified the device in two directions. First, the object of grievance changed from representing the dead of Auschwitz to the disappeared of Argentina, and second, it evolved from a poster reproduced in a magazine to a graphic action in the street.
In 2014, the same approach as that used in Argentina in the early 1980s was used by a group of artists based at the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA) to draw attention to the forty-three missing Mexican students from Ayotzinapa.5 Directly referencing the Argentinian siluetazo, for the "siluetazo por Ayotzinapa" the artists invited the general public to an open workshop held on the entrance stairs of MACBA, where they created forty-three human-sized silhouettes on cardboard. Then they gave a public speech naming the missing Mexican students and counting them out loud, followed by a march towards a recently created "altar for the disappeared" where they put the silhouettes. Again, the models for the silhouettes was the participants' living bodies, with each silhouette identified with a picture of the face and the name of a disappeared student.
Image 2. Siluetazo in Barcelona. Image reproduced by permission of the organizers of the action.
The action was recorded and a video, image and text archive was created and stored on the webpage of MACBA. The artists proposed to use the material generated during the siluetazo to carry out an "online guerrilla" on social media platforms. In this way, the action was deeply changed and updated compared to the Argentine action.
The artist Juanpablo Avendaño Ávila likewise used silhouettes as a memory device in the context of the protests over the missing students of Ayotzinapa, this time in Mexico City. He printed upper-body silhouettes on which were written phrases of political content; other phrases refer to ways citizens behave or should behave in the context of disappearance. These silhouettes were used during the protests, held in front of the bodies of protesters as they walked. The eyes of each silhouette were cut out to allow the holder to see, as well as to blend the holder with the silhouette. This approach was used in several protests in the Ayotzinapa cycle. After the protests, some of the silhouettes were taken home by their users, while others remained in the streets.
Image 3. Silhouettes made by Juanpablo Avendaño Ávila. Image reproduced by permission of the author.
In the cases mentioned above, the use of the silhouette as a memory device enabled the inscription of the figure of the disappeared in the public sphere, with a decisive political effect. Alongside the graphic inscription of absence achieved by such silhouettes, the embodied side of the practice supposed an immanent form of memory that allowed the upsurge of affections and agency. To clarify this I will characterise the actions as performances, and, by doing so, as "immanent archives" that are constantly being re-opened.
Choreographies of Remembering
The notion of performance as understood by Diana Taylor is a suitable methodological lens through which to focus the analysis of the use of silhouettes. Defined in a broader sense as "embodied behaviors" and "embodied practices," performance is understood to be "acts of transfer: transmitting social knowledge, memory, and a sense of identity" (Taylor, 2). Moreover, Taylor defines performance as "a system of learning, storing and transmitting knowledge" (16). Her theory of performance is especially suitable in this case, as she understands performance as a way of transmitting traumatic memory, focusing her analysis on post-dictatorship memory construction in Argentina.
Within the vast discipline of performance studies, Rebecca Schneider's Performing Remains is also a suitable framework for studying the siluetazos. Focusing on performance re-enactment in times of war, Schneider states that in "the practice of re-playing or re-doing a precedent event, artwork, or act […] reenactors try to bring the time –that prior moment– to the very fingertips of the present" (Schneider 2011, 2). Re-enactment is understood as a "`get-up´ of the before, during, and after any action taking place in or as re-actions: the affected effects and after-effects of art/events posed as relative to originals" (Schneider 2011, 2). In this sense, we can think about how the siluetazo in Argentina in 1983 condensed specific meaning constructions and feelings, and how its re-enactment connects with these meaning constructions, creating sense and unveiling certain affects.
My concern with artistic repertoires for addressing the problem of enforced disappearance is thus enlightened by the concepts of performance and re-enactment. They allow me to suggest that the use of the silhouette in performative actions in the context of political protest acts as an "immanent archive," as a specific way of addressing, coping with, and understanding disappearance.
Referring to the siluetazo performances, or any other performance, as an "immanent archive," requires a detour to the problematisation of ephemerality in performance studies. Herbert Blau's idea of performance as "always at the vanishing point" (28) or Peggy Phelan's proposition that "performance becomes itself through disappearance" (146) are contrasted by Rebecca Schneider with "works in which the political manipulation of 'disappearance' demand a material criticism – works such as Diana Taylor's Disappearing Acts (1997) or Jose Muñoz's 'Ephemera as Evidence' (1996)" (Schneider 2001, 206). Schneider states that such works "create a productive tension within performance studies orientation to (and sometimes celebration of) ephemerality" (2001, 106).
I will focus on Taylor's work as her concept of performance is central to the article. Taylor's reassessment of expressive and embodied culture is linked with her goal "to challenge the preponderance of writing in western epistemologies" (16). Referring to the Latin American culture, Taylor traces back the writing/embodied dilemma to the American conquest and explains how the separation between embodied culture and writing supposed that "non-verbal practices –such as dance, ritual, and cooking, to name a few– that long served to preserve a sense of communal identity and memory, were not considered valid forms of knowledge" (19). She continues: "The rift, I submit, does not lie between the written and the spoken word, but between the archive of supposedly enduring materials (i.e., texts, documents, buildings, bones) and the so-called ephemeral repertoire of embodied practices/knowledge (i.e., spoken language, dance, sports, ritual)" (Taylor 19).
Taylor intends to leave behind the traditional "archive"/"repertoire" dichotomy (and specially the preponderance of the former) that is used to disregard performance.6 She ultimately pushes for a new relationship between the "archive" and the "repertoire", as she writes, "[t]he relationship between the archive and the repertoire, as I see it, is certainly not sequential (the former ascending to prominence after the disappearance of the latter, as Nora would have it). Nor is it true versus false, mediated versus unmediated, primordial versus modern. Nor is it a binary" (Taylor 22). Moreover, she considers that, "[t]hey usually work in tandem" (Taylor 21). For her, "[t]he repertoire, on a very practical level, expands the traditional archive" (Taylor 26). She also underscores that although embodied memory "is live […] that does not mean that performance –as ritualized, formalized, or reiterative behavior– disappears" (Taylor 20).
Rebecca Schneider also contributes to this orientation. She writes "[w]hen we approach performance not as that which disappears (as the archive expects), but as both the act of remaining and a means of reappearance (though not a metaphysics of presence) we almost immediately are forced to admit that remains do not have to be isolated to the document, to the object, to bone versus flesh. Here the body –even Hodge's bloating one– becomes a kind of archive and host to a collective memory […]" (Schneider 2001, 103, italics added). Schneider pushes the dilemma further when she considers oral and embodied culture "as already an archive, a performative archive" (Schneider 2001, 103).
In the quest for redefining the preponderance of the traditional western archive, Taylor and Schneider, among others, problematise the tendency to equate performance with ephemerality, proposing a suitable framework to think embodied action in the transmission of memory. I use the notion of "immanent archive," drawing from the aforementioned intention, to rephrase and emphasise Taylor's conception of "performance as expanding the archive" and Schneider's "body as archive" or "performative archive" as previously cited.
I would like to posit that the construction of an effective narrative to deal with disappearance using the silhouette cannot be found only in its material traces, but also in what is immanently archived and restored in its remediations. I would like to think of cultural memory as a practice, as an act of imagination and interconnection in which the body and its feelings are the key factors. Taylor writes that "the body in embodied cultural memory is specific, pivotal, and subject to change. Why this insistence on the body? Because it is impossible to think about cultural memory and identity as disembodied" (86). Approaching this from the perspective of memory studies, Astrid Erll posits "cultural memory" as a metaphor and umbrella term for various forms of experience and knowledge which are shared and passed on within social formations. It is a kind of "archive, which, however, has to be performed to become meaningful for the individuals and groups who do the remembering in their respective present" (Erll 2010, 306). Using this framework, we can understand the use of the silhouette as a practice of cultural memory which is re-embodied across time and space to represent disappearance.
Describing the cultural dynamics of remembrance, Ann Rigney characterizes memory as a "selective practice" or as a "selective transformation of the archive" (4). Within these dynamics, "memory becomes collective when it is shared, and for it to be shared it must be mediated" (Rigney 4). Following her proposition, memory is continuously remediated as it circulates –or travels (Erll 2011, 11)– while, "thanks to reiteration, it continues to reach new publics at the same as it regularly undergoes small changes" (Rigney 5).
In the following two sections of this article I will present the major remediation undergone by the silhouette when it was incorporated as a memory device to fight against enforced disappearance. The first, and central, remediation is the passage from a poster to a performative action. The second remediation is that which is proposed by the performances for the Ayotzinapa students, where the immanency of the actions is launched onto the internet in the context of Global Actions Days for Ayotzinapa.
From a Poster to a Performance: the Global Memory Imperative and the Latin American Perspective
The first remediation of the silhouette in the context of fighting against enforced disappearance was the transformation, in Argentina in 1983, of Jerzy Skąpski's poster into a graphic action by Arguereberry, Kexel and Flores.
The use of the silhouette to represent missing bodies has a long history. José Emilio Burucúa and Nicolás Kwiatkowski understood Skąpski's use of the silhouette as a landmark in an emerging aesthetic for representing massacres. The authors trace the use of the silhouette in art history and stress that it became a productive device for representing massacres after the Holocaust, especially in contexts where there is death, but without a corpse. The "multiplication of the Doppelgänger formula", as established by the authors, appears "ultimately, when commemorative strategies fail. Texts, portraits, paintings, evocations of the popular tradition, all these instruments end up being ineffective and the attempt to commemorate seems futile. The only way the past is made present is through the double and repetition" (Burucúa and Kwiatkowski 195). In this scheme, the silhouette appears to be suitable to bring this traumatic past into the present. In line with Adorno's criticism of representation after World War II, the Holocaust transformed itself into a core and elusive object, allowing the emergence of new artistic practices intended to deal with trauma. The Holocaust not only serves as a metaphor for the building of key conceptual terms for memory construction in Latin America such as "concentration camps," "perpetrators" and "victims," but as stated by Burucúa and Kwiatkowski, it has established a particular aesthetic (11-48), with the use of the silhouette being one example of this (179-210).
The conceptual and aesthetic influence of the Holocaust in memory processes is widely studied, what Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider (2006, 2010) have called the "global memory imperative" and Andreas Huyssen, the "globalization paradox of memory" (13). This "globalization paradox," as understood by Huyssen, allows us to frame the transnational travel of the use of the silhouettes in Latin America. How did this particular aesthetic, that arose to deal with traumatic events of the mid-twentieth century in Europe, come to be used in Argentina in 1983 and almost forty years later in Mexico? Huyssen explains how, in the globalised paradox, the Holocaust becomes the universal trope for historical trauma: "In the transnational movement of memory discourses, the Holocaust loses its quality as index of the specific historical event and begins to function as a metaphor for other traumatic histories and memories" (14). In our case, Jerzy Skąpski's poster portraying the victims of Auschwitz directly inspires Argerreberry Kexel and Flores to develop the siluetazo, before being used in Mexico in the context of that country's own disappearances. Auschwitz acts as an underlying metaphor in the denunciation of the Argentinian disappearances through the performative use of the silhouette, and this is consciously appropriated later to denounce the practice in Mexico.
The "globalization paradox" is important in understanding this memory device and its geographical movement, but when analysing why performances have remediated this device, we find the answer in the Latin American activist experience. Teresa Basile and Abril Trigo pointed out that in the 1980s and 1990s, Latin American countries that underwent traumatic political events faced memory construction with the Holocaust as a universal trope. Against this, Basile and Trigo proposed going back to the complexity of the local sociopolitical structures to find coloniality in the heart of memory practices. For them,
Sin duda, la problemática de la memoria en América Latina exhibe su propia temporalidad y su propia historia, que arranca con la conquista, se continúa bajo las distintas variantes del colonialismo, el neocolonialismo, el poscolonialismo y el colonialismo interno, y se reformula en la organización de los estados modernos, la invención de los imaginarios nacionales y la configuración de identidades siempre en vilo, siempre ambiguas, siempre en disputa. (Basile y Trigo, 4-5)
Tracing back the local genealogies of these performative actions will lead us to the same knots observed by Basile and Trigo. Anti-neoliberalism and anti-colonialism are both at the core of the silhouette actions, with the correspondent aesthetic consequences. According to Julio Flores, in the case of the Argentinian action its organisers "needed to look back to the experience of the early 1970s or read between the lines in the newspapers the actions of Latin American exiles and resistance groups against the dictatorship" (Flores cited in Longoni and Bruzzone 87). Here he refers to the experience of avant-garde art that flourished in Argentina in the late 1960s and 1970s. One of the biggest such actions, which was cited directly by the organisers of the siluetazo, was "Tucumán Arde," a series of artistic actions carried out in 1969 in the cities of Tucumán and Rosario, in which a group of artists, journalists and sociologists looked to denounce the harmful consequences of the economic measures and neoliberal policies being applied in Latin America (Longoni and Bruzzone 85).7 This tradition influenced Arguereberry, Kexel and Flores who chose to drive their project beyond the boundaries of the museum or gallery and to propose an avant-garde collective action, transforming completely the aesthetic device of the silhouette as understood by Skąpski.
In the case of the use of the silhouettes in the protests over the enforced disappearance of the Mexican students, the avant-garde collective street action was also privileged in the actions in Barcelona and Mexico-City. In neither city did the organisers want to frame their action within the traditional art environment, choosing instead to use street protests to make demands and mobilise feelings and representations. It must also be kept in mind that anti-colonialism and anti-neoliberalism is present in the history of Ayotzinapa and the Escuela Normal Rural Raúl Isidro Burgos, the school to which the missing students belonged, bringing other aesthetic consequences to the use of the silhouette. The state of Guerrero, and specially Ayotzinapa, was the scene of two of the most important revolutionary movements of Mexico's so-called "dirty war," the movement of Genaro Vázquez Rojas and Lucio Cabañas, the leader of the Partido de los Pobres (the Party of the Poor). The former was a student at the same school in Ayotzinapa as the missing students. From this moment on, the school and the city were crucial actors of resistance, spaces where the values of self-organisation, active intransigence and state defiance remain intact. This history of resistance is present in the whole cycle of protests over the Ayotzinapa case, and in the two actions that I analyse, it brought aesthetic consequences.
In the action organised by Juanpablo Avendaño Ávila, the anti-capitalist and anti-colonial actualisation of the silhouette came in the form of written phrases, words repeatedly shouted and shared among co-protesters that were crystallised in the silhouettes. From all the phrases chosen by Avendaño Ávila we can highlight those revealing the intention to implicate personally José Luis Abarca, the mayor of Iguala, and phrases that urged the dismantling of the economic system behind these crimes against humanity.
Image 4 and 5. Details of the phrases within the silhouettes made by Juanpablo Avendaño Ávila.8 Images reproduced with permission of the author.
The conjunction of memory and anti-colonialism also surrounds the action, as stated by the artist himself in the interviews I carried out with him:
The magnitude of the Ayotzinapa case has to do with the magnitude of things that it reveals. Ayotzinapa is an aberrant event that is connected to a large extent to capitalism like a form of annihilation, like a machine that does not stop even before human life. Ayotzinapa is connected with the international interests of exploitative Canadian mining companies, that in many cases force entire communities to move out, and which are in connivance with paramilitary groups to perpetuate their interests. (Avendaño Ávila)
While transmitting his personal view of the situation using phrases written within his silhouettes, Avendaño Ávila was searching for the "potential of the written word-thought" to create a disturbance in the people attending the protest (Avendaño Ávila).
In the case of the action in Barcelona, a personal story relating to each missing student was read while the silhouettes were being created, highlighting the revolutionary history of their school. This enunciation acted as a mood inscription, influencing the ongoing silhouetting of the bodies of the disappeared in cardboard. The speakers shouted the stories, at times crying, holding and embracing one other. I will look at this aspect of the actions below in more detail, but it is important to highlight the aesthetic significance of another point: some of the school's irreverent intransigence and defiance infused the silhouettes and the action was updated and thoroughly transformed.
From the Street to the Net: "Online Guerrilla" as Remediation
I will now focus on a second remediation made by the actions over the Mexican students, especially by the siluetazo in Barcelona. This action had an interesting twist: there was also the intention to do "online guerrilla" on social media. To do this, the artists filmed the action and photographed the sequence of the creation of the silhouettes with the aim of going viral. In this sense, the silhouette here transformed itself in the digital sphere, constituting a new memory device, with the political power of this digital transformation relying on the possibility of infinite technical reproduction. The silhouette sense-creation is no longer limited to the experience of the performative action, but depends on the capacity of connectivity and digital flow. This by no means supposes a loss of significance for the silhouette, but following Walter Benjamin, I would like to highlight the political importance of this reproduction: "as soon as the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applied to artistic production, the whole social function of art is revolutionised. Instead of being founded on ritual, it is based on a different practice: politics" (25). This political importance of the digital was understood and strategically used by the organisers of the action, as these extracts from my interviews show:
Political participation depends on the possibilities of each individual person, on how to get involved with whatever social claim you believe in. At this moment the fact of giving an easy "click" or a "like" on social media served us, and served the action. It was what the relatives of the missing students were asking for: dissemination. So if someone gave us a "like", for us it was good. In that strategic moment social media pressure was needed. We live in a time where the amount of likes you have defines the visibility of something […] you need that volume to give visibility. (Prado)
The Ayotzinapa moment showed that: new technologies, hashtag fever. I feel that it was a very positive outcome in the sense that it mobilised, that it generates presence […] And in the end the impulse that Ayotzinapa had was that, to be a virtual moment, a virtual space that everyone wanted to be part of, collaborate, share, post new things. They are the positive things that the virtual network has, to spread the word. Ayotzinapa was a watershed at the virtual community level. (Bayliss)
Placing the silhouette on the internet was necessary in the contingency of the Ayotzinapa case where the Mexican state was pushing for forgetfulness. Activist networks needed to address the international arena in a short time, using social media and the internet, to prevent the event from fading away with the rest of the country's horrific daily crimes. This online strategy can be understood in the context of what Andrew Hoskins calls the "connective turn" in the configuration of memories (2011, 19-20). This connective turn, allowed by the "abundance, pervasiveness and accessibility of communication networks, nodes and digital media content" (Hoskins 2011, 20), meant a huge change in the configuration of memories:
Hypernarratives forged through the tight packing and layering of digital and digitalized media content, afford a memory beyond real-time. That is to say digital data-bases re-spatialize and re-temporize events through their interactive assembling and mapping of disparate simultaneities, which affect a multimodal hypernarrative. (Hoskins 2011, 28)
In this case, the hypernarrative of Ayotzinapa, which flooded the internet for about two months, meant the digitalisation and circulation of thousands of actions like the ones analysed in this article, and the constant sharing and connection of experiences, enlarging spatial reach and time-permanence, crucial for activists in the search for justice.
An interesting example can be added concerning the use of the silhouette in the construction of digital memories. This is the case of the online commemoration of March 24 in Argentina.9 In 2008, 2009 and 2010 a particular commemoration arose on Facebook; in this strategy users removed their profile pictures, leaving to stand in its place the generic Facebook profile picture, the silhouette of a head. This empty-profile movement was studied by Agustina Triquell (2013) and Cecilia Sosa (2018) who considered it a digital siluetazo, referring to the original action of 1983. Sosa refers to this strategy as part of a shift in the mourning process in Argentina. If traditionally after the return of democracy in 1983 the memory of the victims was delineated by a network of organisations of victims' families with a strong discourse on the biological bond of mourning, the Facebook silhouette action showed a new process in the configuration of memories, in which civil society, as well as relatives, participated in the representation of victims, "allow[ing] the delineation of an amplified community, who proposed to rethink the relationship of kinship, memory and politics for the new generations" (Sosa 129). Considering Hoskins's thoughts on digital memories we can see how digital ecology allowed and fostered this kind of transformation: "[…] individuals and groups feel active in an array of connectivity practices such as posting, linking, liking, recording, swiping, scrolling, forwarding, etc. digital media content, and yet do so compulsively, constituting a new coercive multitude […]"(2017, 15).
These "coercive multitudes" were also the target of the digitalisation of the Barcelona silhouette action, allowing the action to circulate endlessly with the rest of the media content. In this section I have tried to show how the digital media remediated the performances, thus enlarging the remembrance communities. In the following section I will discuss how these communities were shaped, and what affects arose from this shaping.
Dignified Rage: the Role of Affects in the Shaping of a New Social Order
Up to now, I have tried to characterise the silhouette actions as performances in order to consider them as an immanent archive that is re-enacted and remediated across time and space to deal with enforced disappearance. Now I will argue for an affective approach to these immanent memories, affect being a predominant component of what emerges and circulates in these re-enactments. I will consider "dignified rage"10 as the way affect was codified within the performances, which helped to create new affiliations and an extended community, rehearsing and enacting at the same time a new social order within the performative –a social order that is contesting state-fostered disintegration and oblivion.
Within the studies that deal with affect, a distinction can be made between two main theoretical currents; the first set of works follows Silvan Tomkins's scheme that describes affects as emotions or feelings, highlighting the bodily nature of affects, how they are contagious, or mimetic, starting in one body and resonating in others (Tomkins and Karon 1992); the second set, on which I will now focus, contains the works of "those critics and theorists who, indebted to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Baruch Spinoza and Henri Bergson, conceptualize affect as pre-individual bodily forces augmenting or diminishing a body's capacity to act" (Clough 207).
If the common ground within this latter set is the consideration of affect as pre-individual, I will specifically follow Ben Anderson who renders the "pre-individual intensities" of affect with a collective lens imbricated in the political (14). For Anderson, "affects are collective: capacities to affect and be affected are always mediated in and through encounters," thus, "any particular body's charge of affect therefore carries traces of other bodies' and finally affects become the environment within which people dwell" (105). This definition –affect as something with its own existence previous to the subject´s experience, as moments, energies or intensities that precede perception and that arise during encounters, and which at the same time are the ground for encounters– supports the hypothesis I propose: that in the silhouette actions, an important part of what is immanently archived and re-enacted is a specific, previous affect to cope with the crime of enforced disappearance. In Anderson's words, "[a]ffects are emergent from specific material arrangements […] but are not reducible to the material collectives that they emerge from. They have an efficacy within those collectives" (13-4).
When activists in Barcelona decided to organise a siluetazo for the Ayotzinapa students, they were not only mobilising a certain visual culture, or a historic repertoire, they were also cyphering amid the kinaesthetic a certain way of organising affection. They were not proposing a "minute's silence," or "a candle-lit vigil" (to mention only two other possible approaches used by human rights advocacy networks); the siluetazo instead meant opening a collective workshop on the street, inviting the public to use their own bodies in the creation of the silhouettes of the disappeared, shouting their names and stories, crying, holding hands. The same was true for Juanpablo Avendaño Ávila's actions: protesters cut eye-holes in the silhouettes to see through, walked next to one another and carried not only traces of other bodies but also written phrases that opposed the government in a first-person plural full of anger and rage. "Dignified rage" can then be understood as a matrix of unveiled affects that turn the collective into action.
Rage mobilizes bodies, bringing them together, forcing them to gather in public spaces to mourn collectively. These performances demonstrate courage and action, with protests against enforced disappearance as an opportunity to get organised and protest politically, but also emotionally. Being together does not only embody an act of subversion but also is a necessary act of being with others, holding others' hands, coping with the crime.
By revisiting the role of "dignified rage" in the configuration of collective memories, we can also stress that these moments of togetherness not only organise affect, but also propose a new social order among the participants and within the performative. It is in this direction that Andrew Hewitt proposes the notion of "social choreographies" to talk about dance and choreography "as it operates at the very base of social experience" (2). The aesthetic of performance, in this case mainly immanent and corporeal, allows participants and organisers to rehearse a new social order, one that is based on the proximity of bodies, company and action. In the context of State repression and enforced oblivion, the upsurge of hope is shaped within the performative, recuperating agency and countering the State version of the crimes through remembrance. In Hewitt's words, "the aesthetic will function –and here we encounter the importance of the performative within our notion of social choreography– as a space in which social possibilities are both rehearsed and performed" (4).
In these choreographies of remembering, the devices are human bodies themselves and their relationships with other bodies, present and disappeared. This organisation of bodies holds up a possible social order, a social order in which civil society pushes justice from the bottom up, with "dignified rage," into the oppressive machinery of the State through aesthetics. The kinaesthetic aspect of the silhouette performances was aimed at reconstructing traces of the missing bodies with the present ones, blurring the boundaries of presence and absence and bringing to bear thousands of neglected memories. Longoni and Bruzzone propose that the
demonstrators used their own body as a pattern […] The silhouette becomes in this way the imprint of two absent bodies, the one of who lent his body to delineate it and –by transfer– the body of a disappeared person, thus reconstructing broken ties of solidarity in a symbolic act of strong emotionality. (32)
By lying on the ground during the siluetazos in Argentina and Barcelona, or by looking through the eye-holes of Juanpablo Avendaño Àvila's silhouettes, the phantasmagorical entity of the silhouetted figure of the disappeared is corporalised and obtains presence in the public sphere. Though the performances are not at all proposing the idea of restitution, the living bodies rehearse a possible communication with what has been taken away.
I have tried to define the silhouette actions discussed above as an immanent archive that is re-actualised through history. In the words of Maaike Bleeker:
this is a situation in which knowledge is not grounded in the materiality of documents, nor in the know-how embodied in practice, but in practices of constant regeneration in which humans, objects and technologies participate, and in which […] the archive itself becomes a function of transfer process. (211)
I have shown how this particular aesthetic evolved from the traumatic post-World War II context, to become incorporated within the repertoire of artistic actions in Argentina in 1983, configuring itself as a landmark in Latin American visual strategies, to end up, in present times, being re-used and deeply changed by actions for the disappeared Ayotzinapa students. In this circulation of the silhouette as a memory device, the performance remediated a poster, allowing the immanency of affect and movement to propose a new social order within the political. In the context of Mexican and Latin American families searching for their disappeared, this social order can be a sanctuary, a safe space to share and mourn. In doing so, they also construct sense.
Works Cited
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Avendaño Ávila, Juanpablo. Personal Interview. October 21, 2017.
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Bayliss, Arlene. Personal Interview. July 12, 2017.
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"En tres meses desaparecieron 1,411 personas en México; más de 15 personas al día". Univisión Noticias, January 24, 2018. Web. https://www.univision.com/noticias/desapariciones/en-tres-meses-desaparecieron-1-411-personas-en-mexico-mas-de-15-personas-al-dia
Erll, Astrid. "Regional Integration and (Trans)Cultural Memory." Asia Europe Journal 8,3 (2010): pp. 305-315. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10308-010-0268-5.
———. "Travelling Memory". Parallax 17,4 (2011): 4-18. Web. https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2011.605570
EZLN. "APOYO DEL EZLN A LOS ESTUDIANTES DE LA ESCUELA NORMAL DE AYOTZINAPA." 2014. Web. http://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/2014/10/07/comunicado-del-comite-clandestino-revolucionario-indigena-comandancia-general-del-ejercito-zapatista-de-liberacion-nacional-mexico/
———. "COMUNICADO DEL CCRI-CG DEL EZLN. COMISIÓN SEXTA-COMISIÓN INTERGALÁCTICA DEL EZLN. En inglés." 2008. Web. http://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/2008/09/18/comunicado-del-ccri-cg-del-ezln-comision-sexta-comision-intergalactica-del-ezln-en-ingles/
Grupo Interdisciplinario de Expertos Independientes. Informe Ayotzinapa. Investigación y primeras conclusiones de las desapariciones y homicidios de los normalistas de Ayotzinapa. 2015. Web. https://www.oas.org/es/cidh/actividades/giei/ResumenEjecutivo-GIEI.pdf
Hewitt, Andrew. Social Choreography: Ideology as Performance in Dance and Everyday Movement. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.
Hoskins, Andrew. Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition. New York: Routledge, 2017.
———. "Media, Memory, Metaphor: Remembering and the Connective Turn." Parallax 17,4 (2011): pp. 19–31. Web. https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2011.605573.
Huyssen, Andreas. Present Past. Urban Palimpsest and the Politics of Memory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003.
Levy, Daniel and Natan Sznaider. The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2006.
———. Human Rights and Memory. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 2010.
Longoni, Ana and Gustavo A. Bruzzone, comps. El siluetazo. Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo, 2008.
Longoni, Ana and Mariano Mestman. Del Di Tella a Tucumán Arde. Buenos Aires: El cielo por asalto, 2000.
Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Prado, Sol. Personal Interview. June 2, 2017.
Rigney, Ann. "Remembrance as remaking: memories of the nations revisited." Nations and Nationalism 24,2 (April 2018): pp. 1-18.
Schneider, Rebecca. "Performance Remains." Performance Research 6:2 (2001), pp. 100-108.
———. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. London: Routledge, 2011.
Sosa, Cecilia. "Filiaciones virales: Facebook, efemérides y una poética queer de la memoria." Eds. Jordana Blejmar, Silvana Mandolessi and Mariana Eva Pérez. El pasado inasequible. Desaparecidos, hijos y combatientes en el arte y la literatura del nuevo milenio. Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 2018, pp. 127-148.
Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.
Tomkins, Silvan S. and Bertram P. Karon. Affect, Imagery, Consciousness. Volume 2. New York: Springer, 1992.
Triquell, Agustina. "Otras siluetas. Conmemoraciones virtuales de la última dictadura." Versión Estudios de Comunicación y Política, Nueva Época 32 (November 2013): pp. 9-21.
*This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 677955).
1 Data Cívica is adding 1,316 more persons to the 33,125 missing persons in Mexico, the official report of the Registro Nacional de Datos de Personas Extraviadas o Desaparecidas (RNPED) registers. See "En tres meses" (2018).
2 During the night of September 26, 2014 the local police and the Mexican army attacked a group of students from the Escuela Rural Normal Raúl Isidro Burgos of Ayotzinapa in the state of Guerrero, Mexico. That night, aside from the disappearance of the 43 students, nine people were killed, more than 40 injured and over 110 people were attacked. The total number of victims (direct and indirect) is calculated to be over 700 (Grupo Interdisciplinario de Expertos Independientes 313-15).
3 Translation and editing are my own.
4 This action was thoroughly studied by the Argentinian researchers Ana Longoni and Gustavo Bruzzone (2008).
5 More information on the action and its organisers can be found at https://www.macba.cat/es/pei-siluetazo-ayotzinapa.
6 Although it is not the intention of this article to deepen Taylor's use of the dichotomy between "archive" and "repertoire," I introduce the subject to show how Taylor's work is ultimately pushing for a reconfiguration of the traditional notion of the archive by taking into account what was regularly discarded as "ephemeral repertoire." I propose that Taylor uses this dichotomy commonly found in traditional western epistemologies as a way to show its ineffectiveness to deal with memory and knowledge transmission in Latin America. By reframing the traditional opposition between writing and embodied culture (an opposition created to disregard the latter), Taylor renders both concepts closely but still separated; in that sense, she contradicts Schneider who equates embodiment with a "kind of archive" (2001, 103) or Maaike Bleeker who underscores the role of the embodied archive in transmission (211).
7 For an analytical study of this work, see Longoni and Mestman (2000).
8 The first reads: "We have to show, in words and actions, that we are sick and tired of the incompetence and corruption of our governments and the businessmen that get rich supporting them"; the second: "Acting means maintaining the pressure on the government and their partners in crime in the political class and business consortium" [my translation].
9 The Day of Remembrance for Truth and Justice (Día de la memoria por la verdad y la justicia) is a public holiday in Argentina, commemorating the victims of the Military Government of 1976-1983. It is held on March 24, the anniversary of the coup d'état.
10 "Dignified rage" is a term coined by the EZLN (Zapatista Army of National Liberation) as a call to all the people of the world to shape a new political subjectivity out of resistance: "Let our rage grow and become hope, let our dignity take root again and breed another world" (EZLN 2008) are two of the statements they used to organize a "Festival of Dignified Rage." They later recycled the term in various communications, but it was particularly prominent in EZLN proclamations related to Ayotzinapa (EZLN 2014). Recently, Ileana Diéguez (2017) also proposed "dignified rage" as a lens through which to focus on agency and resilience in fighting against enforced disappearance in Mexico.


text: Localization Feedback Request Jul 7, 2019 15:39:35 GMT -6 adrianort likes this Tag Quote Select PostDeselect PostLink to PostBack to Top Post by Jogur on Jul 7, 2019 15:39:35 GMT -6 There are several minor problems in Russian localization.1) The word "Gold" in Russian is "Золото". And you can confuse the amount of money - instead of 12G it seems 123. Perhaps it is worth leaving the letter G in an abbreviated version.i.imgur.com/ON7gQtZ.jpg2) In the prologue, subtitles are constantly changing size.Normal size - i.imgur.com/WYp6MGl.jpgSmall size - i.imgur.com/YTr2KYO.jpg3) In some phrases Miriam speaks of himself in the masculine. I noticed only a couple of times, so it's hard to find screenshots.


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Michael Sweet doesn't understand how people can think Sweet & Lynch sound like Stryper or his solo stuff
Michael Sweet doesn't understand how people can think Sweet & Lynch sound like Stryper or his solo stuff
Sweet & Lynch featuring Stryper frontman Michael Sweet and Lynch Mob guitarist George Lynch are scheduled to release their sophomore studio album Unified via Frontiers Music Srl on November 10, 2017. Sweet has apparently received some comments that the new Sweet & Lynch songs sound like his solo material or Stryper songs as he took to Facebook to explain how the songs on the new Sweet & Lynch album were created.
The following message was posted on Sweet's Facebook page earlier today:
"It's very interesting to hear from people that Sweet & Lynch sounds like an MS project or even a Stryper project. I'm scratching my head on that one. George wrote ALL the music on this new album. I wrote the melodies and lyrics and produced it but again, he wrote ALL the music.
Unless George is secretly a closet Stryper fan and purposely writing songs that sound like Stryper (insert extreme sarcasm here), I'm just getting it? Of course with me singing and writing the melodies then to some degree it's going to take on a bit of the MS/Stryper thing but I gotta laugh when I read comments like "it's just another MS solo album" and "it sounds just like Stryper". I'm not to blame this time around"
Sleaze Roxx stated the following in its review of Sweet & Lynch's debut album Only To Rise: "Only To Rise is filled with great melodies and amazing guitar work from George Lynch — some of his riffs and leads take me back to Dokken's Tooth And Nail and Under Lock And Key albums, while a few of the guitar driven songs remind me of the first Lynch Mob album. And those of you that have followed Michael Sweet since Stryper's comeback already know that the frontman has been on a mission, and his voice is in the best shape of his career. Also, let's not forget his writing and production abilities, both of which are nothing short of brilliant."
Sweet & Lynch's "Afterlife" (from upcoming album Unified) video:
Sweet & Lynch – "Afterlife" (Official Video)
Subscribe To Be Alerted When We Add New Videos – http://radi.al/SubscribeFrontiers / From the album UNIFIED. Get your copy NOW: http://radi.al/Unified * Fro…


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That's how the European Union views Great Britain as the EU continues to demand that Great Britain accede to demands they wish to impose on a sovereign nation—solely to bring that subordinate polity to heel. Examples of the EU's demands:
- post-Brexit sovereignty to make Britain more competitive via deregulation, environmental rules or tax reform—these must not occur
- UK's ability to subsidize industries in line with EU state-aid regulations—this must be curtailed
The first must not be allowed explicitly because of that competition. The second may be bad business overall, but it's a domestic matter.
And this, regarding tariffs:
new tariff schedule London published last month eliminated levies on some 2,000 goods, or 17% of goods in the schedule, and simplified tariffs on another 40%. Measured by value, 70% of Britain's imports from other World Trade Organization members will now be tariff-free, compared to 52% under the EU-wide tariff schedule.
Here is the EU's attempt to prevent British competition.
And the EU's demands regarding fishing:
bind the UK permanently in EU fisheries rules governing where British and other fishermen can cast their nets. The UK instead wants the same level of sovereignty other coastal countries enjoy to negotiate fishing rights annually.
And that's the rub: the EU continues to demand to reach into—deep into—British national sovereignty to impose EU governance imperatives on British domestic matters. The EU does not accept Great Britain's sovereignty.
Every one of those demands individually are deal breakers, and their aggregate demonstrate the EU's (continued) bad faith in its "negotiations."
The Brits should walk away from Brussels today and stop wasting their time and effort on the EU's sham. They have better and more pressing things to do with their resources than negotiating with those who will not.


text:
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This long-term care home is a "for profit" 77-certified bed center providing cares and services to residents of Owego and Tioga County, New York. The Medicare and Medicaid-participating facility is located at:
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River View Rehabilitation and Nursing Care Center
In addition to providing 24/7 skilled nursing care, River View Rehabilitation and Nursing Care Center offers other services. Additional focused care includes outpatient therapy, palliative care, comfort care, respiratory management, pain management, wound care, IV (intravenous) antibiotics therapy, and outpatient services involving physical, occupational and speech therapies.
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Owego New York Nursing Home Safety Concerns
The state of New York and the federal government regularly updates its long-term care home database system with complete details of all deficiencies, citations, and violations.
According to Medicare, this facility maintains an overall rating of one out of five stars, including one out of five stars concerning health inspections, one out of five stars for staffing issues and two out of five stars for quality measures.
- Failure to Keep Every Resident Free from Physical Restraints Unless Need for Medical Treatment – citation #F221 date March 11, 2016
The state surveyors determined "the facility did not ensure residents were free from physical restraints [that were] not required to treat medical symptoms. Specifically, one resident "had a scoop mattress, a body pillow, and her bed against the left wall, which limited her ability to stand."
Also, "there was no documented evidence the restraints were assessed, or care planned for reduction, elimination, or alternatives." The severely, cognitively impaired resident's MDS (Minimum Data Set) Assessment revealed that "she required extensive assistance for bed mobility, transferring, and dressing." The resident "was unsteady when being transferred from her bed to her chair, and she did not have a restraint."
A review of the Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA) Care Guide with care instructions documented that "the resident utilized a right body pillow while in bed, and her bed was to be in the lowest position. The care guide did not document the left side of the bed was positioned against the wall or that a scoop mattress was utilized. The care guide did not document the resident had a restraint."
A review of the Physician's orders "did not document the resident was to have a bed against the wall, have a scoop mattress, or identify if the preventative measures were restraints." The resident was observed in her room in bed with "the bed against the left side of the wall." The resident had "alarms in place [as well as] the fall measures in place. The surveyor asked the nursing staff to provide a restraint assessment that was not provided."
A Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA), providing the resident care, stated that the resident "was unable to rise upon command. The CNA stated that "she defined a restraint as something that impedes someone's ability to get up on their own. She stated the Unit Manager, the Director of Nursing, or the Assistant Director of Nursing, completed the restraint assessment, and updated the resident's Care Plan and care guide."
The CNA stated that "she was not sure if the resident could remove the body pillow on command or if the pillow was a restraint." The Assistant Director of Nursing "defined a restraint as any object that impedes a resident from rising on their own."
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text:
Over a decade before his Oscar win, Leonardo DiCaprio was 21 years old and the star of an awful movie you've never heard of.
In 1995, the "Growing Pains" and "Basketball Diaries" actor made an independent film called "Don's Plum," featuring members of his infamous friend group, "the p-ssy posse," including Tobey Maguire and Kevin Connolly.
After witnessing this turd I can't blame DiCaprio and Maguire for wanting to bury it in the backyard.
The black-and-white, cigarette-smoke-filled, largely improvised indie is as pretentious as it is disgusting. It's 82 minutes of hot-shot jerks degrading everyone in sight while rambling on about masturbation, bisexuality and their lack of acting careers.
DiCaprio, Maguire, Connolly and Scott Bloom play young LA actors who regularly meet at the titular diner, acting rowdy and toting along new girls who they treat like dogs.
After Brad (Bloom) brings a hitchhiking woman to their regular table at the diner, DiCaprio screams, "Stop looking at me like that! I'll throw a bottle at your face, you g–damn whore!" And then, as she gets up to leave: "Get out of here, you slut-b–tch!" Naturally, the group doesn't get kicked out of the restaurant for this violent, sexist outburst. Write what you know, I guess.
Some other choice lines from Leo's character, Derek: "I got my girlfriend off on a zucchini" and "Have you guys ever had sex with a hooker?"
Because of the lack of color and diner setting, you can't help but wonder if this bunch of bros — best known for carousing — believed themselves to be mini Lanford Wilsons or 'lil Woody Allens, all destined for genius status. "Don's Plum" is remarkably self-important for a film that boasts the line, "Is it true the male G-spot is in your butt?" Its director, R.D. Robb, never helmed another film again. He went on to act on television, and was the executive producer of "Sirens." Phew.
Despite the idiocy and immaturity of the whole thing, you get fascinating glimpses of nascent star power. Maguire, who sounds like he just inhaled a tank of helium, was already a master of the puppydog geekiness that made him a perfect Peter Parker; Connolly was living and breathing "Entourage" almost a decade before he'd hop in the car with Adrian Grenier. And DiCaprio was mere months away from making "Titanic," one of the biggest films of all time and the one that would cement him as a Hollywood superstar.
Does that mean "Don's Plum" should be preserved by the National Film Registry? No.
Do they do burnings?