<em>In Order to Extract the Memory It Is of Course Necessary to Build the Room</em></br>Susana Plotts-Pineda

Praise for In Order to Extract the Memory It Is Of Course Necessary to Build the Room

Susana Plotts-Pineda’s new book is brilliant, powerful, affecting, and marvelously conceived. Its focus is on violences—of politics, economy, and environment. But its interest lies not in how violence operates, but rather on how violence is depicted, how it becomes an acceptable lever of capital. The line between the material act and the depiction of the material act is often blurry, and Plotts-Pineda’s interrogation of historical memory makes clear how the fabrication and framing of violence is itself a violence that determines the way we breathe and mourn and survive. For all its theoretical ingenuity, however, what sticks with me about this book are small moments of intensity, pain, and clarity: when those on the inside of the frame speak back at us: when architecture disappears, when the forms vibrate with new forms, when sweat is indistinguishable from the data that determines how we live and what we know.
     —Daniel Borzutzky

There should be a special name for the kind of rigorous, genre-defying work straddling the future of memory and the past of futurity. Bursting at the seams with lyrical invention and speculative possibilities, In Order to Extract the Memory It Is of Course Necessary to Build the Room traces connections between empire; the techno-military-industrial complex; vulcanology (here standing in for geopolitics and attempts to control social unrest); museology, and memory studies. So convincing is its logic, I wonder if my words will “stick to the screen” and ultimately serve the dark purposes of the Olvidium corporation. (Think AI.) This is a brilliant debut.
     —Mónica de la Torre

“Behind the wreckage of memory,” writes Susana Plotts-Pineda in this remarkable debut, “one hopes to find more than just sealed documents.” Working from the histories and archives of Colombia’s Armero Tragedy and the M-19 revolutionary movement, Plotts-Pineda writes a Borgesian narrative of nesting dolls in which memory is seemingly all present and continuously elusive. Here, we encounter a documentary crew unwittingly funded by foreign powers investigating the correlation between a guerilla movement and seismic eruption, a museum erected high within inaccessible mountains that houses the photographic stills of all possible films, and a company that has perfected the science of memory capture while calling itself Olvidium—ironically echoing the Spanish verb to forget. When its facilities catch fire, the aftermath is a scorched amalgamation of all memories—at once grotesque memorial and campo santo. Working in a mode of lyric and speculative undocumentary, Plotts-Pineda’s multilayered and multigenre book takes us to the edges of memory. The result is vertiginous and revelatory.
     —Brandon Som

About the Author

Susana Plotts-Pineda is an artist and poet. She is a recipient of a Fulbright Award in Mexico City. In Order to Extract the Memory it is of Course Necessary to Build the Room is her first book of poetry.