Communing with Communion

Penny Siopis’s film Communion revisits a historical enigma by commemorating aesthetically a haunting event that occurred in South Africa in 1952: police violence against the ANC’s Defiance Campaign of non-violent resistance against apartheid. This chapter offers a close reading of the film in relation to rituals and symbolic relations embedded in Christianity as colonial ideology and erupting in this historical and political “event” in a township in South Africa in 1952 where its contradictions were sacrificially played out on a Christian woman’s body: “the body of a nun.” It argues that Siopis does not aestheticize trauma and suffering; rather Siopis’s use of found home movie footage works to riddle this historical trauma into critical consciousness that, following Ettinger, might become a “transport-station of trauma.” Siopis’s film work uncannily echoes the process, it is argued, with the project of art historian Aby Warburg, who treated images as materialized mnemonic stores, transporting across time once embodied and performed psychic intensities. Warburg assembled images achronologically, intermedially, and transculturally to piece together and render perceptible the contradictions and violences of the modern Christianocentric Western world.