Kollectiv Exhibition // Discussion Space
Friday 28 November | Prague Unofficial Haus of Kultur | 1800h
Common Space: Gallery // Everything is Political
In an unprecedented move, Common Space: Gallery is joining with Everything is Political to create a unique night of politico-artistic participation, engagement and transcendence.
We will embark on this joint adventure under the title
“What I never had is being torn from me. What I did not live, I will miss forever.
In addition to the freshly minted artworks on display - which have been produced especially for this event - everyone present is invited to take part in a multimodal, multimedia, multiplicitous exploration of the politics of memory.
As well as engaging with the artworks and performance pieces that will be manifesting themselves, all attendees will participate in a round table discussion on the politics of memory. By examining particular ‘memory pieces’ we aim to foster a better understanding of contemporary modes of mourning, melancholia, nostalgia, amnesia and disavowal. In this way we hope to shed light on many interlinked trends in politics, culture and society. This will also highlight symbioses and parasitic tendencies as well as the benign and malign transgression between public and private, individual and collective. Crucially, we hope to gain insight into the meaning and significance of the politics of memory itself as well as using it to illuminate the possibilities of contemporary alterity and escape from permissive totality.
Everyone is asked to read the definitions below and to choose a ‘memory piece’ from film, literature, art, architecture, public monuments, states, music, or any other field they think appropriate and to analyse it in terms of its politics of memory.
After an introduction, the discussion will proceed through the presentation of these analyses by each person and a moderated discussion around the key themes that emerge. Ideally, this will also take in new insight and input gained from the artworks and performances manifested on the evening itself.
As well as the basic definitions included below, there are a series of examples of ‘works of memory’ which may inspire you to analyse them or other, similar or radically different works.
Furthermore, as well as the deliberately fragmentary notes from the book Requiem for Communism which are in a separate attachment, there are some suggestions for extended reading, should you be so bold.
So, you need to prepare a brief presentation on a memory piece of some kind to share with the group. Please ask for help and support if you need it.
This has the potential to be an exceedingly valuable and enlightening exercise. However, it will only work if you engage with it. You will get out what you put in but WE will get much more than the sum of the individual contributions. The additional collective benefit will increase with the number and quality of the contributions. Get Involved!
Suggestions
For your analysis and in the discussion, as well as in your engagement with the artworks, it may be useful to bear in mind the following. This may help you order your thoughts and make a format for your presentation.
What is being remembered (object)?
Has something been lost – if so, what is it (object)?
Who is doing the remembering (subject)?
What is the relationship between the subject and the object?
How (through what means) is the subject remembering the object?
Is this memory characterised by mourning, melancholia, nostalgia or disavowal or a combination or these?
What is the relationship in this memory between public and private, individual and collective?
What is the consequence of the loss of the object for the subject as an individual?
What is the consequence of the loss of the object for the collective, if this is relevant?
What is the consequence of the loss of the object in wider terms?
What impact has the form of memory (mourning, melancholia, disavowal, etc) had on the individual subject?
What impact has the form of memory (mourning, melancholia, disavowal, etc) had on the collective subject?
What are the significant aspects of time, space and place in relation to this memory work?
Is the piece well executed? Is it Art or Kitsch?
What has determined the form of memory (and its expression) for the individual, the collective and in wider terms?
What does the form of memory say about our current state of affairs?
What impact does the form of memory have on our options - individually, collectively and more widely?
Basic Definitions/ Points of Departure
The mourner can name the loss that stuns the melancholic.
The nostalgic disavows the loss altogether.
Memory
1. the mental capacity or faculty of retaining and reviving facts, events, impressions, etc., or of recalling or recognizing previous experiences.
2. this faculty as possessed by a particular individual: to have a good memory.
3. the act or fact of retaining and recalling impressions, facts, etc.; remembrance; recollection: to draw from memory.
4. the length of time over which recollection extends: a time within the memory of living persons.
5. a mental impression retained; a recollection: one's earliest memories.
6. the reputation of a person or thing, esp. after death; fame: a ruler of beloved memory.
7. the state or fact of being remembered.
8. a person, thing, event, fact, etc., remembered.
9. commemorative remembrance; commemoration: a monument in memory of Columbus.
10. the ability of certain materials to return to an original shape after deformation.
11. Also called computer memory, storage. Computers.
a. the capacity of a computer to store information subject to recall.
b. the components of the computer in which such information is stored.
Thinking of something that is not here or is not now.
Mourning
1. the act of a person who mourns; sorrowing or lamentation.
2. the conventional manifestation of sorrow for a person's death, esp. by the wearing of black clothes or a black armband, the hanging of flags at half-mast, etc.
3. the outward symbols of such sorrow, as black garments.
Additional: The work done by the subject in order to get over the loss of a loved or valued object, whatever this may be. This takes the loss from the realm of the real into the realm of the symbolic and allows the subject to move on, to at least some extent – the ‘healthy’ abstraction of grief, which will help the subject to overcome it.
Melancholia
1. a mental condition characterized by great depression of spirits and gloomy forebodings.
a gloomy state of mind, esp. when habitual or prolonged; depression.
2. sober thoughtfulness; pensiveness.
3.Archaic.
a. the condition of having too much black bile, considered in ancient and medieval medicine to cause gloominess and depression.
b. black bile.
–adjective
4. affected with, characterized by, or showing melancholy; mournful; depressed: a melancholy mood.
5. causing melancholy or sadness; saddening: a melancholy occasion.
6. soberly thoughtful; pensive.
A pathological state of mourning which traps the subject into living in a crushed state. A mental state of revolt against the imperative that the ‘love object’ be relinquished. The shadow of the object falls upon the ego. The object loss becomes an ego loss.
Nostalgia
1. a wistful desire to return in thought or in fact to a former time in one's life, to one's home or homeland, or to one's family and friends; a sentimental yearning for the happiness of a former place or time: a nostalgia for his college days.
The longing for return to an idealised home.
Amnesia
1. Partial or total loss of memory, usually resulting from shock, psychological disturbance, brain injury, or illness.
In the case of public or collective memory, this could be the wilful exclusion of certain topics from public discourse or the collective sphere.
Disavowal
1. a disowning; repudiation; denial.
2. To disclaim knowledge of, responsibility for, or association with.
Repudiate
1. to reject as having no authority or binding force: to repudiate a claim.
2. to cast off or disown: to repudiate a son.
3. to reject with disapproval or condemnation: to repudiate a new doctrine.
4. to reject with denial: to repudiate a charge as untrue.
5. to refuse to acknowledge and pay (a debt), as a state, municipality, etc.
A defence mechanism triggered by the subject’s encounter with an intolerable force
Repress
1. to keep under control, check, or suppress (desires, feelings, actions, tears, etc.).
2. to keep down or suppress (anything objectionable).
3. to put down or quell (sedition, disorder, etc.).
4. to reduce (persons) to subjection.
5. Psychoanalysis. to reject (painful or disagreeable ideas, memories, feelings, or impulses) from the conscious mind.
–verb (used without object)
6. to initiate or undergo repression.
Neurosis
1. Also called psychoneurosis. A functional disorder in which feelings of anxiety, obsessional thoughts, compulsive acts, and physical complaints without objective evidence of disease, in various degrees and patterns, dominate the personality.
2. a relatively mild personality disorder typified by excessive anxiety or indecision and a degree of social or interpersonal maladjustment.
Subject
1. that which thinks, feels, perceives, intends, etc., as contrasted with the objects of thought, feeling, etc.
2. the self or ego.
Me, you, he/she, we, they
Object
1. a person or thing with reference to the impression made on the mind or the feeling or emotion elicited in an observer: an object of curiosity and pity.
2. anything that may be apprehended intellectually: objects of thought.
3. Metaphysics. something toward which a cognitive act is directed.
4. A focus of attention, feeling, thought, or action: an object of contempt.
What is/was valued or important (and has been lost)
Extended Literature// suggested authors
Sigmund Freud, esp - On Murder, Mourning & Melancholia
Jacques Lacan, esp - 6th seminar on desire and its interpretation
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno
Theodor Adorno
Julia Kristeva
Juergen Habermas
Clement Greenberg
Zygmunt Bauman
Walter Benjamin
Oscar Negt and Alexander Kluge
And many, many more…
Examples of Memory Pieces/Works
This is a fairly random sample, drawing on a variety of works, several of which are suggested by Charity Scribner, author of Requiem for Communism. These works are meant to be indicative of the breadth of works available and is in no way intended to be exhaustive!
Film
Krysztof Kieslowski – Three Colours (Blue, White, Red)
Andrzej Wajda - Man of Marble, Man of Iron
Florian Henckel Von Donnersmark – The Lives of Others
Rainer Werner Fassbinder – BRD Trilogy (Maria Braun, Veronika Voss, Lola)
Chantal Akerman – D’Est
Mark Herman – Brassed Off
Robert Zemeckis - Forrest Gump
Art
Anselm Kiefer - Generally. Eg Spiritual Heroes of Germany
Gerhard Richter - eg Looking at Meinhof
Joseph Beuys - Economic Values, and many others
Ilya Kabakov - eg The man who flew into space from his apartment
Christian Boltanski - eg East. West.
Pablo Picasso - eg Guernica
Gordon Matta Clark - eg Splitting
Damien Hirst - The Physical Impossibility of Death in the mind of someone living
Rachel Whiteread - eg House, Ghost, etc
Literature
Milan Kundera; Christa Wolf; Leslie Kaplan (& Marguerite Duras); Albert Camus; John Berger; WG Sebald; Robert Musil; Joseph Roth; Michel Houllebecq; Salman Rushdie;
Architecture
Public Monuments of any kind (think for example of the Jewish memorial in Berlin, the Metronom here in Prague, Nelson’s Column in London, The tombs of unknown soldiers in many locations…
National/regional parliaments, theatres, museums, galleries, flags, etc.
City plans and heritage monuments or areas, including protected/excluded areas, former/ current ghettoes, etc.
Specific buildings and sites such as the Palace of Science and Culture in Warsaw, the Lermonosov university in Moscow, The AlexanderPlatz TV Tower and the site of the former Palast der Republik in Berlin, the forthcoming Freedom Tower in New York.
Other: The states of Israel & Kosovo; Museums, Archives (eg OSCE or StaSi) and Depots; Art Exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale and Dokumenta and here in Prague – Communism never happened; TV programmes such as Retro, showcasing goods and products from another time. TV History programmes, Party political broadcasts – mixtures of the two such as Canadian Heritage minutes, etc, etc, etc, etc …
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