MEMORY LOSS IN ART #2

This symposium brings together Brazilian, French, and international faculty members, researchers, and artists to explore the issue of memory erasure in the arts (visual arts, theater, performance, film, and literature). If, as Susan Sontag said, history is what we collectively decide to remember, artists, historians, and anthropologists are increasingly emphasizing what we collectively decide to forget. The related themes of memory and the writing of history will provide a framework for addressing the role of archives in contemporary artistic practices.
The archival paradigm confronts all threats to memory—amidst heterogeneous spaces and times, which are constantly changing within contemporary cultural contexts, in a political environment that is often excessively unstable. Within this shifting historical framework, and as a consequence of uneven flows of transmission, appropriation, and cultural decentralization, we observe, in largely unexplored places—those territorial and human geographies omitted from official narratives—the existence of numerous discoveries of enigmatic, long-hidden histories. And paradoxically, these discoveries also mirror a current process of disinformation that permeates the most visible spheres of societies whose values are constantly being called into question in terms of their political orientation.

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