The Goethe Institut has
invited artists to reflect upon memory and its loss, generating a variety of
projects in seven cities across the continent.
Silvia Rottenberg
Radio Conversa (photo by
Observatorio de Poéticas Sociales, courtesy the Goethe Institute)
BUENOS AIRES —
Dictatorships and armed conflicts have been all too familiar in South America’s
recent histories. To take stock of these experiences, in 2016 the Goethe
Institut initiated a regional project in which artists were invited to reflect
upon memory and its loss, generating a variety of projects in seven cities
across the continent. Artists have tackled essential questions such as: What do
we remember, as individuals and a society? And, what have we forgotten? How
will we remember in the future? Is memory something fixed or continuously
changing, shaped by the present? Thanks to the project, Montevideo, Santiago de
Chile, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Bogotá, Lima, and Buenos Aires have become
sites to rethink these histories and how they will be remembered in the future.
The project ‘The Future of
Memory: Poetics of Memory and Forgetfulness in South America’ originated in
Bogotá, just after the peace agreement was signed between the Colombian
government and Revolutionary Armed Forces a year and a half ago. The people of
Colombia had suffered violence for several decades, leaving generations more
divided than united, said Oscar Moreno Escarraga, one of the artists in the
project, in an interview with the Deutsche Welle. The only way to counteract
this is by talking to and knowing the other, Escarraga suggests with his
project Radio Conversa. He assembled a simple house — based upon the dwellings
that displaced people build — into a temporary radio station and travelled
around the country with it, talking with local people about their memories,
revealing Colombia’s social and cultural makeup.
In Lima, Peru, the Goethe
facilitated a political theater class at the Universidad del Pacifico where the
stage was used for 20 performances that channeled and grappled with recent
social injustices. And in Montevideo the collective Hornero Migratorio
collaborated with a school’s students and their families to reconstruct children’s
games that no longer exist; they then displayed those into a jointly made song,
so that these memories could be passed along to another generation.
For nine months, a team of
curators, artists, and human rights activists researched the memories of Vila
Autodromo, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, which was
stripped of its population between 2014 and 2016 because of the Olympics and
World Cup. By the end of this project, the former residents came up with the
idea of a Museum of the Displaced, placing flags and sharing stories in their
former place of dwelling.
Twenty years ago, the
public park Parque de la Memoria was created in Buenos Aires as a monument to
victims of state terror. To celebrate this milestone, a more conventional
exhibition, also titled The Future of Memory, opened last Saturday as part of
the Goethe project. It features four very different artistic projects by local
artists Marcelo Brodsky, Gabriela Golder, the Etcetera Group, and Mariano
Sperrati………………
https://hyperallergic.com/434365/goethe-institut-the-future-of-memory/
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