Silenced Voices, Recaptured Memories (original) (raw)
Related papers
SoundEffects - An Interdisciplinary Journal of Sound and Sound Experience
Last night as I was falling asleep, I put in my earbuds to listen to an audiobook. To get into the Nordic mood to write for a journal coming out of Scandinavia, I scrolled to one of Henning Mankell’s famous detectives, Kurt Wallander. On the verge of sleep, somewhere between consciousness and unconsciousness – like memory itself – I listened to Wallander, through his narrator, listening to the room at the scene of the crime, waiting for it to speak to him, to voice what had happened there. Through the haze of half-sleep I wondered whose memory was being voiced in that assemblage comprised of the iPod and earbuds, the audiobook, the room, the narrator, the author and my own memories of watching Krister Henriksson play Wallander and of listening to other Wallander books? And when I woke today and slid the earbuds out of my ears, I felt ready to attend to assemblages and the memories that they voice.
Public silences, private voices: Memory games in a maritime heritage complex
2009
No one has evcr p:lid much atrcnrion to Nietzsche when, accounring for :'In expcn Si\'l' surpl us af history fo r life, he stated tha r ir is "complctc!y impossible to Ji\'c without forgcning" (J 874). This argument seems to bc complerely ar odds with the general va lue [bar is llssigned to remembering, instead af forgerring, in modem and I,:ontem porary times. ln a r(.'Cent seminal paper, Paul Con ncrron {200S} pre ósely nOtes (har forgerting is ohen secn as a bilure whcreas remembcring IS seen as a virmc. No o ne is proud af hav ing forgorren peoplc, Mmes, facts. cvents. Th ls is usua ll y considcrcd a faulr, lhe lack of a faculry ar a kind af ma lfu ncrjon lh ar gen era llr fa ils t O convey aur scnse Df historically laden individual o r collectivc self. FlIrrhermore, rhc infatuarion widl histor)' expericnced fro m carl)' mo<lerniry and up tO lhe presem gives evidence tO rhe imporrance of remcmbering. nor forgerring. ati o ras, erhnic commll nirics, " copies, cultu rcs are ali consriruted hisro rically, (ha r is, b)' referencc tO a cerrain-mo rc-o r~less srablc-paS(. T his 3ssumprion has led lO a li sorr of srud ies devOled both (O lhe W :l)' l he past shapcs o ur sensc o f self and idenriry and [O rhe way o ur presem values, pe rceprions and aspa3tions con srantly shape rhar pa sto T he growrh o f a ficl d of inqu iry (ha r C<l n be labcled " Memo ry Sw dics" is a conseq uence o f rhese concerns. Rur mcmory invo lves forgcrn ng as much as (emcmbe ring. ln order to remember some rhings properl y we havc to (orger others. This is as true for individu ais as iI is for gro llps and COlllmuni, ies. Memory is nor rhe S:l me as rhe plsr evenrs as the)' did in faer rakc place in rhc p.lst, Rather, ir is rhe way wc represem thc !'ast-or a p<lcr oí ir-in the preseot, rcmov ing from ir ali those issucs thar do 001 CODVC)' ou r sense o(self. As sllch, mcmor}' is nor lust rhe pasr as we remembcr ir; ir is al50 rhe palio! <: IS we have forgonen ir. TIlat is probably why Ni etzSChe <l Iso sra tcd rhar "(or getting belongs to aI! action" (18 74) because for someone to ca rr)' 011 il1 life he nmst disca rd rhose C'venrs (har are either disruptive to [heir cx isrcnce ar simpl)' fai l to COIlVC)' the cultu ral fnbric in ,."h ich rhe)' :I rc placcd. Ii wc are nO{ m ru m fhe presem imo <I graveya rd of the pasr, we need to forget as much as we need to rememllCr. ln this sensc, rcmcmbering and forgcrring 3re bo rh producrive, tha r is, both are me<:l ningfu l acrh'ities. \Virh some cxccprions, this assumprio n h<:l5 nm, ho wc"er, kcpr up wirh Illuch of fhe acadcm ic deb:\tc o n culrural memory. Most 3cademic work 0 11 memory foctlses lOS
Voices of collective remembering
2002
Wertsch, James V. Voices of collective remembering / James V. Wertsch. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.
Echoes of our forgotten ancestors
The World of Music, 2006
The opinions expressed in this periodical do not necessarily represent the views of the members of the advisory boards nor of the institutions involved. Cover Illustration: see page 7. University of Bamberg the world of music vol. 48(2)-2006 Echoes of Our Forgotten Ancestors
The Daughters of Memory, Part 3
The selection below is the final part of “The Daughters of Memory,” a chapter from a work-in-progress, intended as a follow-up to my recent book, Paleopoetics: The Evolution of the Preliterate Imagination (Columbia University press, 2013; paperback edition, November 2014). My current project sets out to explore 1) the transformations that narrative and lyric composition underwent when their medium shifted from public performance to private reading and 2) the neurocognitive implications of this shift for visual and auditory imagination. The selection below, Part 3, should be read as a continuation of the argument introduced in Part 1, “Music, Language, and the News from Mt. Helicon” and developed in Part 2, “Music and the Emotional Brain.” In this concluding essay, “The Pleasures of the Inner Dance,” I examine the motor aspects of the Muses art, mousikê, from overt dance movements to covert (inner) speech, and conclude with some thoughts on the pleasure of musical experience.
Entanglements: Experiments in Multimodal Ethnography, 2018
Found and bought a few years ago at an Athens flea market by visual artist and avid record-collector Panos Charalambous, a body of 19 rare acetate 78 rpm. records, made in the United States in the late 1950s by the Greek migrant Konstantinos Chronis and his family, triggers a series of ethnographic and artistic encounters that bring out the role of vocality and phonography in the production and reproduction of memory. Konstantinos Chronis, who migrated to the USA in the beginning of the 20th century, sent these private recordings to his brother and his family back in Greece as a form of vocal letters, including folk songs and nostalgic narratives, family news and highly emotional promises about meeting them once again. Anthropologist Panayotis Panopoulos traces the social life of these records backwards, meeting their original receivers, members of the family and co-villagers of Konstantinos Chronis in Athens and the mountainous village of Roino in Arcadia region, Peloponnese. Vocal traces of more than half a century ago, probably considered forever lost, return to stir up memory, which was also the strong stimulus for the records’ production in the first place. Different layers of memory are assessed and discussed as various performances and levels of (phonographic) vocality accumulate through time. The artist’s intention in the project to resurrect the voices of the dead among their living relatives and village community meet the anthropologist’s interest to reassess the experience of the records’ reception and social life, in a performance of ethnographic/ artistic DJing, through which the recorded voices address their original receivers once again in a meaningful gesture of mending a broken chain of contact and communication.
Dialogues for the Future: Countering the Genealogy of Amnesia
Dialogues for the Future: Countering the Genealogy of Amnesia, 2020
Edited by Marina Gržinić and Šefik Tatlić In collaboration with Valerija Zabret, Jovita Pristovšek, Tjaša Kancler, and Sophie Uitz Centre for Cultural Decontamination CZKD, Belgrade, Serbia; Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria; Peek Project No. AR 439-G24/IBK, 2020 ISBN 978-86-88001-19-9 (CZKD) Centre for Cultural Decontamination CZKD, Belgrade, Serbia Austrian Science Fund (FWF): AR439 Academy of Fine Arts Vienna The book Dialogues for the Future: Countering the Genealogy of Amnesia arose from the research carried out by the PEEK Project No. AR 439-G24/IBK, whose full title is “Genealogy of Amnesia: Rethinking the Past for a New Future of Conviviality.” This is an interdisciplinary arts-and-theory-based research project funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and developed at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, from 2018 to 2020. During this time, we created an online video archive entitled “Countering the Genealogy of Amnesia.” It consists of seventy hours comprising eighty-two interviews/positions as well as the recordings of the symposium “GENEALOGY OF AMNESIA: Crushing Silences, Constructing Histories” held at the mumok in 2018, Vienna, thus tying together the three sites that constitute the “Genealogy of Amnesia”: Belgium, Austria, and Bosnia and Herzegovina/Croatia/Serbia and “Republika Srpska.” This book comprises sixty-six interviews in the form of deep reflections concerning territories and histories of genocides, dispossession, racism, antisemitism, turbo-nationalism, discrimination, silencing, oblivion: Belgium, Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina/Croatia/Serbia and “Republika Srpska,” Slovenia and Spain. We hope this book will contribute to establishing links between the antagonization of racism/fascism and the critique of (neoliberal) global necrocapitalism as a colonial, racial system of dominance. It means that we are calling for the severing of ties between Eurocentric epistemology and its monopoly on the definition of class-sensitive, as well as feminist and LGBT*QI discourses.