Common Purpose

The relationship between performance and curation has shift ed. A new attitude of fluid and pragmatic alliance has evolved as the sense of an essential antagonism between performance and curation recedes and the two fields discover a shared focus on aspects of social engagement and agency. This article considers an Australian socially engaged art project, the Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation (KSCA), which meshes curatorial and artistic practices in its efforts to reimagine and reanimate the future of a small country town. Employing a wide range of strategies, KSCA works closely with the local community to facilitate collective memory, reflection and social and environmental transformation. Deliberately avoiding traditional lines of artistic and institutional tension, KSCA employs an impure and inclusive approach that is emblematic of emerging forms of activist contemporary art.

Towards a pedagogy of reconciliation and transformation: A peace education through art initiative in response to 26/11

The 26/11 Mumbai attacks in India severely impacted the already strained Indo–Pak political relations and fuelled prejudice against the common people of Pakistan. Since the attacks, Indian people have found various expressions of collective memory and ways to commemorate the incident. While these serve as a remembrance of the attack, it also reinforces negative attitudes towards Pakistan and its people, hindering any prospects of peace and reconciliation. This article describes a peace education through art initiative implemented in a high school in Mumbai. It draws from a synergy of theoretical concepts in peace, reconciliation and conflict transformation for its curricular framework that has three inquiry processes: Examine–Envision–Envisage. This article describes the implementation and outcomes of the initiative that support the value of an integrated peace- and reconciliation-focused art education pedagogy aimed at promoting reconciliation in relation to ongoing/intractable conflicts. Furthermore, it highlights the importance of addressing negative emotions inherent in ongoing conflicts and how empathy might contribute towards reducing prejudice towards the ‘Other’.

The Audiovisual Turn of Recent Korean Documentary Cinema: The Time-Image, Place, and Landscape

This article discusses several documentary films since the 2010s that portray the place and the landscape related to Korea's social reality or a personal or collective memory of its past, classifying their common trope as the “audiovisual turn.” The trope refers to the uses of the poetic and aesthetic techniques to highlight the visual and auditory qualities of the images that mediate the landscape or the place. This article argues that the films’ experiments with these techniques mark formal and epistemological breaks with the expository and participatory modes of the traditional Korean activist documentary, as they create an array of Deleuzian time-images in which a social place or natural landscape is reconfigured as the cinematic space liberated from a linear time and layered with the imbrication of the present and the past. The images, however, are read as updating the activist documentary's commitment to politics and history, as they renew the viewer's sensory and affective awareness of the place and the landscape and thereby render them ruins.

Identity and memory as resilience: Applications of liberation psychology in a rural Maya Achi community

This study sought to understand interpretations of interconnections between historical trauma, contemporary violence, and resilience in a Maya Achi community currently engaged in promoting peace and social change through popular education. In particular, the ways in which participants drew upon identity and memory in articulating characteristics of community distress and resilience are discussed. The research is informed by liberation psychology and critical perspectives of mental health, particularly considering the challenges inherent in the promotion of collective memory of trauma and resistance in contexts of violence and humanitarian settings. Participant reflections on historical and contemporary violence highlight elements of collective distress, connecting identity and memory with acts of both oppression and resistance. Education and development are signaled as possible sites of resilience but also experienced as sites of power upholding the status quo. Diverse experiences and applications of identity and memory provide insight into the ways in which community organizations working in contexts of political violence might navigate polarizing and paradoxical discourses in order to subvert, co-opt, or adapt to hegemonic cultural, political, and economic power relations in the process of transformation for collective resilience.

Hypermnesia and Amnesia: Remembering (with) the Body and Post-Conflict Memorials and Architectures

The article consists of two parts. The first part (§§ 1–2) investigates the indiscriminate and absolute remembering and forgetting of everything, hypermnesia and amnesia as the extreme terms that research has used and uses for the different phenomena of memory, both in individuals and in social and political forms. In the face of these shifts it is thus indispensable to re-establish a critique of the paradoxical effects of memory aids and, at the same time, to seek new forms of remembrance that by mixing an experiential dimension and public sphere refocus the attention on the connection between latency, tension and experiential triggers of involuntary memory and on the ability to break through the fictions of collective memory. On this basis, the second part of the article (§§ 3–4) analyses how the experience of political and racial deportation during World War II drastically changed the idea of memorial architecture. More specifically, the analysis deals with a kind of memorial device that must represent and memorialise persons whose bodies have been deliberately cancelled. The aim is to present and analyse the artistic and architectonic efforts to refer to those forgotten bodies, on the one hand, and on the other hand to point out how for these new kind of memorials the body of the visitor is asked to participate, both physically and emotionally, in this somehow paradoxical search for lost bodies, offering oneself as a substitute.

Memoria situada y endriaga en La oscura memoria de las armas

In La oscura memoria de las armas (2008) Ramón Díaz Eterovic explores the topics of memory, Chile’s dictatorship, transition, violence and truth from the perspective of Detective Heredia, who goes through the streets of Santiago elucidating a murder that, based on rumours and on a conscious of effort of not forgetting history, it deals with relevant topics that were not talked about on the time of the transition to democracy, where memories become an "endriaga" at the sight of the establishment of the collective memory, birthed on the streets of the city. A memory made of testimonies dripping with the horror, torment and silence that the dictatorship imposed over the inhabitants of Santiago and allows us to configure the urban imaginary of Santiago de Chile at the time of the transition to democracy, introducing a new character into the national literary imaginary: the victim of the dictatorship who seeks justice and revenge.

Getting Back to a “New Normal”

Violence in educational institutions compounds and accumulates in our collective memory, as school shootings have become a ubiquitous phenomenon. When a young man carrying three guns entered Dawson College in Montréal, the downtown core came to a standstill. As bullets sprayed and ricocheted, one young woman was killed, 19 others wounded, and a community of 10,000 students, teachers, and staff were traumatized. This research employed a qualitative methodology, interviewing 10 senior administrators and managers in-depth. Findings document the salient role grief leadership played in restoring balance and an educational focus in the wake of a shooting on campus and served to reshape the community into one of learning, resilience, and courage. It details specific actions taken by administrators, which promoted healing and re-established equilibrium at a site of grief, loss, and terror. Administrative responses proved essential in helping to re-establish thriving at Dawson College.

Sposób kreowania postaci Juliusza Słowackiego w przestrzeni internetowej. Rekonesans

The article concerns the ways of creating Juliusz Słowacki’s image online. The problem is discussed based on graphic material (memes, facetiae) and fi lm material (productions in the series“Historia bez cenzury” [History without censorship], “Wielkie konflikty” [Great conflicts]). The authoress briefly discusses the viability of the Romantic paradigm in contemporary Polish cultureand the reminiscence of this presence, which is key in the image of the poet shaped by authors and internet users. Next, the authoress characterises the artist based on the collected research material. In most cases, Słowacki is presented as a negative character — a cowardly, pretentious, conceited man, jealous of the poetic talent of his fellow writers. He is often confronted with AdamMickiewicz, a character depicted much more positively. Summing up, the authoress considers the reasons for this type of simplification of the image of the Polish bard on the internet, and concludes that it is the result of building a schematic image of the world based on stereotypes; this image then begins to function in the collective memory of society.

Extended Antisemitism: The Case of Poznań

Extended Antisemitism: The Case of PoznańThis article examines contemporary antisemitism in Poznań. The first part of the study reconstructs how the contemporary collective memory in this Polish city was shaped, starting in the interwar period. Referring to earlier contexts, the author points to the founding myth of the medieval legend of the stolen Hosts, which prevails in Poznań. She also retraces the history of antisemitism at the Adam Mickiewicz University. In recent years, the university has disclosed archival records, including those connected with the introduction of ghetto benches and the numerus clausus rule, in this way attempting to atone for disgraceful events in its history. Reflecting on antisemitism in Poznań, the author asks what fuels it in the almost mono-ethnic city that Poznań is today, and introduces the term extended antisemitism. For the purposes of the article, she conducted interviews (using the Delphi technique) with researchers and social activists involved in Jewish issues. Antysemityzm rozszerzony: na przykładzie PoznaniaAutorka bada współczesny antysemityzm w Poznaniu. W pierwszej części opracowania rekonstruuje, jak kształtowała się współczesna pamięć zbiorowa w tym polskim mieście, począwszy od okresu międzywojennego. Następnie, odwołując się do kontekstów, wskazuje na dominujący w Poznaniu mit założycielski średniowiecznej legendy o skradzionych hostiach. Omawia też historię antysemityzmu na Uniwersytecie im. Adama Mickiewicza. W ostatnich latach uczelnia ujawnia źródła archiwalne, w tym materiały związane z tworzeniem getta ławkowego i z wprowadzeniem numerus clausus; w ten sposób stara się niejako zadośćuczynić haniebnym wydarzeniom ze swojej historii. Zastanawiając się nad antysemityzmem w Poznaniu, autorka zadaje pytanie, czym napędza się on dziś w niemal monoetnicznym mieście. Wprowadza pojęcie rozszerzonego antysemityzmu. Na potrzeby artykułu przeprowadziła wywiady metodą delficką z badaczami i społecznikami.