Marina Grzinić, Memory and History and the act of remembering

February 16, 2018

at Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA),16-17.2.2018, Seminar, The Boundary Condition. About the archive and its limits

Lecture Summary

In the time of neoliberal global necrocapitalism we are increasingly confronted with a political and social amnesia that profits without the past, producing more and more processes of de-historicization and de-politicisation. Central to these processes is the logic of (neoliberal) repetition that produces at least two different procedures of (de)historicization. On one side we have the logic of the neoliberal Western world that works as a pure trans-historical machine, and on the other, in the East and in the South of Europe, we detect forced techniques of embracing historicization as totalization. In both cases the result is a suspension of history that works with a primary intention to dispose of any alternative within it! My idea is to provide some examples, and, more, to try to define these processes on a much wider scale in order to see their political, social and cultural consequences.

The presentation is based on the new insights provided by the research project I am in charge of at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, with the title “Genealogy of Amnesia: Rethinking the Past for a New Future of Conviviality” (funded through the Programme for Arts-based Research PEEK, by the FWF, Austrian Science Fund, in the period from 2018 to 2020).