De-Placing Future Memory

De-Placing Future Memory is an inter-disciplinary collaborative research project comprising two workshops in May 2009 and September 2009 and an exhibition of artworks resulting from the workshops to be held September-October 2009.

The project looks at the transmission of memory across time and space. The way that materiality and art practice can help us to understand how future memory is embodied in places and objects and how this in turn affects senses of belonging. This also relates to immigrant cultures, through the nature of the memory-place bond and the ways that dis- and de-placed communities create meaningful memory monuments.

Negotiations about identity, homeland and attachment to place, are often at the root of investigations of contemporary migrations and politics in conflict regions. But it is rare that the impact of the physical world, and its role must be brought into consideration.

Monuments and places are perceived as containers of memory, but they also actively shape that perception and allow it to persist into the future. By investigating the agency of the physical world, De-Placing Future Memory seeks to comprehend the permeability of the bond between memory and place. For example, the power of a war monument depends on both: a shared understanding of memories of war from the past and its continuing impact on the viewers’ experience, hence projecting memory into the future.

Similarly the power of an artwork relies on its ability to translate the shared human experience while shifting our perception of that same world on which it draws for inspiration. Hence, as part of the two workshops, visual artists will illustrate the methods of their artistic practice through artist-led journeys and an exhibition.

Through the collaboration of historians, archaeologists, geographers, anthropologists, and scholars from politics and drama as well as practicing artists, De-Placing Future Memory addresses the following questions:

What causes a shift or break in the memory of a place?
How does the physical world effect the tenacity of the bonds between memory, place and belonging?
How are futures of anticipated audiences embodied in monuments and objects?
In what ways does the experience of displacement and mobility in particular affect future memory?
How can meaningful memory monuments be created out of archives of the dis- or de-placed?
In what way can answers to the above questions be furthered through a better understanding of, and participation in, artistic practices?

For further information please contact:

Project Manager:
Elena Isayev
Department of Classics and Ancient History, University of Exeter

Project Assistant:
Gillian Ramsey
Department of Classics and Ancient History, University of Exeter

De-Placing Future Memory is funded as part of the AHRC initiative Beyond Text

Here is a link to the Beyond Text interactive website for De-Placing Future Memory

Beyond Text

The project is supported by The Interdisciplinary Research Network in Migrations at the University Exeter