Memories in Translation

Abstract

In a globalized world, paradigms of remembering and commemoration increasingly undergo migration and become transplanted across borders. When Francisco de Goya’s El Tres de Mayo (1814) is repainted by artists in highland Andes (2003) or when Daniel Libeskind’s design of the Jewish Museum Berlin (2001) is referenced in Buenos Aires memorial dedicated to the victims of state terror (2007) we witness obvious cases of not only cultural translation, but also memory transference. The aesthetics of memory not only travels here across time and space, but becomes appropriated for different agendas and adapted for the needs of a new audience. If memory, however, is indeed portable, what implications does it have for curating difficult knowledge in a global context? Taking as a starting point Michael Rothberg’s (2009) idea of “multidirectional memory”, which suggests that memories are not linear or hierarchical, but are subject to the process of communication and cross‐referencing, we would like to look at the borrowing, traveling, and transmigration of memories and memorial frameworks in the form of aesthetic representations from specific experiences of collective violence to others. This panel will investigate transfers between different kinds of traumatic memory, including the Shoah, the colonial past, ethnic cleansing, or military dictatorships, intending to find patterns of rejection or incorporation of globalized memory in the context of local aesthetic practices of remembrance.

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