Ghostly Memories – (Con)Texts

Part of the seminar series entitled Insularities, Immunities, Communities

In Insularities, Immunities, Communities, we investigate the conception of community — and practice thereof, in the Western and Global North tradition — that is in imperialist racist capitalism. Community has been dominantly understood alongside the lines of insularities and immunities, that is, principles of separation between territories, between bodies, between the ones that count and the ones that don't, the ones that are exposed and the ones that are included, the ones that are predated and the ones that are allowed to flourish. Together with writers, artists, theoreticians and activists, we will look for other ways to understand – and practice – community.

Memory work is highly political, and often follows the lines of these same regimes of separation: What and who has the right to be remembered? How? Who can take part in the way memory work is done? Which memories are historicized and where? How are memories immaterially transmitted?  Ghostly Memories, a course within this seminar, takes up these questions directly.

What remains of a history once its monuments are gone — or once it never had any? We start from two apparently opposite gestures. On one side, the monument and its afterlives: Mechthild Widrich's rethinking of monumental care as an ethics of shared public space, not a closed relation to the past. On the other, everything that inscribes memory into the public sphere without becoming stone — sound, performance, rumour, dispersion, the things that pass through a place rather than sit in it.

Between these two, we'll work with a decolonial understanding of "ghostly memories": not memories of the past, but memories that haunt the present — that structure it, unsettle it, keep making demands on it. Following Saidiya Hartman, we'll read the archive against its own silences, and ask what it means to fabulate speculatively where the record simply stops.

Across sessions we'll move between monuments and their refusals, ghosts and their politics, documents and their fictions — building a shared vocabulary for thinking memory as something that lingers, rather than something that's over.

30% Attendance
40% Engagement in discussion, preparation & collaboration
30% Presentation of one artwork /artwork project 

This course is conceived of together with Antoine Turillons course Ghostly Memories – Re(Sites)

Think about taking them together