When I think about memory, I picture all the times I take note of something I do not want to forget. I know that there are many ways to keep and save memories, but that it is also possible that a body starts to work differently all of a sudden and loses them all forever. History can be turned upside down by revealing memories that are previously unknown. 
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Remembering signals more than an act of cognitive recall. To remember is to place a part of the past in the service of needs of the present, and also for the future. Remembering can also be thought of as a process of going into some kind of storage system in our mind—retrieving a record of a fact or experience we experienced at some earlier point. Consideration of memory requires less attention to issues of accuracy or authenticity than it does to the values, beliefs, and norms shaping cultures at a particular historical flashpoint.
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What memories tell us, more than anything, is the stakes held by individuals and institutions in attributing meaning to the past. We can think of memory as a dynamic entity, crafted and recrafted in dialogue with the political, social, and cultural directions of the present.
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Memory is polymorphic and thereby interpreted variously, depending on the context within which it is used. As such, memory studies can be envisioned as stretching along a spectrum of experience, from the personal, individual, and private to the collective, cultural, and public.
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Memory, contingent and multiple, exists also in relationship to history, the discipline that trades in narratives of the past. They are in a mutual relationship of exchange, in which history is also made of memory and memory has a historical dimension. 
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Of course, differing narratives of history as well as the uneven power relations rooted in disagreements between official historical narratives and individual society members’ accounts can create conflict in both stories and the contested sites over which history is remembered.
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This tension or outright conflict between history and memory is most evident in national myths concocted in relation with its history. Acknowledging memory's malleability, opens to further exploring the politics of memory as a means of sharpening the bounds of the interdisciplinary enterprise of memory studies. 
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When exploring the politics of memory, we examine not only what is being remembered but how and why, raising questions of identity and collectivity that strike at the core of human experience.
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Just as there are modes of remembering, there are modes of forgetting, and the two are intimately connected. Forgetting can be directed by the state, emanate from what may be seen as pure interests, emerge from lack of information, or take the form of a planned obsolescence.
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Last June I received the invitation to participate in an exhibition about memory and unmemory. In those weeks I was also reading every day about history and memory in the news, in messages and letters in my mailbox and in texts where I was looking for ways to explain endless war and pain.

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Yates, F. A. (1966): The Art of Memory. Routledge & K. Paul.

In The Art of Memory, Frances A. Yates, scholar of hermetic and occult philosophy, traces the history of mnemonic systems from the classical period of Simonides of Ceos in Ancient Greece, to the Renaissance era of Giordano Bruno, to the 17th century of Gottfried Leibniz. She writes that the reason why she worked on this book was her desire to contribute to the investigation of what at the time was considered a marginal subject, one that did not belong to any traditional discipline of modern scholarship. Unique in its angle when first published in 1966, it is considered today one of the major works that contributed to the emergence of a new field of academic research into the art of memory, by touching on vital points in the history of philosophy, psychology, religion, ethics, art, literature, and scientific method to reveal the necessity of a new discipline. 

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Graeber, D. (2015). Concerning Mental Pivots and Civilizations of Memory. In Severi C., The Chimera Principle: An Anthropology of Memory and Imagination. (xi-xxiii). HAU Books.

Reading David Graeber's 'Concerning mental pivots and civilizations of memory', I enjoyed learning about his encounter with Frances A. Yates' work. In the essay, he recalls his time as a graduate student in the Anthropology department in Chicago in the 1980s, and his excitement at his (re)discovery of The Art of Memory, which at the time sparked a thrill of hope regarding the possible formation of a new sub-discipline dedicated to the comparative study of mnemotechnics.
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It didn't happen exactly at that time, in his opinion, because it was too early for the field, due to the lack of emphasis on multidisciplinarity and acceptance of experimental methodological approaches in academia at the time that Yates’ book was written. But it did happen a few years later, with works like Carlo Severi's Le principe de la chimere: Une anthropologie de la memoire, of which Graeber's text is an enthusiastic foreword.

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Severi, C. (2015). The Chimera Principle: An Anthropology of Memory and Imagination (J. Lloyd, Trans.). HAU Books. (Original work published 2007)

Severi's book busts the comparative aesthetic assumptions about a distinction between orality and literacy, and the relationship between icon, ritual, and text. He raises questions about magic, knowledge, trauma, and imagination as important sites of knowledge and even creates new technical terminology, like chimera-objects and projective belief.
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The central argument of what he identifies as the chimera principle, is that imagination is a social and dialogic phenomenon, that works itself out through the mediation of objects that are at once paradoxical, startling and to some degree unfinished, that mobilize the imaginative capabilities of the recipient to fill in the blanks. He suggests that even what we commonly perceive as religious or magical belief can largely be explained by the workings of this unstable, intrinsically ambiguous and perpetually imaginative process of paradox and imaginative projection.
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As we think through our physical environment, we find ourselves among objects that, depending on the context, at times are simply devices of daily use, and other times embody forms of consciousness.
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An example mentioned by Severi in the book are the iconographies, like masks or clasps, utilized in the eastern Sepik region in Papua New Guinea. A wide number of studies interpret each of these objects according to what it represents or to the aesthetic or ritual use for which it is destined. However, they could also be studied with a different perspective, one aimed not so much at objects considered each on their own, but at the way in which they are classified by cultures and the relations that can be established between them. These objects assume functions within the totemic systems of naming characterizing the societies in which they exist and play an essential role in the memorization of names, which constitute the axis on which the whole of traditional knowledge is organized.
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The images discussed by Severi belong to a category of objects that holds significant importance in human thought, as they have the ability to engage our imagination in a way that links different minds into a cohesive thinking process, ultimately becoming focal points through which new forms of dialogic consciousness, new ways of thinking, are created.

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Bergson, H. (1988). Matter and Memory (N.M. Paul & W.S. Palmer, Trans.). Zone Books. (Original work published 1896)

The idea that memory is not only a material cognitive function lodged in the nervous system has also been explored by Henri Bergson in 1896 in Matière et mémoire. He makes a distinction between two different forms of memory. One concerns habits, is an automatic memory, while the other one registers the past in the form of image-remembrances, that take the form more of a contemplative nature.
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The first one is a habit memory concerned with repetition, serves a practical purpose, is inscribed within the body and it pertains to what Bergson calls recognition. Here, mechanisms of the body are habitually adapted to the circumstances in which it finds itself.
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The second one instead is a recollective memory, which seeks in the past the representations that can be best applied in the present. This is what Bergson calls attention. Recollective memory is not internal to the body, has a spiritual nature and cannot be replicated.
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He exemplifies this differentiation with the learning of a verse by heart. While the functional repetition of the verse is a mnemonic habit, the remembrance of the lesson of learning the verse is the memory of a fact, a distinctive action, that will never be recreated.
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Arendt, H. (1981). The Life of the Mind (M. McCarthy, Ed.). Harcourt. (Original work published 1977-1978)‍

Bergson's reflections on the dynamic interaction that constitutes our experience of the present are referred to by Hannah Arendt in The Life of the Mind, an exploration on how we think, why our inner lives eclipse the world of appearances, and what it means to have free will in a universe of fixed laws.
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In her work, Arendt considers the role of time and memory in understanding free will. Before investigating why we do what we do, Arendt claims that we must first understand how we know what we know.
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Memory, the ability of the mind to recall what is irrevocably past and thus out of reach of the senses, has always been the quintessential example of the mind's capacity to make the unseen visible. Through this ability, the mind appears to have a greater power than reality: it sets its strength against the inevitable transience of everything that can change and collects and recollects what otherwise would be lost.
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The time region in which this preservation occurs is the present moment of the reflective self, which Arendt explains – also by quoting what Bergson called enduring present (un présent qui dure) – as a sort of continuous today, a gap between past and future which exists as an extended now.

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Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and Repetition. (P. Patton, Trans.). Columbia University Press. (Original work published 1968)

Memory and time come into play also in Gilles Deleuze's book Différence et répétition. In this work, he elaborates on the notions of groundlessness and chaos, suggesting that the chaotic realm is filled with infinite differences that defy simple categorization. He challenges the idea of a pre-existing order and emphasizes the dynamic, ever-evolving nature of reality.
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When he describes the different levels of time within which repetition occurs, he refers to the active force of memory, which introduces discontinuity into the passage of time by sustaining relationships between more distant events. Memory transforms time and enacts a more profound form of repetition. 
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Relative to the passive synthesis of habit (which he describes also referring to Bergson), memory is virtual and vertical. It deals with events in their depth and structure rather than in their contiguity in time. 

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Wynter, S. (1995). 1492: A New World View. In V. L. Hyatt & R. Nettleford (Eds.), Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View (pp. 5-57). Smithsonian Institution Press.

In the midst of researching memory and history as sites of struggle, I came to Sylvia Wynter's '1492: A New World View'. In this essay, she questions the remembrance of 1492, the year when Cristoforo Colombo reached the New World, which is most often discussed either as a glorious achievement of discovery, or as a brutal invasion that led to genocidal extinction and environmental disaster.
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Sylvia Wynter asserts that our understanding of the 1492 event and its unfolding must move beyond the binaries of colonizer/colonized or perpetrator/victim that often dominate memory practices. She states that arguing from any one of the oppositional stances remains a product of the intellectual revolution of humanism, which still sets us in the colonial order. The binary European/Native totally ignores the formerly enslaved peoples of African descent, invisibilizing them on the side of death/nonhuman/enslavable, failing to reckon with systemic violence and racialized onto-epistemological order.
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Therefore, she proposes a third perspective from which to give meaning to 1492: a species view – a perspective beyond humanism, that aims to account for the human beyond the exclusivist, exceptionalist, and speciesist understanding of human activity. Her argument is presented as an invitation to take account of systemic omission and move what counts as human into new directions, re-write oppositional claims of memory, and work toward the human story, a ‘species memory’.

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Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman. Polity.

Examining humanism’s restricted notion of what counts as the human is foundational to understanding the emergence of a post-human turn in academic and intellectual discourse. In The Posthuman, Rosi Braidotti states that posthumanism is the historical moment that traces a different discursive framework by looking more affirmatively towards new ways of understanding the human subject. She identifies her thought as part of critical posthumanism, which has the objective to move beyond analytic posthumanism (which provides insights into ethical and conceptual questions about the status of the human, but is reluctant to approach the development of a theory of subjectivity) and develop affirmative perspectives on the posthuman subject.
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Memory has a fundamental role in her posthuman theory. The subjective perspective is a position constructed through an inherently imperfect narrative of recollected experiences and their affective metadata. Memory is the fluid context that positions the perspective of the subject in space and time. As it is not tethered to any objective reality, it can (re)construct the individual perspective through discursive practices. 
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Reading how Hannah Arendt, Sylvia Wynter, and Rosi Braidotti worked on exploring and expanding the subject of memory in sites of conflict, war, and violence, led me to considering the myriad forms of archive and documentary, and how they can be instruments of representation and narration that contribute to developing an artistic practice.
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The archive is not so much a site where the past can be found, but the beginning of a new phase of self or the beginning of one's own claim on a past that previously seemed elusive. The documentary does not expect to ratify any certainties within the real, but can call into question certain memorializations that were broadly accepted as certain.
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On this ground, how can art approach history and the narration of tragic events, especially when memory fades into a sort of institutional amnesia, a self-amnesty made by those in power?

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Joreige, L. (2017). Disappearance and Memory of the War. In M. Scotini & E. Galasso (Eds.), Politics of Memory. Documentary and Archive (pp. 81-91). Archive Books. (Italian edition published 2014)

In the essay 'Disappearance and Memory of the War', Lamia Joreige addresses these questions through her project Objects of War, in which she asked several people to provide an object that was related to their experience of the Lebanese Civil War. The objects and their stories create a space of what she calls 'performative memory', the re-enactment of something that has happened in the past and is re-enacted in the present. When someone remembers or their memory is stimulated by a question, what happens is the act of remembering or forgetting, which is an action where memory is performed in the present. She deems it critical to work with subjectivities and fragments in order to reckon with what remains as visible, as well as with what is missing and invisible.

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Genet, J. (1983). Four Hours in Shatila. (D. R. Dupêcher & Martha Perrigaud, Trans.). Journal of Palestine Studies, 12(3), pp. 3-22. (Original work published 1982)

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Finburgh Delijani, C. (2020). The Anti-Monumental Cemetery: Ghosts in Jean Genet’s ‘Quatre Heures à Chatila’. French Studies, 74(4), pp. 587-604.

In September 1982, Jean Genet was in Beirut during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, when the Sabra and Shatila massacre took place. The massacre, in which up to 3,500 Palestinian refugees were killed, was condemned by the United Nations General Assembly as an act of genocide.
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Jean Genet was able to visit the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut four days after the event, and in response wrote a graphic account of the horrors he witnessed in ‘Quatre Heures à Chatila’.
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When depicting Beirut and the massacres, he recounts the memory of dead bodies, describing them as restless—they cannot rest in peace, seem on the verge of rising up from the grave to demand restitution.
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He cannot speak of or for them, and this inability to afford the dead an articulate voice seems to kill them again. 
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In ‘Quatre Heures à Chatila’, mourning is both infinite and finite, political and radical, since through the militancy of mourning, concrete political gains must be made for the Palestinians.
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As observed by Clare Finburg Delijani in her essay 'The Anti-Monumental Cemetery: Ghosts in Jean Genet’s Quatre Heures à Chatila’, Genet’s act of memorialization, of counter-memory, remains incomplete from both an ethical and a political perspective. From an ethical point of view, the obligation to do justice to the other can never be settled. Politically, as long as justice is not obtained, mourning must be perpetual, so that the restitution of justice might be possible.
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Palestinian scholars and artists have called attention to the distinctiveness of memory in the Palestinian experience across time. In 'A Past Not Yet Passed: Postmemory in the Work of Mona Hatoum', Chrisoula Lionis suggests that the notion of postmemory, which makes room for personal association into collective recollection, is the most suitable instrument to discuss the Palestinian understanding of memory. Her definition of postmemory is drawn from Kaja Silverman’s notion of heteropathic recollection, based on the idea that a person is able to carry memories of another through a process of heteropathic identification.
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This applies to the Palestinian experience, in which postmemory is both grounded in the surrogate memories and trauma of the Nakba and carried over into the contemporary experience of exile, dispossession, and war. 
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Memory transcends generational and historical divides and makes its way into the present as a living history.

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Hatoum, M. (1988). Measures of Distance [Video]

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Lionis, C. (2014). A Past Not Yet Passed: Postmemory in the Work of Mona Hatoum. Social Text, 32(2) (119)), pp. 77-93.

Mona Hatoum's Measure of Distance is a fifteen-minute video portraying Hatoum’s and her mother’s experiences of exile. The video begins with blurred images that slowly become recognizable as body parts. Arabic writing consisting of letters from Hatoum’s mother, reflecting the pain of exile, appear over the naked figure of her body. In the video, we can hear Hatoum reading her mother’s letters and fragments of their conversations out loud.
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The difficulty of pinning down who is telling their own story and therefore to whom the story belongs, suggests that the memory and experience of exile is shared by both mother and daughter. By narrating her mother's experiences through multiple mediums both close and distant to the audience, Hatoum presents an experience of postmemory in which the divide between them, mother and daughter, artist and subject, collapses.

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Azoulay, A. A. (2019). Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. Verso.

The urgent need to refuse imperial violence, experienced across centuries, from the Americas in 1492 to Palestine in 1948, and up until today, is at the core of Ariella Aïsha Azoulay's Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism; a work in which she calls for the recognition of the imperial foundations of knowledge and the refusal of its control and abuse.
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Unlearning imperialism means approaching our current reality, which is rooted in imperialism, with a framework of a pre-imperial understanding, one which rejects the imperial temporality of progress. This can be achieved by practising what she calls potential history, which is not an alternative history, but rather an intentional attempt to deny what was historicized by making repressed potentialities present again within the fabricated field of imperial history. 
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Potential history asks historians to avoid the imperial impulse to fill gaps like imperial explorers themselves, and rather give space for potential presents that missing, erased, and destroyed pasts could have and still can bring forth.

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Hak Kyung Cha, T. (unrealized). White Dust From Mongolia [Film]

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Kirkland, K. (2021, November 5). In Search of Lost Time: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Cinematic Imagination. Another Gaze. https://www.anothergaze.com/search-lost-time-theresa-hak-kyung-chas-cinematic-imagination/

In May 1980, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha travelled from New York to Seoul, to begin working on her film White Dust From Mongolia.
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The film remains unrealized due to her murder. What we know from fragments of scripts, storyboards and footage, is that it was to be narrated during the time when Korea was under Japanese imperial rule (1909-1945), and set primarily in China, where many Koreans received asylum. Essential resources for the project would have been interviews that Cha planned to conduct with people who had lived through the years of occupation and exile.
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The main character of the film is a woman affected by amnesia, whose name is not known, in the process of coming into memory. 
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As Katie Kirkland writes in the essay 'In Search of Lost Time: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Cinematic Imagination', Cha saw memory as a psychic phenomenon as much as a form of embodied knowledge.
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Anonymity gives the character the opportunity to appear through multiple identities – a young girl at the cinema, a maid, a merchant woman, an orphan, a mother – composing a multifaceted portrait of female labor and reproduction. 
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The woman's experiences of abandonment, war, disappearance, lack of memory and words, create an allegory for Korean history, physical and psychological displacement, and the search for memory, identity and language. 
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When we remember, we can access all our experiences at once. Chronology is irrelevant. White Dust From Mongolia manifests this in its structure, in which time is cyclical, overlaying, illinear. Stories develop with their own directions, turns, and overlaps which open up memory into a location for political praxis.

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The bibliographic research portrayed in this essay was inspired by the invitation to participate in the exhibition The Tides of Lethe, curated by Anastasia Fugger, Giulia Ottavia Frattini, Tim Plamper and Yorgos Stamkopoulos (July 22 – 24, 2025, Berlin, Germany).

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In the show, the bibliography was accompanied by an image of memory wheels designed by Giordano Bruno featured in Frances A. Yates' The Art of Memory, and it was printed on A5 flyers that visitors – like the readers of this essay – could pick up, read, share, and explore.

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