Personal and collective memory-making are usually studied on large scales that bridge rather extensive temporal distances, at least in human time. What is overlooked are the kinds of ordinary phenomena mundane memories are made of. The routines of keeping and recurring records, taking notes and planning the proximate future as well as representations thereof and the tools used to accomplish such activities often seem neither especially consequential nor important.
Addressing speakers from different sciences and humanities, from the arts and literature as well as from museums, curatorial institutions and public agencies, the workshop explores the practices and representations of mundane memories in artistic works, social organisations as well as in media forms and technologies from both historic and current perspectives.
Given mundane memories’ historic and contextual ambivalence, they come with a moral charge to set claims and requirements about their significance. Frames of meaning, cultural practices and socio-political cleavages profoundly inform their ethics of attention and recognition that impact upon which mundane memories become normalised while others are rendered redundant, suspicious or precarious.
To view the full programme for the workshop, click on the link below:
MundaneMemoriesProgramme_March2017