Radical
awareness
of
the present
In the framework of the Tandem project of MitOst, Berlin, Castrum Peregrini – Intellectual Playground and the Centre for Humanities, University of Lviv, Ukraine realise a long-term collaboration project that will examine ‘dynamic’ cultural heritage as an everyday experience.
Mapping Future Heritage wants to collect sites of memory which are forgotten, neglected, not yet discovered, difficult, or just too obvious to stand still. Those sites get significance by the unique combination of human stories and ideas that have historically loaded them. The story of a place, the story of people and the story of ideas make for a unique kaleidoscope worth discovering. Identifying and registering those places and facilitating an artistic intervention in them allows for unusual encounters with the past that have the potential to shape and influence a future life. In the first small exhibition you will see 4 projects about four sites identified by the two project initiators Castrum Peregrini, Amsterdam and The Centre for the Humanities, Lviv. They are the beginning of a project that will include an increasing number of partners in different countries. Stay tuned and please feedback to us sites, that are worth unlocking.
” Modern technology has allowed for a huge increase in the capacity to store, categorise, interpret, transfer and present heritage and memories in the form of archives, libraries, collections and databases. In this vein heritage has been approached more and more in terms of memory work. A lively theoretical discourse in the last 40 years , among others, has ensured the framing of heritage as a phenomenon with its own history, not merely a material relict but also a cultural process.This process is not only an individual or social one, it is an activity occurring in the present, in which the past is continuously modified and redescribed even as it continues to shape the future. Cultural memory links the past to the present especially where the mediation of difficult or tabooed moments of the past are concerned, moments that impinge upon the present. Cultural memory is the product of collective agency rather than psychic or historical accident, it is bound to specific sites and global at the same time. It is not something of which one happens to be the bearer, although memory is often so habitual that it seems automatic, but something one performs. Acts of memory are performed by individuals in a cultural framework that encourages such acts. Art and other cultural artifacts can mediate between the parties to the traumatic scene, and between these and the viewer. To enter memory the traumatic events of the past need to be made narratable.”
Travelling and exhibition
The Mapping Hidden Heritage project will launch the web application in a travelling exhibition that will display artists work on, in and with heritage sites. The exhibition will be on display in Moldova in 24-28 May 2012 and in Amsterdam in autumn 2012. The website will be launched in May 2012.
The projects so far
Au/Ra, Amsterdam (The Netherlands)
After Aura, Amsterdam (The Netherlands)
InsideOut, Lviv (Ukraine)
Agora, Lviv (Ukraine)
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