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This article delves into the relationship between memory and materiality, examining how memory is preserved and transformed in places, landscapes, monuments, objects, and bodies. It explores the significance of written and oral cultures, institutionalized narratives, and the fluidity of multiple stories. The role of monuments, memorials, museums, anti-memorials, residues, ruins, and environments of memory is also analyzed. The discussion encompasses the authority of archives, shared experiences, collective remembrance, and the various forms memory takes, from prose and narrative to ideology and creativity.
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Memory’s materiality and archaeologies of memory in places, landscapes, monuments, objects, bodies February 19, 2009
“Only that which does not cease to hurt remains in memory” Neitzsche
history vs. memory (official) history (collective) memory written/literate culture oral culture institutionalized narratives multiple fluid stories monuments, memorials, museums anti-memorials, spontaneous monuments, residues, ruins, places and environments of memory authority of archives shared experiences, collective remembrance prosaic, narrative, ideological poetic and creative fixed, bounded and mummified dynamic and fluid- performed inscribed anchored to the past by the body always discursive discursive/non-discursive
Archaeology? “Little bastard sister of collecting?” questions of memory and its materialized forms of the past • palimpsest: • Paper, parchment, or other writing material designed • to be reusable after any writing on it has been erased. • 2. In extended use: a thing likened to such a writing surface, • esp. in having been reused or altered while still retaining traces of its earlier • form; a multilayered record. • 3. Physical Geogr. Of a landscape or landform, esp. a glaciated topography or a drainage • pattern: exhibiting superimposed features produced at two or more distinct periods. • 4. Geol. Of a sediment or deposit: that has been reworked since it was first laid down.
world as a palimpsest landscape an archive of past human practices and cultures? Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus from Bibliothèque nationale de France
Whenever spaces are shuffled, rebuilt, or ruined, shadows remain. Example of an architectural palimpsest in downtown Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Athenian Acropolis in ealy 19th c.. Edward Dodwell, Views in Greece (1821)
Mesopotamian practices of remembering and the building as a repository of history, an archive Akkadian words of bodily orientation and the sense of time warku: back, future panu: front, past
How is memory sustained and (re-)configured? • ritual performances, festivals, commemorations • (gatherings) • construction activity, building practice • (technological knowledge) • oral traditions, oral culture, storytelling, desire • archiving, collecting, hoarding, digital storing, • back-up (museums, mementoes, computing) • production of texts, annals, inscriptions • writing of official histories • visual representations, imaging, imagining • mapping the world: located, site-specific practices • (topographies of remembrance) • also known as “worlding of the world”
Neolithic in the Near East: early sites of socialization “neolithic revolution”: domestication of wheat, barley, sheep, goat: early settled communities (ca 10,000 to 6000 BC)
gobeklitepe pre-agricultural social interaction and cult practice, feasting, visual/architectural culture
