Memoire

Title:

At the Threshold of Moments

Abstract:

In this paper, I will try to trace my documentation instinct which leads me questions about my identity and makes me anxious about losing my memories and having amnesias. I am trying to capture the moment and collecting memories via different type of visualization tools, in a sense of social and personal context. I am constructing a personal nostalgia through constructing memory. “Capturing” these moments is a communication way with my own past. We are rewriting and reshaping our memories involuntarily. However, in late capitalism of this post-modernist era, we live in great speed and vast consumption society. The average life of people is prolonged while the average life of products, objects and buildings is shortened and this leads to cultural amnesia both in terms of personal and cultural memory. While the longevity of human life is changing, how can we build an identity and keep our memories as they are? In this paper, I’ll try to explore links and patterns between building an identity, amnesias and remembrances in the political context of personal and collective memory.

Keywords:

Memory studies, identity, documentation, threshold, late capitalism, nostalgia, archive, politics of amnesia

Background/Overview:

How do we remember?

What is a collective memory and what is the main relation with personal memory and narratives? (Halbwachs)

Politics of Amnesia (Eagleton)

Politics of Nostalghia

How modernity forgets? (Connerton)

How societies remember? (Connerton)

All that is solid melts into the air (M. Berman)

Human Life Cycle

My Works:

From photography, data visualizations to illustrations, my personal works are mostly taking shape around moments and patterns of instant experiences.

Introduction:

After finishing the paper, I’ll sum up the questions I asked in the paper.

Conclusion/Future Works:

In conclusion, I’ll explain my documentation pattern and answers that I found in context of the rest of the paper.

David Wojnarowicz says “to make the private into something public is an act that has terrific repercussions on the pre-invented world”, where “the pre-invented world” is where the world we have inherited with all of its problems and prejudices. I am making my private experiences and observations into something public in the different form of visualizations, in our world of amnesia and transitivity.

When you repress your own memory, it is impossible to protect your identity, personality, individuality, but there is a balance between keeping the memories as they are and not being conservative and living in the past. Is it possible to “move on” without changing? I began to wonder if change equals destruction. Preservation, memory, protection, family, culture, spirit, power, love is the “good” terms. Change is violence, anger, spite, unrest, instability, ignorance and it stands against the good. But I want to ask, is there a sharp border, or do we create that line between good and bad in the context of society? We have a habit of thinking the physical, ethical, social, material, ecological and aesthetic together as single “plenum”, “space” of “fabric”. Everything is all of these things at once. We remember things without decomposing anything. However, I believe there is another dimension between them and there is no linear history.