spaces of/as participatory memory
DESCRIPTION
At locations across the globe, people are creating impromptu spaces to memorialize and celebrate events. From the peace walls of Belfast to the memorials left after 9/11 in New York City, participants are writing on walls, leaving notes, and placing mementos on chain-link fences. While these spaces are outside of any officially sanctioned monument, they serve as a way for people to participate in memory-making activities. Paris is a city where memory-making takes places in public cemeteries (in particular, at the grave sites of Jim Morrison and Oscar Wilde, which are literally covered in mementos) and on bridges (where lovers cover the chain-link fences with locks engraved with their names), the location where Princess Diana's fatal car crash occurred is of particular interest because of its international participation and resilience. While the immediate, overwhelming sense of mourning in 1997 was enormous, there are still participants who make pilgrimages to the site and participate in the space today, inscribing the space with writings in various languages, colors, and textures. Composing on the concrete slabs that surround the bridge above the tunnel where the crash occurred, these participants write of her loss, their shared grief, and their recovery. Examining this space in particular, we can discuss the writings of these participants, the spaces they inhabit, and the need for preserving and curating their participation.TRANSCRIPT
Liza PottsSenior Researcher, WIDE ResearchAssistant Professor of Digital Humanitieshttp://[email protected]@LizaPotts
Spaces of/as Participatory Memory
Participatory Memory Project
When Participatory Culture alters the conversation in Collective Memory
Studying Public Memory-Making Physical and Digital Spaces Celebrations and Mourning
Shifts in visibility, agency, and
effort Hierarchies and Networks Officials and Participants
Extending Collective Memory
“In a sense, the act of bearing witness made a community out of all those who witnessed the atrocities, regardless of their reasons for being there.”- Barbie Zelizer in Remembering to Forget: The Holocaust Memory Through the Camera’s Eye. 1998, p. 134.
From Traditional Museums
Who Decides What We Remember?
Memorials are “a species of pedagogy” that “seeks to instruct posterity about the past and, in doing so, necessarily reaches a decision about what is worth recovering.”
- Charles Griswold in “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Washington Malll” in Critical Inquiry, Summer 1986, p. 689.
To Participatory Action
Across Time / Space
“We are resistant towards something and we participate in something.”
- Henry Jenkins in “Textual Poachers, Twenty Years Later: A Conversation between Henry Jenkins and Suzanne Scott” from the Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture Updated 20th Anniversary Edition, Routledge 2013, p. xxii
How Participation Shifts the Questions We Ask
Investigating Participatory Spaces
…Ways of Writing Memory
…of Celebration
…and of mourning
Participatory Memory of Princess Di
Project Goals:
• Investigate public spaces of memory, celebration, and reflection
• Learn about how these spaces communicate experience for participants
• Consider how we might digitize, curate, and enhance these experiences
Contested Memory-Making
“Public commemoration is a form of history-making, yet, it can also be a contested form of remembrance in which cultural memories slide through and into each other, merging and then disengaging in a narrative triangle”- Marita Sturken in “The Wall, the Screen, and the Image: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial” from the Visual Cultural Reader, Ed. Mirzoeff, Routledge 1998.
Memory and Identity
“Memory – relating past and present – is thus the central faculty of being in time, through which we define individual and collective selves”
- Jeffrey K. Olic, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Daniel Levy in “Introduction” from the Collective Memory Reader, Oxford 2011.
Storymaking as Participation
“It is only through narrative that we know ourselves as active entities that operate through time”
- H. Porter Abbott in The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative 2002.
Archiving Participation
“It follows that if considerable precautions are to be taken to assure the identity of a culture’s symbolic material, it will be advisable to direct those precautions to ensuring the identity of its ritual.”- Paul Connerton in How Societies Remember, Cambridge1989/2011.
Considering Participatory Memory
Thank You
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Contact Lizahttp://www.lizapotts.org/Email: [email protected] Twitter: @LizaPotts