MJ #15 “I Forgot to Remember to Forget”
With Manifesta Journal 15, “I Forgot to Remember to Forget,” the editorial team, together with Rasha Salti, is proud to launch the second of a series of three issues (MJ #14–16) that explores the politics of time in the production of art, memory, and subjectivity, in relation to the ways that they are constructed by late capitalist and other societies of the global North and South.
Manifesta Journal is now available for free online as a downloadable .pdf reader. Print-on-demand issues may also be ordered at www.manifestajournal.org.
Every two months, a blogger-in-residence is invited to share his/her research-in-progress. Our current resident is the art historian, independent curator, and critic Matteo Lucchetti, who has begun by reflecting on Europe in 2012 and the ongoing transformations that have happened there since the demise of the East-West division.
MJ #15 “I Forgot to Remember to Forget”
Manifesta Journal 15′s title comes from a 1955 Elvis Presley jukebox country classic. Some contributors re-examine the underpinnings of memorialization and historiography, whether produced by the state, civil society, or individuals. Other contributors (writers, poets, and scholars) meditate on art works and films that represent, re-present, and re-enact repressed histories.
The issue opens with Fawwaz Traboulsi’s “Guilt Matters?”, which critiques “culturalism,” and reflects on the rapport between remembering and forgetting in the Lebanese civil war. Başak Ertür’s “Plenty of History” questions visibility and access to knowledge in public libraries in Istanbul as regards the Armenian genocide, and Gareth Evans contemplates “thinking through time” in Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light. Emeka Ogboh’s crafted soundscape, “The Ambivalence of 1960,” draws the gaps of unfulfilled promises and betrayed history, fifty years after independence in Nigeria.
In Elena Sorokina’s Zero Gravity Revolt, 1930s Soviet science-fiction texts are (re)enacted to embody the promises of scientific communism in popular fiction, in which even levitation in trans-planetary revolutionary realms was possible. Then, curator of the web-archive “Tuning Baghdad” Regine Basha shares personal memories and a private musical archive of visual clips and audio recordings of “almost” forgotten Iraqi musicians, while Sami Shalom Chetrit reconstructs a photo album of the Israeli Black Panthers movement. Inspired by Edgar Arceneaux’s exhibition, Hopelessness Freezes Time, Haig Aivazian later meditates on the legacy of the civil rights struggle.
For Anna Colin the witch, a “surviving deviant,” embodies forms of knowledge that cannot be co-opted, and for Gregory Sholette, the “hidden surplus” in artistic production and consumption holds the potential for insurgency. Filipa Ramos travels in time to visit the controversial milestone exhibition Contemporanea (arte 1973–1955) in Rome, whereas Marina Fokidis reflects retrospectively on the provocatively-titled 2007 edition of the Athens Biennial, Destroy Athens!
Ivana Bago and Antonia Majača then propose to stall the production time of a biennial in order to reset the framework for interpretation and reflection, and the collective Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency resurrect the notion of the “common” as a ground for imagining a return to a moment prior to colonization.
Yazan Khalili visits aliens in the West Bank, and Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History emerges in Ashkan Sepahvand’s uncanny poetic reverie entitled “She Was a Party.”
Finally, Manifesta Journal 15 closes with a war-simulation network game by Joseph Del Pesco and Al McElrath that “never forgets.”
The editorial team of Manifesta Journal is composed of:
Chief Editor: Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, Paris
Associate Editor: Virginie Bobin, Paris
Guest Editor (MJ #14–16): Rasha Salti, Beirut
Managing Editor: Lisa Mazza, Bolzano / London
Copy Editor: Shannon d’Avout, Paris
Manifesta Journal is an initiative of the Manifesta Foundation, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and is generously supported by the European Commission and the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sciences of the Netherlands.
Upcoming
MJ #16: “Regret” (November 2012)
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