Remembering as future

Application summary

The project Remembering as future is a series of publications discussing the relevance of history in understanding today’s artistic forms and political struggles. The project starts with an idea to elaborate on specific historical events through very concrete examples by following the stories of people involved in these moments. These are stories of Muammer Özer, Larissa Reisner, Hjalmar Linder, and Kari Aronpuro. This project is not an homage nor it is searching for the heroic models from the past, it aims to picture how in the moments of radical historical ruptures it is difficult to separate personal from political. Taking the subjective aspects of historical narratives as the point of departure, the main question of the project is to search for the experimental storytelling in dealing with the past. Theoretically, the whole project builds on the epistemological premises of breaks and ruptures. The central claim is that these breaks are rich with new knowledge. By these breaks what is referred to is attempts of people to detach from their given identifications; people who surpass the given definitions of social class, artistic norms, gender roles, and national belonging. The core concept of the project is to talk about such people whose lives ceased to fit into patterns of traditional and conservative society; but instead became models, or crystallisations, of different traits and contradictions of the social emancipation. The hypothesis of the project is to delineate these personal traits in light of larger historical and social contexts through experimental forms enabled by artistic practices. Ultimately, the aim of the project is to apply experimental storytelling devices in finding the hidden palimpsests, latent trajectories, and invisible traits of the lives of people who have changed the usual route of the society.