Memory

We come together in the Saari Residence to cross our artistic and academic explorations of memory as a medium for art creation. We understand memory as much more than what can be mapped and monitored: it is a fabulation that re-creates the present by activating the power of the ‘not-there’. We work with the memory not as a vehicle to access a gone past -from the stability of a chronological present- but rather as processes reinventing the present, past and future on each occasion.

Memory is then understood as creative and processual movements calling for inventing inheritance and history anew. We research how memory can be a medium for engaging with the world ‘as we know it’ otherwise, using different disciplines and approaches steaming from dance/movement, visual arts, performance, and writing. Rather than reducing memory to acts of remembering, we approach it as multiplicity through our curiosity to understand how processes of remembering work on and through us. We explore the following research questions:

– How can we work with memories without strengthening private identity with its proto-capitalist tendencies to individualism but without focusing on collective memory as big sacks of information that erase nuanced personal experiences?

– How can memory lead us away from the political, social, and cultural imperatives of the present?

– How do memory-making processes shape and reshape depending on social and political circumstances?

The working group comprises Finland-based artists born and raised elsewhere: Japan-New Zealand, Brazil, Germany, Taiwan–USA. We are aware that our mobility and distance from all sorts of ‘home-related’ aspects affect how we perceive and problematize remembrance. Memory is a challenge to be tackled daily in our private and political lives. Memory is inseparable from the geopolitics of post-colonial and imperial times. Thus, unravelling such complexities can sustainably support diverse community building.