Memory, Fiction and Public Space

Seminar in connection with the “Houses of Memory” exhibition at Malmö Museum, 13 May 2008, 14.15 – 17, K3, Beijerskajen 8, Hörsalen. You may attend the seminar also through webcast. Sign up here.

Aryan Kaganof & Oscar Hemer

14.15 – 15.45

Aryan Kaganof:
The Presence of the Past
SIGNAL TO NOISE (1997, 6min)
MARIENBAD REVISITED (2008, 11min)

Oscar Hemer:
Writing the City in post-apartheid South Africa

16.00 – 17.00

Discussion
WESTERN 4.33 (2002, 32min)

In terms of the “Houses of memory” theme I think that my film WESTERN 4.33 can be introduced as exhibiting the ruined spaces of the failed colonial experiment. The Lutheran protestant architecture that still stands in the desert, a haunting reminder of how perverse the project really was, to “civilise” the natives by systematically starving them to death!

The film attempts to deal with history in a non explicative way, not reducing the past to a temporally segmented fragment of “then”; but rather dealing with the present as a space informed, or haunted if you will, by the constant presence of the past.

SIGNAL TO NOISE is an earlier attempt to use repetitions in order to understand how materiality informs our “reading” of narratives. I was particularly interested in nostalgia at the time, in how cinematic images shot on super8mm material were inherently nostalgic, a priori.

Finally, because 13 May fits right in with the 40th anniversary of the May 1968 student riots, I would like also to screen a détournement of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s classic high modernist analysis of the workings of memory, L’annee dernier a Marienbad. This screening also serves as a homage to Robbe-Grillet who died on 18 February this year. The work is called MARIENBAD REVISITED.

Aryan Kaganof

The “Houses of Memory” exhibition, as part of the Memories of Modernity project, is very much related to my current research project on “Fiction’s Truth”, in which I study fiction’s role in the transition processes of South Africa and Argentina. For this seminar I will focus on South Africa and writing as a way of appropriating and reconquering the urban public space.

Also, with my own project as an example, I wish to discuss the relation between artistic and academic form and the prospects for genre hybridization in culture and media research.

Oscar Hemer