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The Atlas Group created a digital mixed-media archive of contemporary Lebanese history, made up of produced and found documents. These archives look immediately ambiguous: they don't collect historical documents; they actually contain visual artefacts created by the Lebanese artist Walid Raad. These digital mixed-media archives - partly accessible on the web but also physically exhibited and performed - are not intended to preserve the memory of the past, but they become indeed useful to actualize history by giving it back in the form of a historical fiction. What if archives should not deal with memory, but with amnesia? And what kind of historical temporality do they re-activate?
"Prompt, Immediate, Now / Very Restrained and Cautious" (2013), "Defending Territory in a Networked World" (2013) and "Afgang 04.00" (2017) are three sound pieces that lean on events of historical proportions. They involve addressing the artistic challenge of letting difficult historical narratives resonate in the present. The artistic process for all three works involved finding fitting modes of reenactment and providing a present-day position on why and how these materials may be incorporated in artworks today, as well as contributing to historical revision and political resistance.
This paper focuses on an ongoing project that began in 2012, entitled "The Collection of Jane Ryan & William Saunders". This project is an attempt to reconstitute the Marcos Collection. Sourced from auction catalogues, museum archives, and scant government records, their lavish inventory of commissioned portraits, jewellery, Regency silverware, and old master paintings is reproduced as photographic installations, postcards, and three-dimensional prints. Reconstruction, in this instance, becomes a sustained democratic gesture, allowing an increasingly forgetful public to access a collection that has remained unavailable through a systemic failure by successive post-dictatorial governments to institutionalize collective acts of remembering.
The reactivation of time
(2022)
Reappropriating, restaging, revisioning, remediating: at the crossroad of the new millennium, reenactment has undoubtedly emerged as a key issue in the field of artistic production, in theoretical discourse, and in the socio-political sphere. Taking an ever larger distance from notions of historical revival and 'Living History', current reenactments call into question whether the present can unpack, embody, or disentangle the past. Accordingly, to reenact is to experience the past by reactivating either a particular cultural heritage or unexplored utopias. If to reenact means not to restore but to challenge the past, history is thus turned into a possible and perpetual becoming, a site for invention and renewal.
Critical discourse hardly knows a more devastating charge against theories, technologies, or structures than that of being reductive. Yet, expansion and growth cannot fare any better today. This volume suspends anti-reductionist reflexes to focus on the experiences and practices of different kinds of reduction, their generative potentials, ethics, and politics. Can their violences be contained and their benefits transported to other contexts?
In "'Preventing Malicious and Wanton Cruelty to Animals': Historical Animal Welfare and Animal Rights Education," Andreas Hübner outlines future historical animal welfare and animal rights education, sketching concepts and themes such as animal agency and historicity as well as the relational, spatial, and material practices employed between humans and animals. Hübner then historicizes present-day attitudes toward anthropocentricism and discusses educational and learning processes that (can) help to overcome human-animal dichotomies in the history classroom. Hübner presents subject-specific recommendations for critically integrating topics into future curricula and shows that it is possible to teach in a way that acknowledges the role of nonhuman actors. He thereby challenges conventional human-centered narratives of historical learning.