[ecrea] CFP Things to Remember: Materializing Memories in Art and Culture

Things to Remember:
Materializing Memories
in Art and Culture

International Conference Radboud University Nijmegen
June 5-6, 2014

CALL FOR PAPERS

Confirmed Keynote Speakers

Dr Dylan Trigg, University College Dublin
Dr. Celeste Olalquiaga, independent scholar

Call for Papers:
Memory matters. It matters because memory brings the past into the 
present, and opens it up to the future. But it also matters literally, 
because memory is mediated materially. Materiality is the stuff of 
memory. Meaningful objects that we love (or hate) function not only as 
aide-mémoire but as memory itself.

The international conference Things to Remember: Materializing Memories 
in Art and Culture aims to explore a sustained focus on the materiality 
in and of memory. Such a focus helps to understand memory as a vibrant 
process, by analysing the active, creative and popular forms of 
remembering and forgetting. At the same time a materialist focus entails 
recognising certain forms of agency in material objects. As Bill Brown 
argues, a culture constitutes itself through its inanimate objects: 
‘culture as it is objectified in material forms’. In this conference we 
want to draw cultural memory into the discourse of ‘new materialism’, 
inquiring how we remember with and through things. Here we avoid simple 
dualisms by foregrounding the intersections between the material and 
immaterial, natural and cultural, living or inert. Things make us 
remember (and forget), yet we also use things to bring about remembrance 
or forgetfulness. We therefore argue that memory is both mental and 
material.

The conference foregrounds the materiality of memory by investigating 
the vital relations between past and present, absence and presence, and 
remembrance and object. We thus interrogate the material transfers 
through which cultural memories of the past are expressed and circulated 
in art, media and popular culture. These transfers produce, re-present 
and transform mediated memories, literally giving shape to them in 
words, images, and objects. The conference pays as much attention to how 
we remember, create and re-create memories as to what we remember. 
Cultural memory is taken as both an active process and a dynamic 
practice. In such processes and practices of remembering, objects and 
things are endowed with meaning, agency and affect. As Bergson put it 
poetically, recollection is like ‘a fold in a material’. This raises the 
question how cultural memory plays a role in the social and cultural 
life of objects. Or, vice versa, what is the role that material things 
and objects play in ‘doing’ memory? That role will entail a study of the 
interaction between the materiality of memory, its affective nature, and 
its ideological frameworks. The conference will explore how memory 
unfolds time in its objectified materializations, both looking forwards 
and backwards, and realizing the affective dimensions of the here and now.

This conference will be centred on the following questions: What kind of 
memory-work do objects do? How does materiality mediate memory, for the 
individual and for society? What is the role of memory and forgetting in 
the social and cultural life of objects? Or vice versa, what is the role 
that material things and objects play in constructing memories? How do 
art objects and practices bring the past in the present? And how do they 
open up possibilities for a different future? How is the object endowed 
with meaning, affect and agency through the recollections attached to it?

We are particularly interested in:
analyses of what is at stake in the complex processes of remembering and 
forgetting, of recollecting and disremembering, of amnesia and anamnesis 
that make up cultural memory;
studies of how memory, object and affect are contingent on one another 
in their relation to time, both looking forwards and backwards;
and explorations of how art, media and popular culture, in producing 
material memories, may produce a relevant experience for the spectator, 
visitor, listener or reader.

The conference aims at covering a wide range of artistic disciplines: 
fine arts, architecture, literature, music, cinema, theatre, digital 
media and fashion. We welcome proposals for papers as well as for 
three-paper panels.

Possible topics can include but are not limited to:

Thing-memory
Art as a memory trigger
Literary and artistic interventions in cultural forgetting
Consumer culture as planned obsolescence
The consumption of the past in contemporary fashion
Remembering forgotten writers and artists
The production of presence and absence
The persistence of the historical past
Theories of matter, thing, and object
Trauma and materiality
Discarded and recycled objects
Souvenirs, gifts, kitsch objects
Toys, models, and miniature objects as things of memory
Ruins and material remains of the past
The internet of things as a technology of memory
The preservation, conservation and presentation of (in)tangible cultural 
heritage
Virtual 'matter': The presence (and absence) of the material in digital 
art and media
Embodied / (multi)sensory / kinesthetic memory
The musealization and monumentalization of the past through material objects
…

Our previous successful conferences resulted in two book publications:
Technologies of Memory in the Arts, edited by L. Plate & A. Smelik 
(Palgrave/Macmillan, 2009).
Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture, edited by L. Plate & A. 
Smelik (Routledge, 2013).

Deadline for paper proposals: January 20, 2014

Please submit your proposal for a 20-minute paper; or for a panel 
session of three papers through the conference website: 
http://www.ru.nl/hlcs/programma's/things-to-remember/things-to-remember/

Conference committee
Marguérite Corporaal, Vincent Meelberg, László Munteán, Liedeke Plate, 
Anneke Smelik, Lianne Toussaint, Wouter Weijers

Contact information
(thingstoremember /at/ let.ru.nl)



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