EMPA’S Annual Postgraduate Symposium
16th and 17th October 2008
Living Memory: Remembering, Reinventing and Forgetting
Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.
– Walter Benjamin
One of the most significant and exciting recent developments in the contemporary humanities has been the rapidly expanding preoccupation with the study of memory. Memory has the capacity to challenge the idea of truth and to rewrite empirical histories. In an age of digital reproduction, globalization, trans-nationalism and increasing challenges to the metanarratives of history, memory has the potential to destabilize the past and reshape the present. In one way or another Literature, Music, Visual Art and Performance have always traded in the tensions between memory and history, truth and falsehood, the objective and subjective. But is memory more than a deconstructive tool? What is memory itself? How do we write, dance, figure, or perform memory? What is the relation between memory and history, and what role do art, music performance and the body play in preserving or re-writing the past?
The School of English, Media and Performing Arts at UNSW welcomes proposals from postgraduate students and encourages engagement with an array of critical and creative approaches to this year’s theme. Key words that may inform your proposal include:
Affect Image Simulacram
Amnesia Mnemonics Simulation
Aural Memory Monument Sound
Cognition Nation Temporality
Creative Process Nostalgia Time
Delusion Oral Memory Unconscious
Dementia Preservation Vision
Diaspora Prosthetic Memory Visual Memory
Embodiment Reparation Waste
Hearing Representation Wound
Identity Sexual Memory Youth
To register your interest, please email a 250 word abstract, as a Word document, to Chiara Gamboz at unsw.empa.pg@gmail.com no later than 1 September 2008.
Please include a title of your work, your name, institution, email address and contact details. Proposals for academic papers, creative works and performance pieces all welcome. Presentations are for 20 minutes.
Registration is free.
