Picture: La Model prison in Barcelona. Inside views of the 4th gallery, where a memory center is supposed to be built | EUROM
Jordi Guixé
Director of the European Observatory on Memories
First of all, it goes without saying that we dedicate this issue to everyone who has in any way suffered from this wretched, unforeseen and entirely unjust pandemic, either in first person or through their loved ones. I say unjust, first because of the healthcare crisis itself and then because of its terrible knock-on effects. But I also say unjust because the people who are most vulnerable to the pandemic are our older family members, who have already suffered and lived through a few or even many of the conflicts that we as students of the past have addressed a thousand times. Some of them have survived more than three wars and two dictatorships and now are gone with the wind, not knowing when or how or where. This issue is dedicated to all of them for the struggles that they have fought in the past to leave us a better world, and to everyone else who has taken up their legacy and fights on for a universal justice that remains so necessary.
After the first month of lockdown and my attempts to grasp the reality of what was happening in our world, I conducted some online classes as I do every year on memory and public space, history, contemporary art and new forms of transmission. At the time, I was lost and bewildered, not to mention sad and disoriented, much as I imagine most of the citizens on our planet were. We still are. The only idea that came to mind was to propose a straightforward creative activity on the concept of “contemporary confinements”, so that my young students would produce a digital creation based on examples that related the past to the present in a specific space, such as the one we had been using to address memory and memorial heritage: Barcelona’s vast penitentiary known as La Model.
Our resources of time and space and our working conditions were far from ideal. However, my delight was enormous when I found that the transmission of a concept or space from our recent past into the reality of our present became a tool of infinite memory with boundless potential. This might come across as obvious, but the results were and have been effective and enlightening. While my students may not have had the expertise of a professional or an academic, each and every one of their proposed projects nonetheless made use of many of the elements that we too draw on as we unravel the knotted skein of the most current work on memory: the use and interchange of diverse disciplines, digital techniques, creative resources, versatility, a multiplicity of prisms and interventions, the blending of theoretical and physical elements, links between different scales of language and experience, plasticity in practices, a capacity for dynamism and adaptation, and many more. Most surprising was a persistent effort among my students to involve society and think of the public as a recipient of each and every small project or cultural activity that they produced. A young art student put her approach as follows:
“I’m going to do an audio-visual project to convey the process of planting a cherry tree in memory of my grandfather and everyone else who has been alone in a critical situation, with a long history and many loved ones at their back. To counter so much anger, loneliness and helplessness with life, caring and humility. I want to project the result onto one of our classroom walls, together with text/subtitles about the process of creation, reflection and memory.”
The student’s grandfather recently wrote down the story of his life in a notebook, engaging in a form of written transmission that has salvaged such a great many personal, invisible stories and turned them into collective stories. However, our approach, which looks beyond the first two decades of the present century, is to promote and embrace the project of the young artist as a mode of transmission that not only regenerates memory, but also forces it to interact with our infuriating present. Many other projects have produced diverse and varied results too: a song, a video installation, a text, a piece of art, a reflection, a proclamation or declaration. They have amply achieved their goals as well, thanks to their dynamic use of digital tools, whose employment this time has been imposed by physical isolation.
Using the modest example set out above, I am thinking of the manifold nature of memorial work. Academic specialities of all sorts come into play when we retrieve, rethink and design a project or even a space for memory, including art, architecture, anthropology, sociology, political science, work with new technologies, and more. We have also seen how different social groups become involved in the effort and how, depending on each country, place, region or city, political power and the state, they always come into contact with an open narrative about the past.
A thousand analogous examples will come to mind from each of our professional and personal realities. At the European Observatory on Memories, our aim is to draw on the participation of neophytes and novices and to bring them together with professionals, experts and academics. The present issue of our yearly journal Observing Memories sets out to share these and other reflections on a concept that is becoming ever broader and more widespread: democratic memory.
The work of memory is a process. The conclusions of comparative examples and theoretical cases help us – or should help us – to learn from history and its memorial transmission and apply new formulas that draw on more and better engagement from our fellow citizens. This is the engagement that guides our actions, research and efforts to mobilize professional academic processes in and with society in order to build collective memory. The challenge is to hold onto the tension between the varying scales and dimensions of such a process or processes. And this is precisely what we want to share in the present issue of Observing Memories. The aim of our journal is to reflect, learn and share knowledge, but always with a multifaceted engagement from all quarters.
during the summer of 2020 | EUROM
Dynamic engagement helps us to strengthen the transmission of the past in the present through cultural projects and processes, and ensure the public’s access as a core element in our recovery or resignification of memory and its physical or virtual spaces. Hence, at the close of the second decade of the twenty-first century, it is necessary to undertake a variety of activities to bolster our knowledge of the different digital uses of the recent past that arise in the international arena. Memory maps, which feature databases of international memorial spaces, offer a tool to visualize the importance of memorial work and provide a foundation of digital information from which to obtain data on memorial institutions anywhere on the five continents of the globe.
Another key element in memorial activation is the proliferation of networks, platforms and groups of professionals who promote transnational memory as an arena for debate, participation, and the management and promotion of shared memorial projects. These networks and platforms are also useful when critically analysing the process of memorialization and public policies on memory at a comparative and international level. Memory and its challenges in the twenty-first century must necessarily be transnational, digital, cultural and comparative, to name but a few of its characteristics.
Ultimately, our practice in this respect must be mixed, blending analysis, observation, learning and transnational work. That is what lies at the heart of our journal: to be an international window onto ideas, analyses and examples that reflect memory’s multiplicity. These ingredients shape our democratic reality and the socio-political map of today’s Europe. The very concept of Europe is a juxtaposition and memorial multiplicity constructed day by day. This wealth, when compared to parallel processes (including those on other continents), enables us to assert that memorial diversity should be a hallmark of public policies on memory at the transnational scale. Without ignoring or forgetting the heavy burden of the consequences of Nazism and Stalinism in terms of building democratic narratives, we also encounter other processes that have engendered transformative values that cannot be reduced to a second tier, such as the struggles waged against fascism and dictatorship, struggles for civil rights, processes of peace and justice, democratic movements against autocratic regimes, resistance movements and struggles for freedom.
This encapsulates one of the many aims of the European Observatory on Memories. Our goal is to seek forthrightly, without political pressures or aims, to address the complexity of our subject matter through a network of European memory, while also taking into account and respecting the diversity of memories, each with its own distinctive features. The challenges of our world and of our Europe grow ever more complex. However, as we have noted at the launch of our virtual exhibition and book on the seventieth anniversary of the Schuman Declaration, this is about “a Europe full of hopes and possibilities that must never forget the people and the individual or collective processes that have fought for and shaped our free societies and our memory and democratic values of peace and social justice”. This explains why it is so important to hold onto and expand a political and social Europe and to strengthen policies on memory and citizenship, as well as projects and places of memory. Time and again, such policies and places of memory are also policies and places of resistance, transgression and subalternity.
In the present issue of Observing Memories, we want to train a particular spotlight on the relationship between social media and memory. There is no mistaking the increasing importance of social media as channels of information and purveyors of new experiences of socialization, public mobilization, political debate, entertainment and more. They are also becoming increasingly significant transmitters of memories, new narratives about the past, and exciting discussions and conflicts that drive constant interaction among users. But which users generate the most influential messages? How do these messages spread? What kind of reception do they have? What generates discussion? There is no end to the questions that are worth striving to analyse through a plethora of case studies. The historian Matilde Eiroa and the telecommunications engineer Mariluz Congosto have shed light on the Twitter discussion threads and thousands of tweets generated in relation to the event that marked the memorial policy of 2019 in Spain: the exhumation of the dictator Francisco Franco and the removal of his remains from the Valley of the Fallen to his family mausoleum. In the context of the commemorations of Europe Day in 2020, the historian Celeste Muñoz has taken a look at the polarization on Twitter between Eurosceptics and pro-Europeans, marked by discussions of “Brexit” and the current pandemic. Both cases – the exhumation of the Spanish dictator and the celebration of Europe Day – are products of the research project “Online Memories” sponsored by EUROM and built on the firm conviction that it is important to bring interdisciplinary, transnational work to the study of the transmission of memory. Speaking of transmission, however, we also have one of the world’s most authoritative, widely recognized and respected voices in “memory studies”: Marianne Hirsch. This issue features a fascinating interview with Hirsch on her career and the concepts that she has forged, taking a look at contemporary conflicts and debates (from Black Lives Matter to today’s feminism) and the role of memory in democratic societies.
In the “Europe insight” section, we have delved into the following question: can memory bolster democracy and prevent the emergence of new discourses of hate? And we have done so from a number of different angles. First, the winner of the 2018 European Book Prize, the journalist Géraldine Schwarz, once again probes the figure of the “Mitläufer” in order to explain how, although we recall what happened in the Second World War and the Holocaust, we have forgotten how it was possible and the implications that such forgetting entails. Second, the political scientist Sarah Gensburger offers a full analysis of the opportunities and complexities of transmitting democratic values through policies on memory. Lastly, to round out the section, we include an interview with Spain’s current State Secretary for Democratic Memory, the historian Fernando Martínez López, who discusses the various challenges, issues, lines of work, new draft legislation and other aspects of new public policies on memory that are being pursued in his country.
In the “Overview” section, we feature an interesting piece on one of today’s leading specialists in the history of the workers’ movement, the historian Selina Todd, who highlights the distinction between the public memory and popular memory of the working classes in order to grasp the logics of today’s left in Great Britain. The architect Julian Bonder takes us deeper into the complexities of the transmission of memory through commemorative monuments and the challenge of public space as a site of socialization where the public learns narratives of the past. Also, the historian Vjeran Pavlaković examines the status of monuments dedicated to the international brigades in today’s Croatia and looks at the discussions that their memory elicits.
As in every previous issue, we also have a section of short reviews, which may be bibliographical or memorial in nature (such as the pieces written by the EUROM historian David González or the Columbia University student and EUROM fellow Luis Gasca) or may take us on an interesting journey through the former Iron Curtain (provided by Michael Cramer). Lastly, in the “Sightseeing” section, we feature the much-valued collaboration of Nora Hochbaum, director of one of the foremost memorials in Argentina: the Parque de la Memoria, or Memory Park, a monument to the victims of state terrorism. In her detailed piece, Hochbaum describes the significance of the place, the challenges and achievements, her lines of activity (such as the relationship between art and memory), the immense work being done and the challenges that remain.
In closing, I would like to express my public gratitude to every author who appears in the present issue and to the entire team and all of my colleagues who make the journal possible year after year. This year the challenge has been even greater because of our not especially propitious circumstances. My special thanks go to Ricard Conesa in publishing and content, Fernanda Zanuzzi in promotion and design, and Oriol López, Celeste Muñoz and David González for their unstinting work. Let me conclude with a heartfelt embrace for each and every one of you. I wish you all an enjoyable read, the best of health, good cheer and much good fortune now and in the year to come!