Images can be deceptive: The politics of memory in an image-drenched world.
Earlier this month, I organised an event called “Dealing with Loss in the Age of Digital Media” at the University of the Arts London. Together with the amazing team producing Arquivo Documentary and UAL Creative Action, our goal was to start a conversation about collective memory in the face of tragedy in the episode of the fire at the National Museum of Rio de Janeiro.
In only one night, more than 200 years of Brazilian history was lost forever.
The Nation Museum used to house one of the most important Anthropology Departments in the world. In 2014, I had the great pleasure to present my yet incipient Ph.D. research at the Museum to an audience of inquisitive, brilliant, and interested colleagues.
At the time, what sparked my imagination was the contrast between the excellence of talent and the precarity of the building in which it was contained.
The creaking sound of the wooden floors as we stepped on them, the lack of painting in the walls, the need to improvise seating. All things alien to people used to British academic standards and yet a reality to all those people working in one of the most prestigious academic departments.
As soon as the news about the fire broke out, many of my colleagues started to share old pictures of the Museum on social media. It was like social media had become some sort of time capsule, a vessel of memory. It was an effort to keep the museum alive, even if it was through images. The same strategy was adopted by the Museum’s administration.
I remember thinking: What a sad world we live in if the only thing we have left are images.
That’s what I wanted to talk about today: the pervasive allure of imagery, its relationship with memory and politics.
Remembering is to conjure the past, evoking or calling forth as if by magic. To bring the past back to life also means opening Pandora’s box, unleashing all that’s good and evil into the world again. We never really know what the consequences will be. If we’re not vigilant, even the best of intentions can be harmful.
In the case of collective events, the act of remembering is part of a politics of memory. The concept refers to the political means by which events are remembered, recorded, or discarded. Eventually, politics of memory may determine the way history is written and passed on.
In Anthropology, we understand memory as a social construct. The way we remember the things of our past say a lot about the framework in which it is retained, that is cultural and social structures of thinking and feeling.
No memory is possible outside the framework used by people in society to determine and retrieve their recollections. (Halbwachs 1992)
Culture-specific symbols, myths, commemorative rituals, and grand narratives are also memory repositories, semiotically representing a socially constructed and engineered past. (Schwartz 1996, Zerubavel 1996).
We recollect the past through the lenses of the present and framing it by our current mindset. The elements that compose the narrative of memory bring to light the way we tend to organise our experience in the world.
Politics of memory is intrinsically linked to visuality.
Just think about how much of life has changed in the 20th Century because of photography and film. We started going to places never seen before. We started to imagine ourselves as part of global communities. We started to have a different relationship with ourselves and our own image. Even our own sense of time and space has changed dramatically because of image.
Images became a primal mean of mediation between ourselves and the world.
Images now play a decisive role in shaping collective memory. In this day and age, digital platforms are now a crucial aspect of this continuous process of remembering and forgetting. It is a global repository of data and memory, that can be easily stored, accessed, and also deleted.
However, the importance of remembering cannot erase the need for critically addressing images and the support upon which they are preserved.
Images are not some ultimate realm of Truth.
Images are representations of the world, a product of a specific social context of politics, technology, meaning, and collective emotion. Mostly, images are mechanisms through which we can perform feeling, therefore, provoking a certain kind of emotional response in others.
Images are artefacts of intention, not fact itself.
However, we experience images as reality. We respond to photographs as if they were facts. We use them as fuel to our imagination, to envision a possible future and the possibilities it holds.
It is in the dialectical relationship between form and function that we can comprehend images as technologies of imagination, enabling us to be transported to a specific time and space.
Every image we confront on a daily basis tell us a story about the past and about the people that made it. Let’s not forget that appearances can be deceptive. We can easily fall prey to our own preconceptions and end up seeing what we want to see.
The past can easily become just one more convenient tale that fits into our current mindset.
When we talk about images, we need to critically reflect about what kind of feeling that the image seeks to evoke and, most importantly, what is being shown and what is being concealed.
There is a certain logic that dictates what is worth keeping as a memory. In the same way, there is a logic to select what is allowed to be forgotten. Forgetting is just as important as remembering.
Each and every act of remembering is also an act of forgetting.
It is very easy to dissociate ourselves from emotionally charged events. It is a very human way to “prevent” that happening to us.
Images of tragedy often focus on suffering on an individual and intimate level, not paying enough attention to the social context in which such an event took place. By individualising events and the people connected to the past, we might dissolve any sense of collective responsibility.
As a consequence, we alienate ourselves from history and continue to live as nothing has happened.
However, facts don’t cease to be truthful just because people choose to forget.
The past left behind always finds a way to haunt us. Forgetting can be a way of Avoiding Danger and Misfortune. However, remembering is the only chance we have to prevent that happening again.
It is our responsibility as a society to find ways to keep inconvenient truths alive. Even if it hurts.
I have the feeling that, as a society, we rely too much on image to tell stories about the past. A great part of contemporary identity politics and political extremism has a lot to do with the way we manipulate and react to images.
The only chance we have to really understand the role of image in contemporary politics and collective memory is by asking ourselves:
> What does it mean to have our a great part of our collective memory mediated by digital technologies in terms of remembrance and oblivion?
> What kind of past we are recreating by every act of remembering? What are we, as a society, choosing to remember?
> Most of all, what is the place of culture, heritage, and memory in the contemporary global society?
