<nettime> the memory police

[intc via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

hej, all!

i hope this isn't too off-topic (at least, there are some ways that i 
can see this text being adjacent to the general discussion here). 
earlier this year, we started working on a project consisting of a 
reading group, residency and exhibition inspired by "the memory police" 
by yoko ogawa. the reading materials for the programme would be 
contributed collectively, with /(potentially, if funding is secured) 
/lectures for the artists and a public programme by leah feldman 
(https://complit.uchicago.edu/faculty/feldman) and the mineastry of 
postcollapse art and culture (https://postcollapse.art/). we've also 
reached out to grafton tanner (https://graftontanner.com/), who said 
that he would potentially be interested in contributing something to the 
project. after trying to get the project moving through different 
institutions for about half a year, we have reached a dead-end.

i was hoping to ask nettimers for any pointers to organisations (both in 
and outside the EU) that would be able to support and host this -- i 
have only recently moved to europe myself, and have had some issues with 
transposing my previous curatorial experience here. a very general 
description of the programme's directions can be found by following the 
link below (and is included as a full text in the email for those that 
may prefer that). this text was written mostly for internal use, and is 
a lot shorter, softer, less concrete, in some ways, a bit more emotional 
than ones normally posted here. if any of you may find the directions 
here interesting nonetheless, would love to discuss.

warmly,
intc

https://blog.intc.xyz/red-strikethrough-1

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when i was a child, the lights in my city's transit system were warm. 
the amber glow stuck with me, at first as something i feared and wanted 
to escape (the noise of an under-maintained post-soviet metro is truly 
something to behold), but, as time went on, my recollection of these 
environments also filled with warmth, and a familiarity that could only 
belong to something you have seen daily years ago.

i moved away, then, some years later, moved back to the city where i 
grew up. the metro system was slowly undergoing much needed renovations, 
with service expanding (albeit, slowly) to meet the demands of a growing 
city -- as satellite towns were drawn into city limits by the 
unrelenting gravitational pull of expansion, the population boomed. so 
grew the people's needs for coherent transport connections. then, in 
2017, a terrorist attack happened at one of the central stations. the 
entire transit system -- not just the metro, but the trams, trolleys and 
buses -- came to a standstill, but, as it often tends to, city life went on.

the standard words that would normally be used to describe this event, 
like a "ripple" or "shockwave" going through the city, only held true 
for the first hour after the attack. children were back on playgrounds, 
on their way from school, by approximately four in the evening. the 
event is almost nostalgic for me -- back then i used an old nokia 3310 
phone, and was unreachable over mobile internet. the tactile, crisp feel 
of buttons and persistent vibration still there in my memory, as my 
partner at the time tried to reach me in the metro tunnels. i was on the 
way to work, late as always, and found myself being evacuated from the 
train (as it later turned out, i was on the next train to the one that 
was attacked). the government was quick and efficient in establishing a 
connection to a radical islam group, reportedly from chechnya.

three things changed immediately after the attack (though i am sure 
there were many more, these three were the most immediate).

1. quite a few people started taking cabs. on the day of the attack, the 
local taxi-app-monopoly offered its services for free, baiting even 
those that could not normally afford a cab into their supposed comfort, 
with some even vowing never to take the metro again, apparently ridden 
with fear. most of these were men, comfortable with taking a late-night 
ride with a stranger.

2. metal detectors were installed at all station entrances. at time went 
on, going through a thorough security check became the norm, forcing 
even more to veer away form the metro to buses, cabs, and, sometime 
later, their own vehicles.

3. the light in trains and stations slowly lost its amber glow, with 
clinical white tube lights installed in their place. this was especially 
apparent on a station with one rather large lenin applique sculpture, 
whose facial features were now unfortunately illuminated, with the red 
parts of the walls becoming almost hysterically threatening.

though there have been many disappearances before (film labs, video 
rentals, certain types of cheese and dairy from the eu), this was the 
first one that i felt the full impact of. it attempted to slowly 
repopulate my memory with clinical lights, moving and changing things 
around. around the time of these changes in the metro, my grandparents 
started getting rid of things that no longer had a place in their lives, 
and indeed began their own series of renovations, one room at a time. 
the small kitchen crt television with a built in vcr gave way to a 
flatter counterpart, some old clocks and furniture were swept out of the 
way, their stationary telephone finally yielded the way to a new

cordless model (around 2006, a similar thing happened to a soviet-red 
rotary telephone, much outdated even by then).

appropriately, old wire lightbulbs were, too, replaced with abrasive 
white LEDs, hopelessly illuminating their ageing daily wares, and giving 
the (much loved) food my grandmother impressive amount of clinical 
clarity. as such, my journey to visit my grandparents on the other end 
of town was now almost entirely bathed in white lights.

this (not-so)-subtle change in interior lighting was, as it turns out, 
the first link in a chain of ongoing disappearances. they were 
noticeable to different extents: some led to changes in public behaviour 
(the way one dresses, positions oneself before others), some lead to 
minor inconveniences (like certain books being disappeared from shelves, 
or resources on the web becoming unavailable). soon, people started 
disappearing. reappearing at first, tired and angrier than before, then, 
in some rare cases, gone for good, be that as a result of an external 
force, or on their own accord.

it is important to note that not all changes were for the worse. e.g: 
for awhile, it was nearly impossible to find a good cup of specialty 
coffee in the city. as third-wave roasteries became fashionable, some 
people (shameful as it may be to admit, myself included) building their 
entire personalities around specialty coffee, chain shops were replaced 
by more modern, identity-catering counterparts. that is to say, i do not 
want to drown in a formulaic nostalgia for better times, although it is 
curious that most of the positive changes i could muster up have 
something to do with consumption and individual aesthetics.

***

as i write these words, we are faced with a new wave of similar 
disappearances. archives being meddled with, sometimes swept away 
entirely, with rhetorical devices and machines of incredible complexity 
(and, somehow, simultaneously thick as a brick) establishing and 
demolishing ideologies, protective frameworks dismantled, memories 
erased and replaced.

there might be a temptation to explain these disappearances using a 
clear methodology. in some cases, it seems, that this temptation is 
justified, with links further down the chain becoming visible a little 
in advance, allowing to prepare for the inevitable disappearance of 
something (someone?). there is an insidious factor to all of this, 
however, with disappearances sometimes happening spontaneously, as if on 
their own. approaching them exclusively through memory politics, 
radicalizing in the wake of continuous disappearances, can only lead to 
frustration, as one meanders in search of an overarching narrative. some 
things (and, sadly, some people) simply disappear, with no 
comprehensible reason behind this. acknowledging this unjust randomness 
is essential. some of the tools that will be used in this project, as 
such, will remain vague and imprecise.

of course, any soul-wrenching thing could be blamed on capitalism, or 
the desire to destroy and replace, built into us on a genetic level. i 
find it difficult, however, not to leave the possibility of some grand 
inexplicable external (internal?) force that drives this desire, 
perhaps, as a way of mystifying, perhaps because some things must remain 
inexplicable in order to be understood. i am aware of a danger built 
into this rhetoric, however, as when something is consciously treated as 
impossible to comprehend it may be used as a tool to control.

this project stems directly from yoko ogawa's book "the memory police", 
which forces the reader to come to terms with their own disappearances, 
and leads them to developing an understanding of how to make do with 
them. the book offers a deeply empathetic method of working with current 
politics.

disappearances in the text are treated in a matter-of-fact way: people 
seem to show interest, or can even admire the beauty of something being 
disappeared, but resume their lives, with an object or a concept being 
removed irrevocably by the end of that day. this is an effect that i 
feel needs to be preserved in our discussion of the book and the 
subsequent exhibition.

it is difficult to fit everything that has happened in the last few 
years into a few lines of text, let alone a text that is by all means 
supposed to be mostly utilitarian. i find myself trying to do this in 
order to justify (to myself, first and foremost) that this project is 
worth talking about. perhaps, this is a bit too direct for this type and 
function of writing, but i have had a very difficult time continuing 
with cultural work after 2022. different communities i interacted with 
found it nearly impossible to respond to the news of first one war, and 
then another, and then another, and, after awhile, normalised a 
reactionary cycle, exhibiting, in turns, a desire to participate, 
situational indifference and, above all, enraged helplessness. it feels 
wrong, if not almost shameful, to write this from the first person, 
distancing oneself from these cycles. in truth, in 2022, amid my own 
reactionary cycles, i was falling into a spiral of depression and 
anxiety, which has only subdued with time and the presence of others. as 
time went on, i found a definition of cultural work that seems to fit 
for now:

/kindling fire. lit in/
/a hollow cold wood. the stars dying, one by one/

this is, personally, why i found "the memory police" to be an uncannily 
timely book. when novels disappear, the narrator finds herself forcing 
characters onto pages, painfully trying to continue writing. it becomes 
impossible for something that can no longer exist to take shape, 
especially as the memory of its existence fades by the minute. ogawa's 
approach to the disappearances in the book, however, remains calm, which 
allows the reader to find a place for their own pain in them, instead of 
being prescriptive. the joy and sadness feels real, as the reader is 
given the time and space within the text to experience them for themselves.

initially, i had the desire to write a foolproof methodology of 
disappearances, showing how they can be categorised into types. some 
things disappear because they are no longer needed, others are 
disappeared because they are now an obstruction to whatever is viewed as 
just at the time, etc.

this method turned out to be... simply put, wrong. an archive of modes 
of disappearance through, say, objects, cannot inherently transmit the 
emptiness left behind by their disappearance, as the objects, in our own 
mind, no longer really exist. they can be held, touched, broken, but not 
experienced truly, like a child holding a diskette.

what can be made of a disappearing species? a plot of land that will be 
gone in ten years? what can be done with disappearing events, especially 
when one is no longer certain they even happened? what, finally, can be 
done with entire groups of people disappearing? the desire to restore 
the past, as remembered, is, hopefully, not the answer. the desire to 
record everything is part of the reason we are here now, and, as such, 
cannot be the answer on its own.

***

this is a loose project structure for red strikethrough, white noise. it 
is temporary, with elements being subject to change depending on the 
budget, location and time.

/reading and first discussion of proposed literature/

(4 weeks)
the reading group takes about 4 weeks, on and off, and is structured 
around texts by ogawa, derrida, modern british hauntology. this could 
take place online. during this time, and as a result of these 
discussions, artists propose works within a given budget.

/residency/

(up to 2.5 weeks)
live, in person discussion. an important part of this project would be 
to get the group to sit in one place, share food, and discuss works in 
progress with each other, in a way that would allow the works to 
dissolve, share more common themes and keys, "disappearing" into each other.

/exhibition mount/

(1-1.5 weeks)
based on the results of the residency and proposed works. could be done 
immediately after the residency, or after a short break.

***


--
... j
<intc.xyz> intc.xyz
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