Memory, Fiction and Public Space with Aryan Kaganof and Oscar Hemer
Tuesday May 13th , 14.15 – 17 Malmö Museum
Seminar in connection with the “Houses of Memory” exhibition at Malmö Museum
14.15 – 15.30 Aryan Kaganof: The Presence of the Past
· SIGNAL TO NOISE (1997, 6min)
· MARIENBAD REVISITED (2008, 11min)
· WESTERN 4.33 (2002, 32min)
· Discussion
Aryan Kaganof´s film WESTERN 4.33 will be introduced as exhibiting the ruined spaces of the failed colonial experiment. The Lutheran protestant architecture still stands in the desert, a haunting reminder of how perverse the project really was, to “civilise” the natives by systematically starving them to death! The film attempts to deal with history in a non explicative way, not reducing the past to a temporally segmented fragment of “then”; but rather dealing with the present as a space informed, or haunted if you will, by the constant presence of the past.
SIGNAL TO NOISE is an earlier attempt to use repetitions in order to understand how materiality informs our “reading” of narratives. Kaganof was particularly interested in nostalgia at the time, in how cinematic images shot on super8mm material were inherently nostalgic, a priori.
13 May fits right in with the 40th anniversary of the May 1968 student riots, Kaganof would like to screen a détournement of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s classic high modernist analysis of the workings of memory, L’annee dernier a Marienbad. This screening also serves as a homage to Robbe-Grillet who died on 18 February this year.
15.45 – 16.30 Oscar Hemer:
Writing the City in post-apartheid South Africa
16.30 – 17 Discussion
The “Houses of Memory” exhibition, as part of the Memories of Modernity project, is very much related to Hemer’s current research project on “Fiction’s Truth”, in which he studies fiction’s role in the transition processes of South Africa and Argentina. For this seminar the focus is on South Africa and writing as a way of appropriating and reconquering the urban public space. Ocar Hemer would like to discuss the relation between artistic and academic form and the prospects for genre hybridization in culture and media research.
Oscar Hemer
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