FALL 2024 | ReMemory: Experiments in Listening, Authorship and Knowledge-Keeping
In this series, we highlighted the work of artists, scholars, and knowledge-keepers whose works attend to what Toni Morrison describes as the “pitched battle between remembering and forgetting.” (Morrison 2019) The reparative labor of re-memory invited us to recognize the ways that we are intimately bound up with undocumented or under-documented histories and the urgent need for "reconstituting and recollecting a usable past.” Kenyan author and scholar Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o, whose work seeks to redress the historical amnesia and “dismemberment” of the colonial enterprise, sees memory as “the site of dreams, and of desire, is thus crucial to the construction of our being.”
Thu, Sep 26 • 6:00 PM EDT
You Didn’t See Nothin’
Yohance Lacour and Sarah Geis, who respectively hosted and produced the Pulitzer Prize-winning audio documentary series You Didn’t See Nothin. The limited series investigates a 25-year-old hate crime, the beating of Lenard Clark in a white neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago in 1998. The series deftly weaves memoir and investigative reporting, recontextualizing and reexamining the impact of this moment on a community and on the life of Lacour himself. This event will feature a presentation by Lacour and Geis on the process of creating this work, followed by a Q and A with the audience.
Thu, Oct 24 • 6:00 PM EDT
"Not Looking At, Looking With."
The second event in the series ReMemory: Experiments in Listening, Authorship, and Knowledge-Keeping featured author and scholar Edgar Garcia. Garcia’s book Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis takes the Maya creation story, The Popol Vuh, and explores its history and relevance as a text created within and responding to the crisis of colonialism. Through nine short essays, Garcia considers what a world at the intersection of its own social, political, and intellectual emergencies might learn from the story of the Popol Vuh. This event will feature a short talk by Garcia, followed by a Q&A with the audience.
Thu, Nov 14 • 6:00 PM
Sansón and Me
An in-person screening of the documentary Sansón and Me, directed by Rodrigo Reyes. During his day job as a Spanish criminal interpreter in a small town in California, Reyes met a young man named Sansón, an undocumented Mexican immigrant who was sentenced to life in prison without parole. With no permission to interview him, Sansón and Reyes worked together for over a decade, using hundreds of letters as inspiration for recreations of Sansón’s childhood—featuring members of Sansón's own family. Reyes enacts multiple forms of participatory authorship in his films, documenting the process of continual renegotiation with subjects and the narrative that emerges as a third space wherein the hidden poetry of marginalized communities flourishes. This event will feature a screening by Reyes, followed by a Q&A with the audience.
Thu, Dec 5 • 6:00 PM EST
A Conversation on Black Archives
Black Archives is a “gathering place for Black memory and imagination.” Charlie is a research-based visual artist and author of Black Archives: A Photographic Celebration of Black Life (2023). Current project: In the summer of 1977, the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress established the South-Central Georgia Folklife Project. Cherlise’s work examines the fieldwork practice of Dr. Beverly J. Robinson, educator, and folklorist, who documented the communities and traditions of rural southern Georgia.