Have we ever heard anyone speak of collective forgetfulness? While the term "collective memory" exerts its power over us, it places a whip in our hands against our attempts at personal forgetfulness.
For Mahmoud Darwish, while memory serves as a tool of resistance against the erasure of existence, it also represents another form of symbolic death for identity and history. This is because it enforces a kind of stagnation and immersion in old pain, trapping the individual in a cycle of grief and reflection on past losses. In his reading of "Memory for Forgetfulness," Ra'ad Abu Sa'ada questions, as a Gazan, the role of memory in the ongoing Palestinian struggle and in the collective Israeli identity, with a view toward the Holocaust, the besieged Beirut of 1982, and Gaza today.
For Palestinians living in historic Palestine and for those referred to as "Palestinian refugees," the Nakba (Catastrophe) of 1948 never ended. This memory shapes Palestinian identity, but is it a lack of narrative that has existed for decades? Nour Saed analyzes factors inhibiting Palestinian society from investing in the arts while emphasizing the importance of storytelling and documenting a national experience versus forgetfulness.
Ammar al-Beik’s film The Sun’s Incubator offers a destabilizing, non-linear view of the Arab revolutions from a domestic setting. Margherita Foresti analyses the film’s complex temporality, manifested mainly through the motif of the TV screen.
The colors jostled on the clothes line, and she was glad she had taken down the black.
“Welcome to the post-contemporary,” say the DIS collective, curators of the 9th Berlin Biennale, with the hospitality of border control. Michal B. Ron shares her impressions of the biennial in a new critique for Tohu Magazine.
