This question was triggered by the title of a three-day symposium that began yesterday at Cairo's Townhouse gallery. Its title, “Speak, Memory,” is borrowed from the memoir of the late Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov. The book, typical of this literary genre, narrates his remembrance of his youth; it speaks of, and preserves, his memory. Inspired by this title that commands the memory to speak, the symposium borrows its spirit to tackle the question of (re)activation of cultural memory. How do we make memory speak? For one, memory speaks through images; photos speak to moments that have been silenced. This silencing, however, could be caused by time, death or oppression. On the first day of the symposium, artists, curators and researchers exhibited and discussed their efforts to excavate, collect and exhibit cultural memories that have been suppressed or temporarily silenced. Oral history, people's private collections of art work, and especially photographs, are samples of the material that artists in the symposium gather to preserve and exhibit. This momentum for preserving cultural memory, especially through various artistic mediums, was triggered by a concern over the scarcity of material on the Middle East's art history. According to the symposium's curator, Laura Carderera, we only have scarce resources, mostly private collections, to learn about the region's modern art history. Yet, amid what is referred to as the post 9/11 artistic boom in the Middle East, and throughout the global South, there is a growing interest in reactivating 20th century artistic expressions. In both the Middle East and Latin America, authoritarian regimes and ideologies have suppressed and alienated people and their memories. Susan Meiselas, an award-winning documentary photographer, spoke of her experience with Kurds in the Arab world. Scattered and persecuted, Kurdish people have no national archives and, until recently, could only preserve their collective existence through holding on to old photographs, hidden in their basements and attics. Meiselas travelled to Iraq in 1991 following the violent suppression of the Kurdish uprisings there. She was looking for visual evidence of the ruins to make visible an alternative history to that of the Iraqi State. However, she did not want to take photos and then take them away to be buried in Western archives. Rather, she ended up reproducing people's photographs in their own backyards. The purpose of reproducing people's photos, she explained, was to tease out and “protect the cultural memory against erasure.” She probed people into making their memory speak, by asking, Who is in the photo? Who took it? Who saved it? Her project culminated in three final products. The first is a book, Kurdistan, a family album of the scattered Kurds. The second is a series of traveling exhibitions of the gathered images to locations where there is a Kurdish diaspora. The Kurds were in turn invited to bring their own photos and stories to add to the collection. And finally, a virtual archive (akaKURDISTAN.com), provides a safe space for people to share their photos, memories and identity. Displacement, war and erasure of collective memory are common narratives in the Middle East, most evident in the Palestinian saga. Yasmine al-Sabbagh, a member of the Arab Image Foundation, moved to Burj al-Shamali refugee camp in 2008. In this Palestinian refugee camp, located in southern Lebanon, al-Sabbagh conducted a five-year project to collect family and studio photographs. This project, which still struggles with issues of copyright and permission of dissemination, will no doubt speak of memories of life and struggle that dig deep into the Arab world's most troubling issues. The panelists spoke of various other promising initiatives in the Middle East and Latin America that do the same thing: excavate, collect and exhibit cultural memory through artistic mediums. Below are websites for some of these initiatives. Arab Image Foundation http://www.fai.org.lb/home.aspx The Bidoun Library Project http://www.bidoun.org/bidoun-projects/bidoun-library/ Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran and Turkey (AMCA) http://www.amcainternational.org/ Archive on Egyptian Surrealist Movement http://www.egyptiansurrealism.com/ Speak, Memory Website http://speakmemory.org/
