Fearless Speech and its Fate in the Archives
INSTRUCTORS
István Rév, Ioana Macrea-Toma
COURSE DESCRIPTION
Archives belong to the category of specific public spaces: usually open only to predetermined categories of the public, defined and regulated either by the institution, legislative bodies, state authorities or by custom. Archives (their professional work, the documents they store, the trust they possess) play a defining role in the way history is represented, made use of, and instrumentalized in the public sphere.
Blinken Open Society Archives (OSA) is not a state institution, but a private archival laboratory in the service of the public, legally part of the Central European University. Its primary holdings are related to the post-World War II divided world order and its contested history and to grave violations of human rights worldwide. OSA thus have an unusually rich collection of documents produced by or reported on clandestine activities, real or imagined figures of political oppositions, activists, politicians, private citizens who spoke truth to power.
OSA has been engaged in the program series on Fearless Speech that includes seminars, public actions, film screenings, performances and an exhibition due to open on March 16th. According to M. Foucault, “someone is said to use parrhesia and merits consideration as a parrhesiastes only if there is a risk or danger for him or her in telling the truth. When a philosopher addresses himself to a sovereign, to a tyrant, and tells him that his tyranny is incompatible with justice, then the philosopher speaks the truth, believes he is speaking the truth, and, more than that, also takes the risk (since the tyrant may become angry, may punish him, may exile him, may kill him.”
The exhibition at Blinken OSA dedicated to Fearless speech seeks to address the conditions and truth content of speaking truth to power. General references will be made to the Greek antiquity analyzed by M. Foucault, but concrete examples will be taken from the recent past, from the Cold War up till now. The students are invited to reflect in groups on one of the 5 themes of the exhibition (Courage, Censorship, Security Police, Fearless Speech and Democracy, The Right to Truth), to translate them to socio-political contexts that they are familiar with (find analogies), to find relevant materials, select and curate them in order to produce video or audio projects for the exhibit, while considering issues related to validity and veracity of archival materials.
For that purpose, students will be offered:
• theoretical lectures about the problematics of truth-telling,
• historical presentations about the cultures of dissent in Central and Eastern Europe and their fate in the archive,
• guided immersive experience in the OSA’s archival collections related to the Cold War and its aftermath in order to see their archival logic, understand their context and analyze their content
• guided tours to other memory institutions given by the distinguished film maker Péter Forgács, art historian Zsuzsanna Toronyi, and by the researcher Geza Vörös,
• individual consultations with archival treasure hunt consultant Zsuzsanna Zádori and the multimedia production specialist Darius Krolikowski (see the students’ guide attached for more info)
In the five-week internship the HIPS students will therefore also get acquainted with the theoretical background of archival work, the way archives operate unseen by the visiting public, the practice of historians and archivists working in archival institutions. Theoretical lectures and hands-on archival research work will help future public historians to further understand the logic and epistemic assumptions of Cold War data collections and to translate issues having a Central and Eastern European relevance to larger global frameworks. The students will therefore be able to understand archives not just as sources, but as wholesale historical documentary projects, necessitating archival care and constant re-contextualization.
Session 1
ONLINE Presentation of the Parrhesia program and their future project (István Rév)
Session 2
ONLINE Lecture: Introduction into the Problematics of the Archive (Istvan Rev)
Session 3
Practical session:
1. Presentation of the archival holdings
-archival tour
-AV visit (selected videos from Yugoslav Archive Project , International Monitor Institute)
-Catalogue search
2. Presentation (short)
Counter-archives as documentary truth-telling projects: stressing the Cold War informational complex of conscious archiving and documenting
Session 4
Lecture: Truth-telling in the dissident cultures of Eastern Europe (András Mink/ Ioana Macrea-Toma)
Sessions 5 and 6
Practical session: Immersion into the archive
Presentation of [the history] of collections of:
a) counter-reporting: samizdat archive (Anastasia Felcher)
b) era of censorship: Index on Censorship (global span) Ioana Macrea-Toma
c) active collecting (Black Box Foundation, Eva Kapitanyi)
d) Soviet Monitoring (Oksana Sarkisova)
Exercise:
How is truth-telling presented for right-wing and left-swing dictatorships/ censorship?
Session 7
Visit to the secret police archive (guide: Géza Vörös)
Session 8
ONLINE Projects pitch: presentation of ideas regarding contribution to the exhibit
Sessions 9 AND 10
Visit to the Jewish Museum and to the Synagogue (guides: film maker Péter Forgács, art historian Zsuzsanna Torony)
Session 11
Lecture: How to exhibit archival materials/ the issue of truth in contemporary art (Katalin Székely))
Session 12
Lecture: Right to Truth after Conflict: Field Report from Yugoslavia (Vladimir Petrović)
Sessions 13 AND 14
Practical part (comprised sessions): immersion in the archive, individual and work groups
Session 15
Lecture: Freedom of Information: Its Principles, Practice, and Limitation (Iván Székely)
Session 16
Individual consultations
Sessions 17 AND 18
Students’ findings/ projects presentations