Memory in Public Spaces (Including archives)
INSTRUCTORS
COURSE DESCRIPTION
This complex program aims at introducing public collections (archives, libraries, museums, cultural heritage) both as resources for history in public space, and also as sites of public history. Members of the program will work (remotely) in archives, visit, use and make use of libraries, museums, public memorials, and interpret public rituals and performances of memorialization.
As the Blinken Open Society Archives is both a self-reflexive historical archive, a historical research institute and a site of public programs, it is the appropriate place for this experimental course that includes internship for the students of the History in Public Spaces program. Students will meet four times a week during the four-week long period. Besides the classes and archival work, the students will be able to have intensive individual consultations with the Archives’ staff, most of whom are members of the CEU faculty.
From week one, the students will work on their individual projects, preferably related to their HIPS research/thesis project. Students are asked to make use of archival materials (either from the OSA collection or from other relevant archives) integrate them into their projects in order to produce a short portfolio/program script/exhibition concept with visual vignettes/photo album/documentary mood book/script of public ritual or counter-ritual/design of public memorial or counter-memorial…
LIST OF CLASSES
January 11, session 1:
Public Collections as site/resource for Public History. Reading: Aideen Doran, Free Libraries for Every Soul: Dreaming of the Online Library
https://www.memoryoftheworld.org/blog/2019/10/25/free-libraries-for-every-soul/ Watch: Alain Resnais, Toute la memoire du monde
January 11, session 2:
OSA’s collections. Reading: Sonja Luehrmann, Religion in Secular Archives: Soviet Atheism and Historical Knowledge
January 13, session 3:
Memorials, memorialization in public space Reading: Thomas Laqueur, While statues sleep
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n12/thomas-laqueur/while-statues-sleep
January 15, session 4:
Curatorial Work: Exhibitions, visual programs, artistic representation of historical issues. Reading: Setting up a human rights film festival
https://www.moviesthatmatter.nl/media/documenten/film-festival-guide-vol-2.pdf
January 18, session 5:
Pitching students’ projects (concepts only)
January 20, session 6:
“Budapest 100” project
http://budapest100.hu/en/kutatas-modszertan/
January 20, session 7:
The Yellow star houses program (http://www.yellowstarhouses.org/)
January 22, session 8:
The rise of identity politics, human rights: impact on archival epistemologies/ecologies 1. Reading: Lea David, The Past can’t heal us. The dangers of mandating memory in the name of human rights.
January 22, session 9:
Continuation of the identity politics, human rights session. (Reading: Kirsten Weld, Paper Cadavers. The Archive of Dictatorship in Guatemala.
https://muse.jhu.edu/book/70502
January 25, session 10:
Amateur photographs: public interest versus privacy. Recommended reading: Allan Sekula, The Body and the Archive.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/778312.pdf
January 25, session 11:
Home Movies as historical sources. (Watch: one of Peter Forgacs’s movies and/or Watch: “They call me Babu”)
January 27, session 12:
Media production workshop with Kalman Tar
January 27, session 13:
Continuation of the media production workshop
January 29, session 14:
Project-works in progress critical review
February 1, session 15:
Integrity, authenticity and credibility of historical sources. Watch: Sergei Loznitza, The Blockade
February 3, session 16:
Counterfacts and untruth; archives in the “post-truth” era. (Group exercise)
February 5, session 17:
Presentation and peer review of the individual projects.
February 5, session 18:
Continuation of the peer review process.