Memories That I Never Wanted: The Narrations of Displacement and Exile

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description

The roundtable participants will discuss various methods and mediums that address the mechanisms of remembering and forgetting connected to exile and displacement. Jonathan Kołodziej Durand’s documentary «Memory Is Our Homeland» tells the forgotten and erased story of young Polish women deported to Siberia and ending up in East African refugee camps in the 1940s. Through the recollections of the filmmaker’s grandmother and other survivors, the film pieces together the fragments of a missing chapter of WW2 history. Ewa Sułek’s multimedia art project, «Catastrophic Interference», presented at Harvard’s Kirkland Gallery, is based on distorted and imposed memories of abandoned places as told by refugees from Poland, and Ukraine. Based on text, sound, and AI-generated imagery, it tests the limits and possibilities of storytelling. In her «Book of Long Objects» Lia Dostlieva collects images and fairytale-like short stories, where each narrative is tied to a specific ‘long object’, tracing three generations of one Ukrainian family through wars and episodes of forced displacement – from Soviet rule to Nazi occupation and independent Ukraine and the current Russo-Ukrainian war. We decided that the roundtable format would be most suitable, as we want to collectively test and analyze the ways of memory-making and erasing through various languages of film, sound, textual art, and fine arts.

Sub Unit

• Arts I: Visual Culture, Material Culture, Applied and Fine Arts

Chair

• Michal Przeperski, Polish History Museum (Poland)

Roundtable Members

• Lia Dostlieva, Independent Artist

• Jonathan Durand, Independent Artist

• Ewa Magdalena Sulek, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University