The Red Earth Project (2019-)
Archive of Forgetfulness
- ‘With our current heightened sense of being and breathing in this world, we are acutely aware of the longer and deeper histories of forced immobility and segregation, and of the extractive infrastructures and racial violences made material in how cities across the African continent were imagined. Drawing inspiration from Mahmoud Darwish’s prose Memory for Forgetfulness (1987), the exhibition questions how we might engage with what exists in the failure of memory, and that which can no longer be spoken; yet also acknowledges forgetting as an active part of remembering.’
The Archive of Forgetfulness holds together acts of remembering: collecting and gathering stories often untold. The contributions renew lines of connections, resurface forgotten conversations, and establish the beginnings of future collaborations. This project is a space for interrogating the archival gesture, from the bodily and spoken, to the written and performed. Beginning with our interest in the entangled histories of how we live our lives, the project is framed by a series of questions: We ask what personal and political histories emerge via infrastructures? We question how thinking through deep and recent histories, across water or through the skies, might reveal alternative ways of living? And how dreams of freedom, and other worlds that might have been possible, haunt our present, and suggest other possible futures?
archiveofforgetfulness.com
Available from Jacana Media