On the Difficulty of Forgetting: Recollections of the Basel Symposium on Chantal Akerman

Research output: Journal contributionsJournal articlesResearchpeer-review

Authors

In October 2016, we organized a symposium in Basel, Switzerland, in commemoration of Chantal Akerman. Through screenings of her films, as well as talks, presentations, and accounts of friends and collaborators, the event focused on issues of remembering and forgetting. In Akerman’s films, history insists, returns, refuses to disappear. Memories are haunting and haunt those who were, and are, persecuted. The conference examined Akerman’s cinematic strategies of taking time to forget in transforming the traces of history into resistive forms. In working with cinematic forms of alienation, repetition, and permutation; in inventing shots that point to the lacking and the missing; in transmitting unexpected voices and sounds; and in creating hybrid forms of unadaptable identities, Akerman unflinchingly produces forms of persistent memories. The following short texts by the participants in the symposium condense their contributions, their thoughts, and the sometimes contradictory positions that surfaced after the viewing of Akerman’s films. Films served as spaces of resistance, reconsidering the boundaries of history and presence, of fiction and document, and of biography and historiography. The authors are scholars, curators, and collaborators; some were her friends; many share several of these attributes. As organizers of the symposium, we asked them to shed light on the papers given on the occasion by returning to the theme of the difficulty of forgetting.
Original languageEnglish
JournalCamera Obscura
Volume34
Issue number1
Pages (from-to)163-183
Number of pages21
ISSN0270-5346
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 01.05.2019

    Research areas

  • Science of art - chantal Akermann, memory, remembering and forgetting

DOI

Recently viewed

Publications

  1. Spectral Early-Warning Signals for Sudden Changes in Time-Dependent Flow Patterns
  2. Octanol-Water Partition Coefficient Measurement by a Simple 1H NMR Method
  3. Governing Objects from a Distance
  4. Performance Saga: Interview 01
  5. A Multilevel Inverter Bridge Control Structure with Energy Storage Using Model Predictive Control for Flat Systems
  6. On the Direct Kinematics Problem of Parallel Mechanisms
  7. Pushing the Envelope: Creating Public Value in the Labor Market
  8. Making mutual learning tangible
  9. How can problems be turned into something good? The role of entrepreneurial learning and error mastery orientation
  10. Theorie des Quantum Computings
  11. Petri net based EMIS-mappers for flexible manufacturing systems
  12. Determination of 10 particle-associated multiclass polar and semi-polar pesticides from small streams using accelerated solvent extraction
  13. Performance concepts and performance theory
  14. Convergence of adaptive learning and expectational stability
  15. Introduction
  16. Analysis of the mechanical properties of an arc-sprayed WC-FeCSiMn coating
  17. Implementing the Kyoto Protocol without Russia
  18. On the role of linguistic features for comprehension and learning from STEM texts. A meta-analysis
  19. Do guided internet-based interventions result in clinically relevant changes for patients with depression?
  20. Optimal dynamic scale and structure of a multi-pollution economy
  21. Individual Scans Fusion in Virtual Knowledge Base for Navigation of Mobile Robotic Group with 3D TVS
  22. How do students and teachers deal with mathematical modelling problems?
  23. In situ synchrotron diffraction of the solidification of Mg4Y3Nd
  24. Hermann Stutte
  25. Different facets of tree sapling diversity influence browsing intensity by deer dependent on spatial scale