Histories
Sources
One of the senses of term History refers to the academic discipline which uses a narrative to examine and analyse a sequence of past events, and objectively determine the patterns of cause and effect that determine them. Certain historical narratives, however, may be seen to be symbolically charged with the elements of nationalist discourses which naturalize ethnic identity or imperial domination and operate as foundational myths in a given society. Many of the grand narratives of modernity were constructed in this fashion in the 19th and the 20th century. In today’s globalised world, Eurocentric historical discourses, where a hegemonic centre writes the history of a subaltern periphery, are no longer tenable. Many critical voices today demand new historiographical modes based on the recognition of multiple identities, locations and relationships, and the deconstruction of the dominant ideologies that for centuries have shaped our collective imagination and memory and our personal mindsets no less than the accounts of official history. Attempts have been made- in the fields of pedagogy and audiovisual production, as well as in other forms of cultural practice- to develop new, emancipatory constructions of communal memory and history, examining how, to whom, and in whose name historical narratives are told and taught, in order to understand the present and project collective awareness and action onto the future.Genealogies of practice
- Debout!: Une histoire du mouvement des femmes 1970-1980. (Francia / France) Carole Roussopoulos, 1999
A documentary on the feminist movement in France in the 1970s from the perspective of some of its leading protagonists, looking back on a decade of struggle.
- Roseware. (Francia / France) Chris Marker & Laurence Rassel, 1998
Roseware expanded the idea of Immemory (another cd-rom by Chris Marker which explored a hypertextual approach to memory). Lodged into a computer drive, its use is fairly simple: every visitor brings along a series of documents that constitute a fragment of their personal memory: music, pictures, drawings, video, etc. Roseware is conceptualised as a collective, open-ended work structured by the connections between materials from heterogeneous subjectivities.
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