The vernacular and family archives under investigation exist as organic bodies of collected documents, oral histories and different kinds of memorabilia. These media objects are generally assembled and stored according to autobiographical and idiosyncratic criteria. The focus of PASS(ED) ON lays upon how to reflect, relate to and reproduce the collective social processes in which they exist and, at the same time, to see in which ways they transcend them. By focusing on these archives’ specific operational mechanisms, and by acknowledging them as places for the articulation of lived and transmitted experience with macro-political and historical dimensions, the interest of this symposium is to inquire about the way they entangle with institutionalized and cultural memory.
Each panel of PASS(ED) ON – 1. The mute archive: Post generational work on violence and perpetration within concealed archives; 2. Migrating memories: Intergenerational transfer of material narratives in the contexts of migration and 3. Inherited Revolution: Privatization and intergenerational transfer of narratives of collective upheaval – addresses vernacular archives through different historical and contextual focal points which bring together diverse methodologies to critically inform us on the different collective processes at stake and on the routes of their transfers of memory. With the round table From the attic to the museum: Inscribing vernacular archives into collective history, we venture into a presentation and discussion of different projects in which vernacular archives undergo a process of institutionalization and of inscription into historiography and collective history.
PASS(ED) ON is conceived by Ana de Almeida, Lena Ditte Nissen and Elif Süsler-Rohringer as part of their DOC-Team project “Stay and tell: memory objects and narratives of appropriation. Tracing social change in text, photographs and patterns within personal archives” which is funded by the ÖAW – Austrian Academy of the Sciences. The symposium is generously supported by the University of Arts Linz, by the Zentrum Fokus Forschung – University of Applied Arts Vienna and the Academy of Fine Arts of Vienna.
Speakers: Andrea Ancira, Vida Bakondy, Ana de Almeida, Georgia Holz, Berthold Molden, Lena Ditte Nissen, Monika Palmberger, Edward Serotta, Elif Süsler-Rohringer, Huda Takriti, Marcela Torres Heredia, Markus Wurzer, Mai Ling.
Moderation: Alison J. Clarke, Karin Harrasser, Gudrun Rath, Mariel Rodríguez Rodríguez
Venue: University of Arts Linz, Hauptplatz 6, Hörsaal C, 5.OG, 4020 Linz / Austria
