Archiving the Present: Memory as creative practice...

"Archiving the Present: Memory as creative practice, Multi-local and site-specific creative memory work"

Presented by Postdoctoral Fellow Tania Cañas as part of the FIMS Seminar Series 2024/25.

All are welcome to attend.

Attend in-person: FNB 4130
Attend online: Register for Zoom

Abstract: Public memory practices are continual sites of struggle and contestation on unceded lands as the nation-state continually functions to relegate and dispossess memory.  Archiving the Present (AtP) is a multi-site digital community archive project of "remembering as insurgent practice" (Cusicanqui 2020, p.xxxii) and memory as creative practice, from a Central American, site-specific, and multi-local perspective. The project is made up of artists and community members who are primarily of the Australian Salvadoran community, having arrived in Australia through the refugee and humanitarian program in the 80s and early 90s. Archiving the Present is a grass-roots initiative that seeks to develop alternative practices of remembering in ways that do not conform to whiteness and aesthetics of colonial forms of remembering (i.e. plaques, statues). Archiving the Present asks: who gets to be remembered and what gets to be preserved in settler-colonial Australia? How does memory and embodied archiving occur for sites deemed to have no “heritage significance” by national and state-level heritage organisations? What does it mean to engage in acts of creative remembering that sit outside of heritage regimes? How do we remember within displacement and in the context of ongoing dispossession?