Memory and Amnesia: An Intercultural and Interdisciplinary Exploration
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
An Intercultural and Interdisciplinary Exploration
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge
Summary
A report of my experience in attending the 5th - 6th April 2016 Places of Amnesia conference at the University of Cambridge, exploring the presentations on remembering and forgetting from various spatio-temporal frames, conjoining these with art from different cultural contexts and periods, and distilling insights in relation to the Yoruba origin Ifa system of knowledge as a strategy for investigating the intersection of past, present and future.
Modes of Memory
I had the privilege of attending the Places of Amnesia conference at the University of Cambridge on the 5th and 6th of April, 2016.The conference was a revelatory experience for me in terms of various ways of engaging with the convergence of personal and collective history at the matrix of mind, body and space as these are interpreted in the human quest for meaning in a world where hermeneutic possibilities are mediated by various,often conflicting agendas.
Conceptual Platforms in Exploring Remembering and Forgetting : El Anatsui's "Womb of Time". Time as an egg, as a cranial nexus, a womb of possibilities where potentiality becomes actuality at the meeting place of consciousness and circumstance. The installation of this work within a space where walls intersect and a space opens out creates a perspectival shock that subliminally evokes the convergence of streams of possibility and their unfolding the enigmatically inward focused subject alludes to. Image "El Anatsui, Womb of Time, 2014, installation view at The School, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery"from "Art | El Anatsui Found Resonances of Both Fragility and Resilience in Clay " by Bill Rodgers at C-File : https://cfileonline.org/art-anatsui-found-resonances-of-both-fragility-and-resilience-in-contemporary-ceramic-art/. Accessed 21/05/2016.
Image Above
Conceptual Platforms in Exploring Remembering and Forgetting : El Anatsui's "Womb of Time". Time as an egg, as a cranial nexus, a womb of possibilities where potentiality becomes actuality at the meeting place of consciousness and circumstance.
The installation of this work within a space where walls intersect and a space opens out creates a perspectival shock that subliminally evokes the convergence of streams of possibility and their unfolding the enigmatically inward focused subject alludes to.
Image "El Anatsui, Womb of Time, 2014, installation view at The School, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery"from "Art | El Anatsui Found Resonances of Both Fragility and Resilience in Clay " by Bill Rodgers at C-File : https://cfileonline.org/art-anatsui-found-resonances-of-both-fragility-and-resilience-in-contemporary-ceramic-art/. Accessed 21/05/2016.
Through the visual and verbal media by which the presentations came to life, we were transported to spatial and temporal sites of ultimate horror such as the Rwandan genocide which claimed a million lives, Nazi concentration camps committed to Hitler's plan to annihilate the Jews, a plan that eventually claimed six million Jews along with victims from other peoples. We witnessed a range of locations where these exercise in transcendental inhumanity were executed. We journeyed through the reverberations of these demonisations across history since the end of these conflicts, from the Second World War in 1945, when the peak of evil represented by Nazism was finally dismantled, to the beginning of social and psychological recovery from the calamity in Rwanda, moving through the lifeblood represented by the struggles of various communities to deal with these upheavals of the terrible, a process particularly agonizing on account of the complex web of collaboration and coercion, acquiescence, identification and resistance, that necessarily shapes a society's involvement in such catastrophes.
Conceptual Platforms in Exploring Remembering and Forgetting : El Anatsui's "Chambers of Memory". Magnificent evocation of memory as a palace both grand fragile, colossal and vulnerable, as a warren of caves constructs a structure evocative of both skull fantastic geological structure, within which rest rocks like dried skulls, their piercings suggesting eyes. A potently beautiful work. Image : "A view of El Anatsui’s “Chambers of Memory” (1977) at The School (photo by the author for Hyperallergic) " in "El Anatsui Goes to School" by Melissa Stern on May 21, 2015 : http://hyperallergic.com/208231/el-anatsui-goes-to-school/. Accessed 21/05/2016
Conferences like this contribute to the process of healing from the searing wounds of these inhumanities by exploring various ways people deal with the memories shaping the mental and emotional worlds of various communities.The most compelling images for me of these strategies of memory from the conference are three I came across for the first time. One is a letter written by a Jew on a train to a death camp. The other is the empty, uncultivated space of a section of a field where Jews who had been shot by the Nazis were buried. The last is the image of survivors of the Rwandan genocide acting as primary caretakers of the bones of those who had been eliminated in the anti-Tutsi pogrom that claimed 1,000,000 lives.
Conceptual Platforms in Exploring Remembering and Forgetting : El Anatsui's "Chambers of Memory". Individual and collective memory within an enclosure like a hollowed out skull, its cave warrens the catacombs where cognitive webs lie invisible or have vanished from, demonstrating the fragility of memory. Image from " Pushing the Boundaries of Ceramic Art Tradition in Nigeria: Notes on the ‘Suyascape’. Project" by Ozioma Onuzulike. Interpreting Ceramics | issue 11 2009. http://www.interpretingceramics.com/issue011/articles/03.htm. Accessed 21/05/2016.
Imagine being transported on a train by agents of a government hostile to the culture and ethnicity to which you belong, those agents having already made clear that you were not regarded as a member of the human race of the same status as themselves by making sure you lived in segregated sections in all communities they control, then going beyond this ghettoization by separating children from parents and parents from each other, placing them on trains to places unknown to the occupants, within conditions difficult to imagine but of such mind bending abomination that some people go mad, while others escape as the prisoners are allowed to relieve themselves in scenes of humiliation.
Conceptual Platforms in Exploring Remembering and Forgetting : Joseph Beuys "Das Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts", The End of the Twentieth Century. Individual and collective history as an intersection of randomness and order. ' The End of the Twentieth Century is a large installation consisting of thirty-one rough, bulky basalt rocks, which are strewn across the floor in a seemingly random manner. The stones are all a muted beige colour, mottled with patches of grey. Each rock measures between one and two and a half metres in length and has a cone-shaped hole drilled into the upper side of one of its ends. These cone-shaped cavities have been smoothed down and lined with clay and felt, and the pieces of basalt that were removed from the stones have been polished before being placed back into their holes. The rocks lie in loose, haphazard clusters that resemble piles of debris. However, they are broadly arranged in two groups, leaving a long gap down the centre so that viewers can walk among them. This installation was made by the German artist Joseph Beuys in 1985. It is the third in a series of works that all have the same title and were produced in roughly the same way. The first of these, which comprises twenty-one stones, was conceived in 1983 for the exhibition Tending Towards the Total Work of Art at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf after its curator, Harald Szeeman (1933–2005), asked Beuys to make a new work for the show. While producing this first version of the work, Beuys also prepared another, which includes forty-four stones. The Tate installation is the final large-scale version of this work that Beuys oversaw. The artist was involved in selecting and preparing its stones in 1985, but he died in January 1986, before the work was installed. Although Beuys made some initial sketches that illustrate possible ways of arranging the stones, there are no fixed rules for installing The End of the Twentieth Century. This poses a challenge for curators, who must decide how to display the installation and whether to base their decision on previous displays of other versions that the artist helped to install. After Tate purchased this work in 1991, Tate curator Sean Rainbird and Beuys’s former Munich gallerist Bernd Klüser devised a composition for displaying the piece that drew on previous arrangements and the artist’s drawings. The work was first shown according to their plans at the Tate Gallery in 1992 and, aside from very minor alterations, it has been displayed in the same way since. The title of this installation makes reference to what was at the time the impending end of the twentieth century, and the art historian Mark Rosenthal has suggested that the work expresses a pessimistic view of this by evoking ‘the haphazard aftermath of a calamity’ (Mark Rosenthal, ‘Joseph Beuys: Staging Sculpture’, in Menil Collection 2005, p.84). Furthermore, this work could be seen as a reflection on the physical effects of the passage of time: clay, felt and basalt are materials that were used frequently by Beuys, who often stated that he was interested in basalt’s status as a volcanic rock, and the art historian Victoria Walters has argued that he associated it with ‘a very long-term, geological notion of time’ (Victoria Walters, Joseph Beuys and the Celtic Wor(l)d, Zürich 2012, p.248). In 1984 Beuys claimed that he wanted this installation to allegorise a relationship between the past and the near future to which its title refers: This is the end of the twentieth century. This is the old world, on which I press the stamp of the new world. Take a look at the plugs, they look like plants coming from the stone age. I took great pains to drill them out of the basalt in a funnel shape and then set them back into the hollows using felt and clay so they cannot do each other harm, and can keep warm. It is something agile, eruptive, lively in this solidified mass – in the same way that the basalt itself was once pressed out of the earth’s interior. (Quoted in Willisch and Heimberg 2007, p.7.) Beuys’s suggestion that this installation produces a harmonious relationship between ancient, natural forces and the ‘new world’ may have been linked with his commitment to the ecological movement in this period, which led him to found the German Green Party in 1980. The End of the Twentieth Century is also directly connected with another of his major late works, 7000 Oaks: city forestation instead of city administration 1982, which was produced by Beuys for Documenta 7 in Kassel, Germany. To make this work, Beuys placed seven thousand stones on the square in front of the Museum Fridericianum, Documenta 7’s central exhibition space. Over the next five years the rocks were gradually removed and each was placed next to a newly-planted oak tree elsewhere in Kassel. In 1983 forty-four of the stones were moved from the square to Düsseldorf for the 1983 Galerie Schema installation of The End of the Twentieth Century, before being replaced. Beuys stated that he wanted 7000 Oaks: city forestation instead of city administration ‘to initiate the gradual “straightening process”, the “enlivening process” of nature as well as of the social–ecological, that is, social organism’ (quoted in Eckart Förster, ‘“Gentleness, Indirectness, Imperceptibility, and often ‘Anti-Technics’ are my choices”: on Joseph Beuys’ The End of the 20th Century’, in Menil Collection 2007, pp.62–3.) Further reading Joseph Beuys: actions, vitrines, environments, exhibition catalogue, Menil Collection, Houston 2005, pp.84, 136–49. Susanne Willisch and Bruno Heimberg (eds.), Joseph Beuys – Das Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts / The End of the Twentieth Century, Munich 2007. The End of the Twentieth Century: The Best is Yet To Come: A Dialogue with the Marx Collection, exhibition catalogue, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin 2013, pp.11–21. Lucy Watling January 2014 Tate :http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/beuys-the-end-of-the-twentieth-century-t05855/text-summary . Accessed 21/05/2016 '
In the midst of this infernal deviation from a life lived in largely civilized normalcy throughout the lifetime of the victims many of whom had thus come to see themselves as full members of those communities from which they had been eventually evicted, some people are able to operate in terms of the normal modes by which human consciousness orients itself in collective time and space and in the landscape of personal biography- they are able to note the time, the environment, the number of people in the train and how many have escaped, compile all these observations into a note, send their love to their loved ones in that note, and fling the note out of the train window in the hope that it will say something to someone, somewhere, a testament to their humanity in the midst of efforts to obliterate that humanity, a transcendence of the destructive present superbly depicted by historian of Holocaust transport Simon Goldberg's commentary on such letters in summing up his MA research at the University of Haifa.
Conceptual Platforms in Exploring Remembering and Forgetting : Pablo Picasso's La Minotauromachie (Minotauromachy) etching. 1935. Light amidst evil as the sisters of time look on, a mn escaping the approaching dreadfullness of the human/beast, as a terrified horse bears away a woman whose stomach is torn open to the entrails, her face blissful in silence, the entire scene dark with the power of the conjuction of what David Kinsley in a book of the same name calls the sublime and the terrible. "Picasso and the Myth of the Minotaur" by Martin Ries inArt Journal, winter, 1972/1973, XXXII/2 : http://www.martinries.com/article1972-73PP.htm. Accessed 23/05/2016.
Such notes are recovered, archived and decades later studied by people like Goldberg, as in his paper "Returning to the Place of Amnesia : Reflections on a Holocaust Poem", the Holocaust being such a complex operation that its study needs to be organized both in terms of overarching themes as well as a focus on specific aspects. Goldberg's examination of the implication of being able to write such a letter in such dreadfully surreal conditions particularly moved me, the marks of black script on the letter operating for me at the same level of orientation in the galaxy of possibility as the celestial alignments as a measure of timelessness within the vast revolutions of the celestial bodies represented by the meditations undertaken by a fellow inmate in the effort to sustain himself psychologically in a Soviet gulag as described by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his Gulag Archipelago, presented in accounts of mystical experience by Cohen and Phipps in The Common Experience.
Instantiations of Memory : The lights of souls snuffed out by the US atomic bomb attcak on Hiroshima that brought Japan's role in WWII to an end evoked through a carpet like satrs in the night sky as the terrestrial configuarion resonates visually with the peaceful glow of the expanse of blue space looking down upon it , the zone evocative of ascent and mystery which calls to the mind to imagine where the departed souls may have dissapeared to. A tiny gleam of light glowing from what looks like a concourse of mountains as the rectangular blocks of frozen light, sentinels of memory, look on. "Nagasaki National Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims by Akira Kuryu Architect and Associates "; "We achieved a space for silence and solemnity, in order to mourn to the atomic bomb victims and pray for everlasting peace. Most of the building volume was placed in the basement. The basin was placed on the ground, because most of the victims longed for water on August 9 1945, the day of the atomic bomb exploded in Nagasaki. Under the basin, 70,000 lights, the same number of the victims, was burned at night. Visitors approach around the basin to the remembrance hall, library and information centre on the basement. " : http://www.kuryu.com/projects_completion_nagasaki_E.html. Accessed 23/05/2016
Another image, presented, if I recall correctly, by Roma Sendyka in "Abandoned Killing Sites of Dispersed Holocaust : Amnesia or Nonmemory" is that of a section of a field empty of any vegetation but bounded by carefully mown grass on either side, that empty section being a site where murdered Jews had been buried, but which received no commemoration except the persistence on those who lived in the vicinity leaving the place uncultivated, yet keeping it neat, if I recall that image correctly. I find deeply moving the sense of anonymous testimony thus ewvoked, resident primarily in terms of knowledge unmarked by any other means apart from the otherwise undistinguishable symbolism of the uncultivated earth, mute, yet resonant, reverberating in memory, the exercise, across generations, of keeping the bare earth unmarked by vegetation a profound act of reverence.
Instantiations of Memory : Auguste Rodin's Magnificent "The Burghers of Calais". Heroism and resignation, a quiet monumentality of form as six self sacrificing citizens of Calais walk out of the city to give themselves up to the invaders who have besieged the city that is now down to its last strength, so the city would be spared.Auguste Rodin, The Burghers of Calais, 1889, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., cast 1943.AgnosticPreachersKidhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_sculpture#/media/File:The_Burghers_of_Calais_-_Hirshhorn_Sculpture_Garden.JPGModern sculpturehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_sculpture.
I would have thought the practice of survivors of the Rwandan genocide being primary caretakers of the bones of the murdered to be traumatizing but was deeply moved to learn that the experience could be cathartic for the survivors, giving them a chance to identify their loved ones caught in the genocide as well as provide adequate care for the huge scope of remains in a country where facilities for such work are lean and in which most of these remains lie within the external spaces of people's homes where the murders took place, insights emerging from Florence Rasmont's paper " A Memorial of the Tutsi Genocide to Remember of the RPF Struggle? : Challenges of Memory in Post Genocide Rwanda" and the deeply enlightening discussions that followed the delivery of the paper.
Instantiations of Memory : Henry Moore's Mother and Child and other people taking refuge in bomb shelter during the WWII bombing of Britain by Germany. The long line of spectral, even skeletal figures winding towards the tunnel snaking into the distance within the grim colours of the space evoke a version of a dsytopian non-earthly condition, a form of limbo.Henry Moore ~ Shelter Drawing: Seated Mother and Child, 1940-42 Henry Moore Shelter DrawingsHenry Moore Shelter Drawings War artwork created by Henry Moore in the 1940's https://uk.pinterest.com/pin/435230751463380583/
These images of unusual forms of memory and memorializing resonate with Carlo Ginzburg's majestic keynote lecture "Unintentional Revelations. Rescuing the Past, Obliquely", on how unanticipated signifiers become revealing of the profoundest meaning in the understanding of history as developed by Marc Bloch's The Historian's Craft and with Paul Connerton's keynote “The Inside and the Outside: Can Human Body be a Place of Amnesia” from the Upcoming Book The Durable and the Ephemeral” on the human body as a location for amnesia in its mediation of inside and outside through the orifices of the body, sensory enablers in terms of which meaning is interpreted and transmitted within the self as these encounters with experience may be projected through various historical situations as these responses travel in different ways through time, shaping culture in various forms.
Instantiations of Memory : Drowned migrants, their presence resonating through absence of direct representations of their persons, evoked by an installation of clothes suggesting the empty coverings left after people perish at sea in desperate efforts to reach Europe in the early 21st century as they flee poverty and war. The elegant sorroundings of the gallery suggest the world of highly developed commerce and creativity that drew the migrants on the fatal journey, eventually ending up as absent presences within the physical emblematisation of global political economy represeted by the Western art gallery. Image source : "The installation 'La Mer Morte' (The Dead Sea) by French artist Kader Attia on display at the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, Germany, in December. Photo: MARKUS SCHOLZ/EPA". "In Kader Attia’s installation “The Dead Sea,” a wave seems to have left behind a sinister cargo: jeans, sweaters and T-shirts, all in shades of blue and eerily empty, as if “the sea had rejected them,” the artist says. For many visitors, the work recalls the recent picture of a drowned Syrian boy and other images of refugees. " From "In Europe and America, Migrants Reach the Art World " by By Anna Russell Dec. 30, 2015. The Wall Street Journal : http://www.wsj.com/articles/in-europe-and-america-migrants-take-on-the-art-world-1451509444#. Accessed 23/05/2016
Gisele Iecker de Almeida's presentation of her historiographical thought in her paper 'Transitional Justice and its Philosophy of History' sums up for me the significance of this conference as well as the inspiration it provides for my own work on comparative cognitive processes and systems, the comparative study of various ways of arriving at knowledge.
Instantiations of Memory : Skull and belongins of Rwandan genocide victim in genocide museum memorialising the massacre "The Rwandan genocide, known officially in Rwanda as the genocide against the Tutsi,[2] was a genocidal mass slaughter of Tutsi and moderate Hutu in Rwanda by members of the Hutu majority government. An estimated 500,000–1,000,000 Rwandans were killed during the 100-day period from April 7 to mid-July 1994,[1] constituting as many as 70% of the Tutsi and 20% of Rwanda's total population. The genocide was planned by members of the core political elite, many of whom occupied positions at top levels of the national government. Perpetrators came from the ranks of the Rwandan army, the Gendarmerie, government-backed militias including the Interahamwe and Impuzamugambi, as well as countless ordinary civilians". Text source: Wikipedia : "Rwandan Genocide" : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide#Rwandan_Patriotic_Front_military_campaign_and_victory. Accessed 2/5/2016
This inspiration is centred in my work on the Yoruba origin Ifa system of knowledge and its dialogue with the cultural framework represented by the Western academy. This framework is represented in this context by the subjects, themes, modes of discourse and cultural landmarks, from intellectual figures and the ideas they represent to historical events interpreted by these figures, woven by the conference as a Western intellectual event situated within the disciplinary and physical spaces of Western academia, spaces represented here by the modes of discourse that shaped this conference in its location at the University of Cambridge.
Instantiations of Memory :Victor Ekpuk's mural conflating mythic and historical space, time and personas in terms of the slave ship packed with slaves on the right, but holding within its bossom the cosmographic pattern represeting the great fish Tnaze, the divine personage that will give birth to the Abakua esoteric order in Cuba, the transposition to the Americas of the spirit of the Ekpe esoteric order of Nigeria's Cross River region and South West Cameroon, on the left the serpent who plays a central role in the story of the birth of Abakua, both forms converging on the figure on the central wall of the Abakua spirit, both animal and humanoid in evocation of the inspiration of Abakua and Ekpe in nature and animals, as the spiral of eternity and solar presence and its associated values crowns the figure, the entire tableau freamed by countless enigmatic inscriptions suggesting the esoteric charcter of the mythic universe thus evoked, an esotericism centred in the esoteric hermeneutics of the Nsibidi Ekpe symbolism and the Abaku symbolism, as the ripples of water, suggesting both the waters traversed by the slaves as they transported to the Americas and the process of transmission of Ekpe to Cuba in the form of Abakua. The mural generates a dense network of inscriptions , which, in harmony with the mysterious shapes, creates a sense of the numinous, in relation to its evocation of sacred cognitive configuration unifying history and myth. 'Meditation on Memory (ephemeral drawing performance) by Victor Ekpuk at the 12th Havana Biennale 2015 PORTRAITS, a solo exhibition by Victor Ekpuk 29 September - 24 October 2015 Unit 2 La Gare, 51 Surrey Row, London SE1 0BZ “According to African philosophy, the head is the seat of consciousness and memory, and our lives on earth are guided by its disposition.” - Victor Ekpuk Portraits, a series of paintings and fine drawings rooted in African philosophies and aesthetics, is borne from Ekpuk’s interest and continuous exploration of consciousness and the enigmatic nature of the human condition. Through meditative mark making, a visual language that developed from his re-imagining of Nsibidi ideographic and pictographic script, Ekpuk’s abstract portraiture explores the notion of the essence of self. Live drawing performance Moving beyond the traditional canvas and employing a visual stream of consciousness, Ekpuk will further transform the gallery into a metaphysical space through a live drawing performance. Through his ephemeral drawing performance, you will have the rare opportunity to share in Ekpuk's ritual of mark-making and enjoy an intimate evening with the artist. The opening reception of Victor Ekpuk's solo exhibition Portraits at Sulger-Buel-Lovell Gallery is on Tuesday 29 September 2015.'
The visualization of these values emerging from the conference is demonstrated by an image I adapt from from Almeida's presentation,in which the present is placed the centre of a range of possibilities of response, responses ranging across a spectrum from forgetting to commemoration. These responses implicate the spaces of the human mind, the human body and physical space, within a web that looks vertically forward to the future into remembering the event and backwards to the past remembered, sideways into forgetting or manipulating the memory of the event.
Instantiations of Memory : Ossip Zadkine's sculpture memorialising the destruction of Rotterdam in WWII, The Destroyed City (1951-1953), representing a man without a heart, a memorial to the destruction of the center of the Dutch city of Rotterdam in 1940 by the German Luftwaffe.its contruction and stance evoking something both epic and cataclysmic, an impression amplified by the framing of the figure aginst the rolling clouds shaping the expanse of the sky. Prayer, despair, anguished questioning are evoked, conflating humanity's responses to both natural and human made calamity within its contorted and sky projecting form, as if calling to or seeking a non-present ultimate arbiter in the relentless sequence of humanity's inhumanities against itself. JOV http://www.panoramio.com/photo/3595659
All these possibilities intersect at the locus represented by individual and social consciousness, whether in the various theaters of Nazism, from the holocaust transports to the death camps, to the Hitler youth schools through which the Nazi party hoped to perpetuate their legacy and the living members of which today struggle to memorialize their experience of a conflicted time in their lives which defined them all in various ways as discussed by Helen Roch in her paper, "Nazi Elite School Pupils and German Collective Memory" to the paradox of catharsis of genocide survivors in Rwanda being the primary carers and cleaners of bones of the dead from that horror, from references to specificities of encounter with the struggle to cope with the monumental burdens of memory to mythic transmutations of history represented by Goldberg's magnificent exploration , in his paper, of Dan Pagis’ poem “Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway Car,” which may be seen as suggesting the people on the Holocaust trains and those engineering the logistics represented by the trains as members of the same archetypal family, the family of Adam and Eve, one of whose two children killed the other in what the poem may be read as projecting as a tale of humanity's struggle with itself manifest through the fratricide that shapes much of human history.
Conceptual Platforms in Exploring Remembering and Forgetting : Gisele Iecker de Almeida's visualisation of convergences in the shaping and addressing the past.
Ifa Studies
The reference to myth brings me to Ifa. The image of intersecting vertical and horizontal lines is a classic Ifa motif drawn on the surface of the opon ifa, the tray used in Ifa divination, its cosmological symbolism the subject of a growing body of hermeneutic activity. The central idea through which my experience at the conference advances my exploration of Ifa is the stimulation leading me to ask how this ancient system may be understood in terms of ways of using history as a means of engaging with the future, this being a central concern of Almedia's paper,a concern that brings together various responses to this question as represented by the various strategies of remembering and forgetting demonstrated by the historical spectrum from Germany to Rwanda demonstrated buy the presentations at the conference.
Conceptual Platforms in Exploring Remembering and Forgetting : Axes of being and becoming, expressed through time , space and infinity, converging in the self , understood a svisualised through the quaternary division that may be marked on an opon ifa, a primary synbolic and functional form of the Yoruba origin Ifa system of knowledge
To what degree may the past be seen as instructive for the future? Is history recurrent but expressed in different ways? Does history move forward in terms of unreplicated novelty, with little relation to the past, Almedia asks, if I remember her presentation well enough, and within these contexts, what tools may people develop to enable them deal better than they have before with the changes they will face?
Conceptual Platforms in Exploring Remembering and Forgetting: Ifa cosmographic statement suggesting existence as a tranformative process yet grounded in the stability of fundamental constitutents, as suggested by the development from Eji Ogbe of Oyeku Meji, the first full binary form in the binary organisational structure of Ifa, the Odu Ifa, an idea amplified by the inscription of the vertical binary inscriptions of Oyeku Meji on an opon ifa, inscribed with spirals of transformation and the face of Esu at the top, the Orisa or deity of trnaformation and of meditation between possiblities and forms of being.
She draws examples from history, taking my mind to Ifa textuality, its means of rendering memory in literary form as a map for navigating future possibilities, cognitive coordinates organized in terms of two hundred and fifty categories arrived at through permutations activated through the random patterns assumed by the divinatory instruments when cast, this apparent randomisation described as as actually demonstrating an underlying order manifested by the individual's ori, their centre of identity in dialogue with the inanimate intelligence foundational to the oracle.
Conceptual Platforms in Exploring Remembering and Forgetting : The unfolding and integration of possibilities, suggested by the Voodoo veve, scared symbol for calling upon the deities of the diaspora African religion Voodoo, within the armbit of eternity, evoked by the circularity of the opon ifa. Sixteen radiations of the Voodoo symbol correspond to the sixteen primary Odu , the primary identities of all possibilities of being, as understood in Ifa, as presented by babalawo-adept in the esoteric knowledge of Ifa- Joseph Ohomina,
Is it possible to develop a series of narratives in relation to one's own life, explore their interrelationships and use them as maps to enable one anticipate future occurrences and plan how best to manage them? Is it possible through such configuration and reflection to enter into cognitive states that deliver intuitive knowledge of future or of emergent or unfolding possibilities ? How may these questions relate to the range of epistemic forms employed in Ifa, from literature, oral and written, to sculpture, to mathematics?
Conceptual Platforms in Exploring Remembering and Forgetting : The struggle or tension between order and chaos as a primary paradigm of reality, as suggested by the charred texts in the battered bookcase overlooking the expanse of shattered glass, as thenimbus of inscriptions crowning the bookcase and expressing the foudational zones of being as they emanate from Ain Soph Aur, the unmanifest source of existence, expressed in terms of the categories of existence edonted by the names linked by wires running the length of the bookcase in a network, suggesting the susting integrity of existence within the destruction that defines existence, adapting the intertpretation of the balance of chaos and order, of good and evil that shapes terrestrial existence by Isaac Luria, who interpreted the Jewish hermneutics of Kabbalah in terms of an understading that the vessels through which the unmanifest streamed its power in ordewr to create the universe broke under the force of the divine presence, shattering intoi what humans now perceive as the chaotic form of the world they inhabit, the divine light remaing trapped in the shards of the primiordial explosion, this shattering within order being aligned in this woork, The Shattering of the Vessels by Anselm Kiefer, with the destruction of texts objected to by the Nazis and the destruction of Jewish buninsdess in the Night of Broken Glass, a climatic point in the movement of the Nazis towards demonising and eventually attemting to exterminate all Jews within the compass of their conquests in Europe. A powerfully bleak and epically potent work, integrating myth and history in a remarkable synthesis. 'Shevirat Ha-Kelim (2011)Kiefer has broken glass within the gallery and situated its shards and fragments in a library made of lead. Half library, half bomb-shelter, the large, folio-sized books appear well-thumbed and dog-eared, but not, by virtue of the solidity and weight of their material, fragile. There are shards of glass protruding from the bookshelves and further debris surrounding the library on the floor. The piece recalls the nightmarish rubble of Kristallnacht or “The Night of Broken Glass”, the pogrom in 1938 that devastated Jewish communities in Germany. By situating the broken glass in the library, Kiefer points towards possibilities for healing and mending, through learning, art and literature. Literature, in Kiefer’s work, seems to endure, almost above all else. One of the most unusual and impressive aspects of Kiefer’s more recent work is the way he has incorporated the symbols, myths and iconographic teachings of the Kaballah into his confrontations with recent history. According to the Kaballah, the Breaking of the Vessels occurred when God’s light could not be contained within the 10 vessels that were housing it, thus creating a state of discord in the world. Harmony is only re-attainable through a process of “tikkun olam”, which Dr. Lurie translates as “world mend”, and which is intended to reconnect Jews with “the infinite.” Above Kiefer’s installation, there hangs a glass crescent, on which the words “Ain Soph” are etched: the Hebrew words for “unending” or “infinite.” In Kiefer’s Shevirat Ha-Kelim (2011), it is possible to see an impulse towards mending and a faith in the durability of learning, but this can only be achieved through a cathartic taking of responsibility, a process of facing up to history with an unshrinking gaze.' on Shevirat Ha-Kelim: The Breaking of the Vessels ran from 2 November until 15 April 2012 at Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv. www.tamuseum.com by Colin Herd in 'Confronting the Past ' Aesthetica. http://www.aestheticamagazine.com/confronting-the-past/
The development of Ifa Studies continues to reinforce an understanding of cognitive system as one that may be studied in relation to a very broad range of knowledge, acting as the pivot, the point of departure for an exploration of existence, in its comprehensive scope as well as its particulars.
Instantiations of Memory : Detail of Ossip Zadkine's sculpture memorialising the destruction of Rotterdam in WWII, highlighting the contorted hands and open mouth seemingly calling to the sky in anguish, as the emptiness suggested by the absence of concrete forms in the cloud canopy seems to resonate soundlessly with the silent scream, non-sound and non-concreteness in relation to space enveloping the figure in a manner that may suggest voidness of meaning in the face of humanly created calamity or a voidness evocative of meaning that escapes or transcends human comprehension- history, supplication, anguished reflection resonating from humanty's various self inflicted holocausts converging on this dynamic form.
Cambridge and Educational Tourism
With this essay I come to the conclusion that my practice of attending public lectures, seminars and conferences at the University of Cambridge is not simply a recreational exercise but an educational initiative of far reaching significance, as suggested by the decisive push the stimulus from the encounters gained has given me in advancing my work on Ifa in ways completely unanticipated, as demonstrated by the stories and essays
Instantiations of Memory :Two people reading inscription on remains of The Bombing of Dresdenhttp://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-two-people-reading-inscription-on-remains-of-the-bombing-of-dresden-52206983.html
It should be possible to build this experience into a learning system operating at the convergence of the fortuitousness demonstrated by making selections of what educational events to attend from the offerings provided by different academic units at the university. The central university website for such events, talks.cam.ac.uk goes a long way is fundamental to enabling access to these events.
Instantiations of Memory :Dresden DestroyedIt was one of the most controversial actions of the Second World War: the fire-bombing of Dresden that city to ash and rubble. Between 13 February and 15 February 1945 (twelve weeks before the final capitulation of Germany), 3,900 tons of high-explosives and incendiary devices were delivered in four air raids carried out by 1,300 bombers. Thirteen square miles of the city and the estimates of civilian dead vary from 100,000 to 130,000 — twice the amount that perished during the entire London Blitz. Nearly a thousand invaluable masterpieces (mainly from Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister) were lost or destroyed. The photographer contrasted its devastation with a statue of not an angel (as commonly assumed) but more powerfully, a personification of Kindness. August Schreitmüller’s sandstone sculpture “Die Gute” on Dresden’s Rathaustrum once overlooked a magnificent city, so-called ‘Florence-on-the-Elbe’, the former seat of the Electors of Saxony. Now beyond its outstretched arms lies a sea of ruins. The photo from the tower looking south was by Richard Peter, who made a name for himself recording ruins and desolation that was Europe at the end of WWII. His photo inspired many others to find their way up the tower of the city hall and take similar photos.Iconic Photoshttps://iconicphotos.wordpress.com/2009/07/08/dresden-destroyed/. Accessed 2/5/2016
Also priceless is the CRASSH (Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities ) website, which seems to be the central agency at Cambridge in organising academic events in the humanities and social sciences and to some degree the sciences, as these are accessible to the general public.
Instantiations of Memory : 'The lambent flame of [ humanity's] inherent divinity'- Dennis Brutus. Bird in flight in Sankofa pose, reminiscent of Ghanaian Adinkra Sankofa symbol suggesting the need to study the past for its relevance for the present and the future, light from within by the flame of life, of memory and of spirit, part of there.'memorial, Second World War 1939-1945, eternal flame (Also known as The Flame of Hiroshima and Nagasaki). This memorial contains an eternal flame which is encased inside of a metallic dove. The eternal flame was originally taken from a fire generated by the bombing of Hiroshima and was later combined with a flame that was taken from a fire generated by the bombing of Nagasaki. ' Wikimapia The map created by people like you! http://wikimapia.org/1222484/Atomic-Bomb-Memorial#/photo/1026774
Other units whose events I have attended with some consistency include the Department of the History and Philosophy of Science , the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, the Science Meets Faith lectures of the Wesley Methodist Church, the Round Church Talks organized by Christian Heritage , the Institute of Criminology, Wolfson College, the Stokes Society at Pembroke College.
Conceptual Platforms in Exploring Remembering and Forgetting: An example of Evelyne Huet's powerful evocation of the human face as container or evocator of inward universes, configurations of memory, eyes glowing darkly, sorrounded by turtured rings possibly of skin made dark by crying, as if in wounded recollection of traumatising experience,By Evelyne Huet 'World War One, a taste of Armageddon for my grand-father Marcel OUDIN (1895.03.29 – 1984.09.10), pacifist and communist from the very beginning who survived the hell of the trenches and mustard gas, notably in Verdun and Le Chemin-des-Dames. Besides his hearing which he lost during the war when shelled, he also lost, at age 20 and forever, his carefree attitude, imagination, and volubility. Later, he never attended what he used to call the “tragic farces” of the commemorations of the Armistice Day on November 11th, 1918. (oil-acrylics-digital) Category: Bloodshed.
This learning strategy satisfies an interest in learning without being fixed to an academic program while exposing one to the frontiers of research as delivered by scholars and scientists profoundly passionate about their work, providing a stimulus to further development operating entirely at one's discretion, the best of academic immersion without its normally attendant regimens of assessment, a free public service from the University of Cambridge.
Other universities such as Oxford, University College, London and Harvard, these being those I looked into, provide a similar service, Cambridge's being the one I have taken advantage of so far.
Conceptual Platforms in Exploring Remembering and Forgetting. Jesus of Nazareth – Crucifixion by Evelyne Huet. http://www.evelynehuet.com/?product=jesus-of-nazareth-crucifixion&lang=en