The Memory of Crimes: From Utopia to Practice

Monday, October 31, 2016, 7pm

The Memory of Crimes: From Utopia to Practice

Pierre Hazan

HEAD – Genève, Boulevard Helvétique 9, 1205 Geneva, seminar room CCC, salle 27, 2nd floor

Students attacking Cecil Rhodes’s statue in Cap, South Africa – the statue will be finally removed – April 2015. Image: Mike Hutchings.
Students attacking Cecil Rhodes’s statue in Cap, South Africa – the statue will be finally removed – April 2015. Image: Mike Hutchings.

Is it the multiplication of crises? The uncertainty about the future? The identity malaise that rages in Europe? Rarely has memory been so much invoked, claimed, asserted. Never have so many history museums been built as now. But is memory truely contributing to a pedagogical project? What are the links between ethics and aesthetics? What place do the judge and the artist still take, both in charge of preserving memory? This is what I will intend to explore departing from the analysis of memorial politics.