Conversations on visual memory

Abstract

Conversations on Visual Memory is the final product of the research conducted by Luisa Passerini as Principal Investigator of the European Research Council Project “Bodies Across Borders: Oral and Visual Memory in Europe and Beyond” (BABE). In this book, Passerini broadens the scope of her longstanding engagement with memory, extending it from orality to visuality. The book brings together Passerini’s dialogues with experts in the fields of memory and visuality; “maps” drawn and presented by mobile individuals interviewed in the course of the BABE fieldwork; and art that thematically centers on migration toward and across Europe. In the first chapter of Part 1, Passerini evokes her conversations with the cognitive psychologist, Jerry Bruner (1915–2016. These exchanges enable the author’s envisioning of the “maps” drawn by three individuals who migrated to Italy from Egypt, Albania, and Peru, respectively (chapter 2). The maps shed light on and are simultaneously illuminated by the author’s recollections of conversations she had with two other friends: the philosopher of aesthetics, Gianni Carchia (1947–2000) and the anthropologist, Jack Goody (1919–2015) on the relationship between the written and the oral. These latter conversations are interspersed with presentations of “maps” by individuals from Moldova, Pakistan, Romania, and Morocco (chapter 3). Part 2 is an exploration of two fields of knowledge that are evolving along different lines: art on the theme of migration, on the one hand, and documentation (oral, visual, and written) collected from mobile individuals whose trajectories are directed to and through Europe, on the other. Visual works by Eva Leitolf; Victor López González; Ursula Biemann and Bouchra Khalili are set in dialogue with “maps” drawn by interviewees from Peru, Syria, Nigeria, Moldova, Ecuador, Morocco, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mali, and Ukraine. The book concludes with a discussion in a graduate class that Passerini directed in oral history, which highlights the importance of art for teaching and researching in this field.