The panel proposes to expand the field of memory studies by integrating organic and non-human forms as active agents, rethinking and negotiating the archive to reshape histories, open pathways for drift, and reconfigure frameworks for democratic imaginaries. The artist’s approach to archival practice functions as a constellation of elements evoking traditional disciplines, tidy completion, and fixed structures. The inclusion of the non-human perspective offers here a model for the potentiality and futurity of moving between and inhabiting spaces, of othering and recognition—for the tracing, claiming, and acknowledgement of memory.
Each paper moves beyond symbolic interpretations of landscape, engaging with multigenerational narratives in which relationships to land and environment are embodied through daily practices, from agriculture to urban life. Through democratised methodologies and artistic collaboration, the panel seeks to question hegemonic memory and explore its potential transformation. Within these frameworks, land and its continual changes emerge simultaneously as archive and agent. This reconstitution of memory practices envisions a form of democracy shaped by the entanglement of human and non-human actors in evolving historical and contemporary narratives.
The discussion will consider the archive as fragmentary—an aesthetic strategy to activate the imaginary. It will examine how non-human witnesses constitute “non-sites of memory” (Lanzmann), reflecting on the hauntology of inheritance (Barad) and the material entanglements that persist within contentious sites of national remembrance. By foregrounding vernacular, multisensory histories and archives often excluded from national memory discourses, the panel asks how landscapes, in an expanded sense, might act as participants in the making of cultural memory, and how the agency of the non-human can reshape remembrance itself.
Monika Gabriela Dorniak, HfK Bremen - "Living Archives: More Than Human Agents in Post War Rural Memory"
This research investigates how more than human actors—soils, plants, minerals, and animals—participate in the transmission of cultural memory in rural environments marked by the legacies of the Second World War. Moving beyond symbolic understandings of landscape, the study draws from multigenerational narratives in German and Polish rural communities, where relationships to land are embodied through daily practices such as agriculture and foraging. In these contexts, the land itself emerges as both archive and agent: bomb fragments embedded in trees, or the recurrent discovery of unexploded ordnance in fields, reveal the material capacity of environments to mediate between silence and disclosure of traumatic pasts. Building on Bruno Latour’s notion of a Parliament of Things, the project interrogates how non human witnesses contribute to what Claude Lanzmann terms “non sites of memory,” while Karen Barad’s framework of “hauntological relations of inheritance” highlights the entangled persistence of matter, violence, and memory. Through a methodology combining auto ethnography, agricultural engagement, and artistic research, the study foregrounds vernacular, multisensory archives largely absent from nationalized memorial discourses.
Key findings suggest that rural landscapes function as living archives, unsettling dichotomies of complicity versus innocence or ruin versus restitution. By positioning soils, plants, and other agents as co authors of remembrance, the research proposes an expanded field of memory studies that integrates more than human agency into democratic discourse. This reconstitution of memory practices calls for a vision of democracy where entangled human and non human actors actively shape evolving narratives of post-war Europe.
Rosell Meseguer, Universidad Complutense Madrid - "OVNI Archive "
Events during this XXI Century such as the poisoning and death of Litvinenko spy (2006), first conviction for espionage in Spain to Mr Flores (2010) for selling information to Russia, Wikileaks (2010), or Edward Snowden (2013), brought back to mind the Cold War espionage era. The current espionage happens in a context of recent economic and financial crisis, as well as in a race to control technologies, digital archives and information - media- as well as the resurgence of discussions on the use of nuclear energy, and control of the space race. The paper asks, how might the invasion of Ukraine (2022) shows us how these issues that we considered to be part of the past are contemporary and complex? And what are the consequences?
The OVNI (UFO) Archive Project, talks about how these issues from Cold War are part of our daily life. The project has been going on since 2007, fascinated by Cold War and Propaganda issues from the past to the present, developing an unusual huge archive that displays: analogical, internet and website media files, memory and political documents, photographs and materials related to the world of espionage, taking into account the impossibility of these to be completely legible, for in them is hidden an essential part of the information.
As a PhD in Fine Arts, artist and researcher, building the archive from media, considering five important issues brought from the Cold War: espionage, atomic bomb, petrol, space race and of course the Cosmos, has been a long term process project on history, politics and arts, that reflects how media, analogue -print- and digital newspapers, can help us in the storytelling, mixing image and text, and improving our contemporary Knowledge.
Winona Pawelzik, Universität Hamburg - "The Perspective of a Stone: Artistic Approaches to Collaborative Memories and Restitution in the Exhibition ‘Moving Mountains’ (2022–present)"
In 1889, German colonial geographer Hans Meyer led an expedition to Mount Kilimanjaro in what is now Tanzania. Meyer removed the top of the highest mountain in Africa and renamed the summit ‘Kaiser Wilhelm Peak’. He divided the summit stone into two parts and gave one half to emperor Wilhelm II while keeping the other for himself as a paperweight. Meyer's heirs sold it to an Austrian antiques dealer, where it remains today.
The German artist collective PARA and Tanzanian artists Rehema Chachage and Valerie Asiimwe Amani address the theft of the summit stone in the exhibition ‘Berge versetzen’ (Moving Mountains) at the GRASSI Museum für Völkerkunde zu Leipzig (the ethnological museum of the city of Leipzig). In a performative action at the opening of the exhibition, PARA dismantled a historic pedestal in the museum. From the material obtained in this way, the collective produced small replicas of the summit stone, which they call ‘Skrupel’ (scruples) and which can be purchased by visitors to finance the restitution of the summit stone. To increase the political pressure, the collective removed and kidnapped the upper part of the Zugspitze (the highest mountain in Germany). In parallel, Chachage and Amani dismantled Hans Meyer's photographic archive and wove it together in a video installation into a reparative narrative that illuminates the perspective of the stone. The stone becomes a stubborn subject. The paper explores how these democratised, collaborative forms of negotiating memories through artistic practices of deconstruction, transformation and recomposition can bring about a shift from a hegemonic memory to a ‘collaborative monumentality’ (Dan Hicks) that not only questions ‘what’ to remember but ‘how’ to remember.
Fabian Röderer Williams, Universität Hamburg - "The Plinth as Planter for Public Art. Veronica Ryan’s Proposal for London’s Fourth Plinth"
Veronica Ryan’s proposal for London’s Fourth Plinth, titled ‘Sweet Potatoes and Yams are Not the Same’, was to present a large-scale sweet potato with upward growing and leaf-bearing vines. London’s Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square had remained empty for the majority of its existence. Since 1999 various artists employed the plinth as pedestal and stage to engage with and comment on the square and its display of imperial power. Part of the 2024 shortlist, Ryan reimagined the plinth as a planter. Depicting growth and thus change, the sculpture claimed potentiality and futurity. Once a foreign vegetable, now readily available in supermarkets, the sweet potato challenges the static proposition of Trafalgar Square’s 19th-century imagery of national identity. Ryan plants the memory of migration, arrival and integration and claims democratic, political participation through the monument’s positioning in Westminster, the political heart of the United Kingdom.
Drawing on Ryan’s artistic practice and her longstanding exploration of memory and migration through organic forms, such as seeds and fruits, ‘Sweet Potatoes and Yams are Not the Same’ foregrounds – emphatically in its title – the immigrant experience of misrecognition and othering. Situated in the midst of built narratives of imperial grandeur, the plinth as a planter allows the sweet potato to sprout defiantly and resiliently. Suggesting new histories through its growing leaves, the artwork looks to create new memories, without forgetting the past.
Employing a close reading of Ryan’s proposal within the context of current debates of public art and remembrance in the United Kingdom, the paper asks how public art can foster democratic debates and collective memory in times of growing polarisation.
20260729T173020260729T1900America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires4.9. The Negotiation of the Embodied and Non-Human in Artistic Practices of RemembranceSV204MSA Buenos Aires 2026buenosairesconference@memorystudiesassociation.org
