CfP: Memory Gaps: Tracks and Cracks (Strasbourg, France)

International Conference, 19 and 20 October 2023, University of Strasbourg

Each speaker has 30 minutes of presentation, followed by a 15-minute discussion. The languages of the conference are French and English. The publication of the papers is planned.

Please send your proposal (title, short abstract and biography) at the latest by 1 May 2023 to: Beat Föllmi, University of Strasbourg, bfollmi[at]unistra[dot]fr

We would like to examine the way in which the arts (theatre, cinema, literature, painting, sculpture, music) draw, trace and unfold the canvases and scores of individual, familiar and collective memory, from traces, cracks, flaws, interstices, lapses, oblivion, loss of memory, repression, from “the memory of what is forgotten”, shadowy areas, crypts, confiscated images and words, prevented, manipulated or forced memory, from “wounded memory” (Ricoeur), forgetting processes, silences, denials, blind spots, scattered fragments, superimposed and/or hybridized strata, from the power of memory and the power over memory.

This will also lead us to re-examine, in a comparative perspective, the forms of commitment and the culture and forms of commemoration – “orthopaedic memory, frozen in sterile commemorations”, the memory “on display”. Commitment and commemoration – two key words in the research programme of LES:TRACES (Laboratory for studies on: trauma, art, commemoration, engagement, sound).

Scientific committee: Isabelle Reck, Beat Föllmi Director of CREAA: Alessandro Arbo

The Centre for Research and Experimentation on the Artistic Act (CREAA) aims to develop knowledge of the artistic act in interdisciplinary matter, by comparing the knowledge and methodologies of the humanities, social sciences and exact sciences.