Memories Un-Remembered: Thinking of Home (Longing)
BxArts Factory in partnership with the Bronx Muisc Heritage Center invites you to our 1st Art Exhibition of 2016!
Save the date for our Opening Reception!
Artists:
Stephanie Mota
Francheska Alcantara
Edwin Torres
Lazarus Nazario
Curated by:
Alexis Mendoza
Description:
The Bronx is known as one of the most diverse borough in New York City. Long a refuge for the city’s poor, migrant workers, the borough has maintained this identity to date. Though the faces of its immigrant populations have changed—from the initially Irish, Italian, Jewish, Polish migrants to now African, Latino, East Asian, West Indian, East Indian immigrants—the impetus that drove them to leave their places of origin, often overlap. Yet, the shared histories and stories of life at home or that initially compelled them to migrate frequently fade. Whether through a voluntary forgetting or the pressures of adaptation, rich, textured memories and narratives become lost to the requirements of life in a new land.
The Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, has said the “un-rememberable”, the memory clouded from view, is the most powerful memory of all, while for the Russian writer and theorist, Svetlana, Boym, there are two types of nostalgia: restorative nostalgia and prospective nostalgia. For Boym, restorative nostalgia, attempts to reconstruct the lost root that nobody remembers, while, the latter, reflexive nostalgia, which she positions in art, is a thought of the past as a potential, (i.e., it is about ‘watching’ dreams through which we can think about the future). Through this definition, the past and the future remain connected and ripe with interplay that encompasses benefits that can be passed on. We wondered, then, what would happen if we attempted to explore the interplay between the un-rememberable and nostalgia, especially within an aging, immigrant demographic? Would we find a simple longing for home or more complex desires for something more, perhaps a something that never existed? Through the collection of verbal, visual and written stories, Memories Un-Remembered: Thinking of Home (Longing), seeks to bring forth the un-rememberable through the triggering of nostalgia to initiate conversations within aging communities in the Bronx in order to build a collective memory of their shared origins and histories, including displacement, adaptation, gentrification, all topics steeped in loss. Through the process of content collection, we hope to locate and distill common themes to reflect back to the community via an exhibit, film presentation, a panel discussion and workshop.
Curated by Alexis Mendoza, Co-Fouder and Art Director at BxArts Factory
