Over the last six months, we have brought together a group of artists from all fields, to investigate what it means to live in the shadow of history, what legacies we carry, and which ones we consciously refuse. Together we embarked on a journey that was not always easy, as the memories we confronted were often painful, unresolved and unreckoned with. We investigated the rapid decrease of public space, the bodies that lie buried beneath the soil, the political languages of obfuscation and erasure, as well as the different experiences of displacement, while at the same time looking for connections, untold stories and acts of resistance.
Throughout this journey, one question kept resurfacing: “Why tell these (hi)stories?”. It is easy to respond to this by reducing the past to a simple lesson, or an empowering narrative. The most fruitful elements of our discussion, however, were those moments when history became visible in all its complexity. Not a clean linear narrative, but entanglements of agencies, identities and belongings, that shape the present – its lasting injustices and lingering traumas, but also surprising moments of kinship and recognition.
Rather than a simple answer, this exhibition and the texts gathered here are an invitation to sit with an unfinished history and the questions it raises. We locate ourselves here somewhere in-between grief and hope. Grief, as letting go and holding on at the same time. Hope, as in blind hope, necessary hope, dangerous hope. And in spite of everything, we held on to the belief that reckoning with the past is also a way of making space for a different future.
