(by Leila Kiyomura)
On the 12th, Giselle Beiguelman will be at the Paraty Literary Festival (Flip) to launch Memória da amnésia: políticas do esquecimento at Casa Sesc. In her Rádio USP column, Ouvir Imagens, the artist and professor at USP’s Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism discusses her new book (click the player above).
“In this volume, I bring together a set of textual and visual essays in the field of the aesthetics of memory,” she explains. “All chapters, except the last—a reflection on the fire at the National Museum—orbit projects I have carried out in different contexts. They are experimental and research works developed through artistic interventions in public and informational spaces.”
The book opens with Beleza convulsiva tropical, a project carried out at the State Historical Archive for the 3rd Bahia Biennial in 2014. The second chapter discusses the intervention Memória da amnésia, presented at the São Paulo Historical Archive, which gives the book its title. The next two chapters continue these reflections, interwoven with questions that resonate with the artist’s digital media work.
The book closes with an essay on the fire at the National Museum of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro on September 2, 2018. “The text was conceived in the spectrum of a memoricide; the fire is read under the sign of catastrophes and as a metaphor for our recent past,” Beiguelman observes. “It was written almost as an afterword, in October, when the book was already finished. Without yielding to bewilderment before the present or to amnesia, I conclude by insisting on art’s power to put memory under tension and reinvent reality.”
Memória da Amnésia: políticas do esquecimento will be launched at a discussion on heritage, resistance and neglect, at 5 p.m., with Solange Ferraz de Lima, professor and director of the Museu Paulista da USP, and Alexander Kellner, director of the Museu Nacional at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. The same discussion with the same participants will be held in São Paulo on the 16th at 7:30 p.m., at the Centro de Pesquisa e Formação do Sesc (Rua Dr. Plínio Barreto, 285, 4th floor, Bela Vista).
