MOBILE MEMORIES
Annual conference of the research group Bilderfahrzeuge. Aby Warburg’s Legacy and the Future of Iconology Berlin, 10.-11. November 2022
Memories travel between locations, cultures, generations, groups, and migrate with people and objects. The processes of transmission or displacement of memories also mean their transformation according to social, political, personal or other dynamics. At the same time, memories are often addressed as ‘tradition’, as relatively stable points of reference in the self-definitions or identity constructions of groups or societies (bound to particular places and sites). Collective memory, which includes memory practices or agents, such as archives, museums and rituals, may be confronted with memory as the individual faculty to process, store and retrieve information.
This year’s conference of the research group »Bilderfahrzeuge. Aby Warburg’s Legacy and the Future of Iconology« entitled MOBILE MEMORIES and taking place in Berlin 10.-11. November 2022, will investigate objects and carriers, matter and media of memories in a transcultural perspective. Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas and his image-based concept of memory is an obvious point of reference, but also of critical concern. The reflection on Warburg’s Mnemosyne project leads on to other fields of enquiry, such as media and data transmission technologies. The latter are an essential factor for the mobility and travel of memories, while technologies are partly also driven by the need or the politics of transmission of memories. The conference seeks to discuss this in historical case studies as well as in relation to contemporary practices and methodologies in digital mediascapes.
Under these premises, the interplay of memory, motion, aesthetics and transcultural dynamics is an important field for the investigation of concepts such as ‘heritage’ and ‘provenance’ or of constellations of translocated artifacts and global memory spaces. We conceive this as an invitation to art history and related disciplines to newly engage in and contribute to memory studies, with a focus on pictorial and artistic discourses.