The Slow Memory Podcast

In this episode, we introduce Slow Memory in arts-based practices of care. The episode features three pioneering arts-based practices from Argentina that generate significant, slow-moving transformations in mental health care. They promote the rights of people who experience mental suffering: the right to play, the right to dream, the right to be listened to, to be remembered. This is key, knowing that the memories of people with lived experiences of mental suffering are oftentimes the object of stigmatization and forgetting in society. The episode includes the voices and stories of people who are involved in this significant memory work, including Santiago Barugel (Hospital Infanto Juvenil Dra. Carolina Tobar García), Sonia Malva Basualdo (Colectivo Crisálida) and Daniel Degol (El cisne del arte).  Read by: Marileen La HaijeMusic by Rasec Música Sin Copyrigth from Pixabay

In this episode, Members of Working Group 3 on the Transformation of Politics explore the history of International Women’s Day and how this date can be understood as a “slow commemoration”. Slow commemoration refers to dates in our calendar that appear to commemorate or celebrate something specific yet whose meaning is slippery. Slow commemorations attach themselves to multiple histories and multiple meanings: they can be filled with content to persuade you to fight for something, vote for something, or simply buy something. The 8 March is marked in many places in the world, but the meanings attached to it shift and slip according to time and location. Sometimes it is a day to celebrate women in traditional ways with gift-giving and flowers, sometimes it is a day to protest continued inequality, in some places it is viewed as nothing more than a Soviet hangover, and in others, it is a marketing opportunity.Narrated by Sara Jones and Maija SpurinaMusic by Rasec Música Sin Copyrigth from Pixabay

Susana Gomes da Silva, coordinator of Education at the Modern Art Museum, from the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, Portugal; Blerta Hoçia, a curator from the Humanitarian Law Center, based in Kosovo; and Professor Vicky Karaiskou, from the Open University of Cyprus, delve into the meanings of slow curating and what slow curating has entailed in their curatorial work. Against the backdrop of the times of acceleration, they discuss slow curating – as an approach and a method – to critically explore the entanglements of material, affective, and nonhuman worlds. Inquiring into the curatorial domain through the slow memory lens, they pursue an ethical framework challenging representations of the fast-paced and anthropocentric agency.Read by: Vjollca KrasniqiIsabel Machado Alexandre Alice SemedoMusic by Maksym Dudchyk and UNIVERSFIELD from Pixabay

In this era of rapid acceleration, scholars are subjected to unprecedented pressures to deliver at a pace that is unsustainable. The “boom” in memory studies and memory practice since the 1980s is one expression of this sped-up environment. We operate in systems that require the fulfillment of simultaneous roles of teacher, researcher, administrator, manager, counselor, networker and more. All of these roles are shaped by embeddedness in the regime of neoliberalism in the Anthropocene. Imperatives and deadlines of scholarship are determined by funders, institutional concerns, and administrative checklists, rather than the needs of high-quality, rigorous and engaged research. This is not only detrimental to our health and wellbeing but leads to mediocre research at best and to missing key insights about (slow) memory at worst.Slow memory conceptualizes practices of remembrance that are ‘multi-sited’, ‘eventless’ and refer to slow-moving phenomena. But we are hampered in our ability to study these processes by a 24-hour news cycle coupled to a 24-hour academic assembly line. To succeed in this system we are expected to work at such a breakneck speed that it seems the only options are to keep the pace at an unsustainable rate or drop out. We believe there is another way that involves slowing down our research methods, processes and thinking. To this end, we propose the Cres Manifesto.