Keeping Memory: Oral History Practices that Host Kin and Community - Incite at Columbia University

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    Keeping Memory: Oral History Practices that Host Kin and Community

A keep is a place to hold what is both precious and intimate. In the oral history practices featured in this series, kin memories are held in trust, in wisdom, in ritual, in heritage, and in each other. These projects think beyond the one-to-one interview encounter, gathering the embodied experience of kin, families, and communities. Each asks what needs to be remembered, and who needs to remember.

From Avantika Seth, whose film Will You Remember What I Choose to Forget? returns to her family's two houses in Shimla and finds family oral history to be its own ethical terrain, in which consent became not the granting of permission but the act of staying.

Will You Remember What I Choose to Forget?

To Nyssa Chow, whose listening praxis, rooted in Caribbean and Global South memory practices, moves oral history beyond documentation toward enactment—architectures of communal remembering that host not only what a narrator can say, but what a person, and a people, can be.

Remembering Gathers a World: Listening as an Occasion of Otherwise Possibility

To Jeary "Sylves" Payne, who names his film All The Space You Cannot See a Black oralgraphical documentary made through slow listening and intimate looking at images, and offers it as a model for attending to the Black interior worlds and the spaces in our lives we cannot see but know and feel.

In My Granny’s Kitchen—Black Collective Memory and the Emotional Architecture of Space

To Laurie Zamí Germain, whose LAKOU SEKRÈ // SAKRE built an altar to "the open secret" of queer diasporic life and whose GATHERING(S) now invites queer and trans migrants, their friends, and their families to move from witnessing to participation—we will think together about what oral history can be beyond the interview.

GATHERING(S)

This series is curated by Nyssa Chow and hosted in partnership with two institutes of community memory: this fall at Weeksville Heritage Center in Central Brooklyn, a historic site preserving one of the largest free Black communities in pre–Civil War America; and this spring at The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center, a Puerto Rican and Latinx cultural home on the Lower East Side.

Learn more here.