In ancient Rome, the practice of damnatio memoriae (condemnation of memory) was the ultimate punishment: any trace, record, and depiction of an individual’s existence was expunged from collective memory. Even today, we demand for public figures to be “canceled” when they have breached certain moral codes and for monuments to be torn down when they represent repugnant prejudices and condemnable crimes.
When every move is seemingly documented, recorded, and bought and sold, however, the power, and perhaps impossibility, of total erasure takes on new value. Whether in the height of the Cold War or in the morass of contemporary social media, the ability to redact becomes a necessity and a privilege. Removing something from the record is, moreover, as powerful an act as refusing admittance to it. Many in the world today, whole peoples and nations, are still fighting for the right to exist, be seen, heard, and recorded for posterity.
Does control over what is off the record, through expungement or omission, remain the supreme force of power that the ancient Romans believed it was?
Here are some more of the questions that we will ask: What is the record and who gets to decide if something is removed from it? Is the ability to be forgotten a right or a privilege? Should we be able to control our own record, as the European “right to be forgotten” affirms? Is it still possible to exist without leaving a trace? What is the lifespan of things recorded digitally? Should they have an expiration date? A statute of limitations? Is there erasure through excess? Does canceling (people) or tearing down (monuments) serve a valuable social function? Is damnatio memoriae still possible? In today’s world, would it be considered a punishment or a gift? How is power wielded through record-keeping and -erasing? How can we have better accountability for those who abuse this power?
Eduardo Cadava is Philip Mayhew Professor of English, and an Associate Member of the Department of Comparative Literature, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, the School of Architecture, the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, and the Institute for International and Regional Studies at Princeton University. He specializes in American literature and culture, comparative literature, media technologies, literary and political theory, theory of translation, and issues of citizenship and human rights.
Matthew Connelly is a professor of international and global history and co-director of the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy at Columbia University. Connelly is also the principal investigator of History Lab, a project that uses data science to analyze state secrecy, with a focus on intelligence, surveillance, and weapons of mass destruction.
Julia Weist is an artist making artwork at the intersection of systems and power through research and participation. Her work explores how the process of record-keeping reveals social truths around shared systems of knowledge and power and is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Jewish Museum, MIT List Visual Arts Center, and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum among others.
Mabel O. Wilson is the Nancy and George Rupp Professor of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and chair of African American and African Diasporic Studies at Columbia University. Her research and practice explores race and Blackness in architecture, visual arts and media.
The presentations will be accompanied by the screening of a series of short videos cut specifically for Salon 51 by: Charles Broskoski, Joshua Craze, Tamara Kneese, New Models (Caroline Busta and Lil Internet), Jack Self, and Jess Wythe.
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