Collective memories

Abstract

With this visual article we propose that today we have abandoned our condition as social animals to adopt a disconnected gregariousness, propitiated by technologies that connect in real time but disintegrate spatially. This individualisation erodes coexistence with other species and distances us from the past when we conceived of ourselves as political animals. In this framework, memory emerges as an essential tool: although it appears individual, it is configured in collective frameworks and in relation to bodies, practices and territories. When it is stripped of this social interaction - as happens when it is museumified - it loses its shared meaning and is emptied of content, reduced to fragments with no critical link to temporality. Faced with this, from the Global South, collective memories manifest themselves as complex epistemic fields that confront linear models of progress. Far from being residues of the past, they allow us to imagine possible futures and sustain culture, critical thinking and creation as living and relational practices.