Killing memory: Memoricide, materiality and the art of digital memory

Abstract

Memoricide’s emblematic imagery comprises familiar scenes: burning ‘ash-snow’ from Sarajevo’s National Library; satellite images of Palmyra; the exploding Bamiyan Buddhas. The concept, coined in 1992 by Mirko Grmek, suggests a wider scope. Grmek emphasises its Latin etymology, memoriae, as this “means not only memories but also historical monuments”. I reconfigure memoricide, with Maurice Halbwachs’ observations on collective memory, to focus it as ‘the killing of memory’ broadly. This enables flexibility accounting for a wider breadth of memoricidal targets and practices. I demonstrate this by identifying the normalisation of memoricide – ‘everyday memoricide’ – and its consequences for mnemonic frameworks that do not resemble its dominant imagery. I develop this through a wide-ranging analysis of digital memory arts across three key contexts: Palestine, Australia, Syria. Digital memory is explored as rearticulation. Rather than entail a radical break, digital technologies augment existing mnemonic traditions allowing older elements, like memory politics and normative power, to be inherited from older forms. UNESCO’s World Heritage and Memory of the World programs are such forms being rearticulated. I analyse their susceptibilities to geopolitical memory policing, canonising certain material forms and eliding transcultural mnemonic dynamics. Conversely, these are subverted, extended upon and/or replicated by the digital memory arts covered: online archives; GPS-guided phone apps, online counter-cartographies; and, digital (virtual reality) and material (3D printing) reproductions of heritage objects. Each seemingly transcends materiality’s trappings through differing means yet reinforces its primacy through interdependence and rearticulation. However, these digital interventions also reveal a nuanced understanding of memoricide highlighting its visible, immaterial and unconscious dimensions.