Remembering and narrating are dynamic processes that influence each other. How do we narrate memories or how do we remember by telling stories? How does the act of narrating change memories, and how do memories and narratives change with each repetition? What is forgotten in the process? The second season of WeSearch is dedicated to these questions.
Anyone who needs to remember lots of things – whether grocery or vocabulary – can use certain tricks. There is the loci method, for instance, also called the memory palace: here, you imagine a building and assign memories to individual rooms and the objects they contain. If you want to access them, you wander through the individual rooms in your imagination, recalling the objects and the information connected with them.
Real buildings are often used as memory palaces and, as the term “palace” suggests, particularly large buildings so as to store much information. The Humboldt Forum, for example, would make for a very good memory palace. However, it already is one in a literal sense: not only does it stand in one of the oldest parts of the capital, which is closely connected to Berlin and German history; with its collections, exhibitions and events, it stores memories, keeps them alive and updates them. Good reasons, then, for this year’s MitWissenschaft series to address the topic of memory.
Memory and forgetting, specific memories and the forms that remembering takes are constantly changing, triggering debates: who remembers what, how and what do we remember, what do we forget und what should be snatched from oblivion?
The curators
is a historian and has just written a history of nostalgia, which will be published in autumn. His research topics include popular culture, the city, memory and temporality. His current project is about a murder in imperial Berlin and its cultural afterlife. Together with Uta Kornmeier, he has curated the series Narrating Memory.
studied art history and museum studies and curated several exhibitions at the Berlin Museum of Medical History. Since 2020, she has been curator for academic events and programmes at the Humboldt Forum.
WeSearch first season (2021-2022)
From alternative antiquities to past times yet to come, from active matters to firing synapses: scientists share their cutting-edge research with the audience.
Science is simultaneously both a window through which we view the world, and an engine of change for that world. The Humboldt Forum brings society and science together. This series of presentations aims to be a continuation of the Kosmos Lectures given by Alexander von Humboldt in the 1820s, where he considered the world from a global scientific perspective. He vividly conveyed to a wide audience how nature and culture are intertwined and all phenomena are interrelated.