Emilia Yang Presents Talk at Incite, Columbia University
On March 6, 2025, Stamps Assistant Professor Emilia Yang will present a talk at Incite and the Oral History Masters Program (OHMA) at Columbia University. The talk, titled Altars Archives: Strategies for Decolonizing Participatory Art, Design and Witnessing, is part of the 2024 – 25 ReMemory: Experiments in Listening, Authorship and Knowledge-Keeping Series.
Drawing on my experience as a victim/survivor, activist for memory, artist, designer, and researcher, I will share the process of creating AMA y No Olvida, Memory Museum Against Impunity. This memory initiative was made in collaboration with the Association Mothers of April (AMA), a collective of families of victims of state violence organized in a context of authoritarian and brutal repression in Nicaragua. This endeavor was informed by the families’ use of altars as technologies of remembrance and connection to the spiritual realm to share our individual pain with a broader community. Through this example, I will share strategies for decolonizing participatory art, design, and witnessing through embodied practices.
The 2024 – 25 ReMemory: Experiments in Listening, Authorship and Knowledge-Keeping Series highlights the work of artists, scholars, and knowledge-keepers whose works attend to what Toni Morrison describes as the “pitched battle between remembering and forgetting.” (Morrison 2019) The reparative labor of re-memory invites us to recognize the ways that we are intimately bound up with undocumented or under-documented histories and the urgent need for “reconstituting and recollecting a usable past.” Kenyan author and scholar Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o, whose work seeks to redress the historical amnesia and “dismemberment” of the colonial enterprise, sees memory as “the site of dreams, and of desire, is thus crucial to the construction of our being.”
Altars Archives: Strategies for Decolonizing Participatory Art, Design and Witnessing [Virtual Event]
Part of the 2024 – 25 ReMemory: Experiments in Listening, Authorship and Knowledge-Keeping Series
5:30pm on Thursday, Mar 6, 2025 EST
61 Claremont Avenue, Suite 1300, New York
RSVP