Medialab Prado

Proposal by Juan Gutiérrez 

How it Works

For a year and a half now, a group interested in constructing a Commons of historical memories has been meeting at Medialab-Prado. They have presented and discussed their reflections at three of the Commons Lab meetings held during that time. As a result, six months ago, Medialab-Prado set up a work group called "Memory and the Commons" at its Madrid venue, tasked with creating a prototype for the construction of a historical record of threads of peace ("paz de vida") in the context of the Spanish Civil War and post-war period in Spain. It is expanding its contents to include the educational dimension of this historical record at educational centres.

This workshop consists of 5 sessions, which started in October 2011 and continue through July 2012, accompanied by a permanent network of contacts among participants and an intensive study of the current state of the subject and how to find valid references for creating the prototype. The workshop is aided by academic presenters including anthropologists, historians, documentation specialists and experts in the matter, some of whom are alternative thinkers opposed to prevailing views. The sessions will be filmed, broadcast via streaming, and published on the Web site of Medialab-Prado within the framework of the Memory and the Commons work group.

The participants in each session will have available to them recordings of previous sessions, documentation on the matters discussed earlier, and the network of contacts to prepare and plan the sessions. Several participants will prepare reports to be presented, which, along with other reports narrated at this session or at earlier ones, will form the basis for the subsequent dialogue. It will focus on matters that arise in creating the prototype, which we have attempted to organize in four groups, like steps in a stairway. At the 1st and 2nd sessions: Where and how to find these reports? How to gather and bring them to the workshop? At the 3rd: How to store and archive them? At the 4th and 5th: How to make them public, stage them, transmit them through the media, and take them to educational and cultural centres?

At the second session already held, over 10 quite diverse narrations were presented in various formats (writing, sound recording, film). They were about events during the Spanish Civil War, post-war period, or more recent times in Spain, as well as the Genocide in Guatemala, Nazism in Germany, the Gulag in the Ukraine, and so on.

Expansion

The workshop at Medialab-Prado is expanding:

• At secondary schools in the Madrid region (Comunidad Autónoma de Madrid): Algete, the city of Madrid, and Coslada. Half a dozen teachers are encouraging and guiding their students aged 14/16, with their families’ consent, to look for memories of threads of peace and present them in the classroom.
• A publisher for young adults means to publish a book with interviews by well-known writers that contain threads of peace. Instead of writing up the reports gathered in the interviews, the reports will be published just as they were narrated, and the writers will write about what they felt when they did the interview.
• Various workshop participants are exploring the possibility of gathering reports of peace in life at meeting centres for the elderly in some areas of Madrid.
• The workgroup is also exploring the possibility of creating a parallel workshop in Euskadi.

Steps in Creating the Prototype

At the workshop itself, it has not yet been decided whether to include certain results of the dialogues held to date in the prototype to be created. Therefore, a report on the state of the creation of the prototype cannot be made yet.

However, an assessment of this type should be made and we have decided to attempt it in the workshop session on 6 March.

That is why the following list offers an attempt at presenting that assessment, and I propose certain points in which objections were clarified and it seems a consensus was reached. This is a proposal launched to be completed among the group.  

The workshop is contributing essential elements for creating the prototype to a large extent thanks to our reflections and debates on specific cases, not abstract ideas, which form a collection offering what we call "threads of peace". 

Memory <> History: Much discussion has been and will be devoted to the relationship between Memory and History at the workshop. There seems to be consensus that people remember things and create a collective memory because as citizens they do not agree with history as it is presented to us generally or in education. This mobilizes memories, and narrations arise from quite different, polyphonic voices that gather traces of the situation and the environment that history had set aside but which are close to the narrator who contributes them. The memory constructed of such narrations reaches us, transmitting a sense of closeness, live feelings, touching us deeply, causing an impact that we remember.

History tends to be linear, presenting its characters with historical weight, profiling them as heroes, martyrs or tyrants, exaggerating, hollowing out and distorting their human dimension and leaving out their contradictions and loss of direction. Memory seems to prick that linear history and make it explode, its many narrations forming a broad kaleidoscope instead of just one point.

There is tension between memory and history, but it is not good for them to be pulled apart. Properly handled, this tension is fruitful.

Historical verification should not be set aside but rather opened up, broadened, adding more context, seeing and feeling it from various positions and points of view, gathering it with the polyphony formed by reports of a whole constellation of memories of persons close to the event. 

Memory is better than history because it reaches people more, generating more emotions, serving as a more powerful tool for education.    

Event<> Life Trajectory: Even reports of fleeting events may contain threads of peace, but a richer contribution to the common memory is made through reports on life trajectories that narrate a variety of threads of peace, sometimes in quite different times, places and contexts. 

Authenticity, veracity: We know memory contains mythic elements in its construction but it cannot be indifferent to whether what is narrated actually happened or was only imagined. It can make mistakes but not lie. It must be authentic, true, and willing to have verification reveal mistakes, which can then be remedied. It should welcome devil's advocates. 

Which threads to look for: There are very different types of threads of peace. They are all threads in fabrics of co-existence, but different types of threads appear in different contexts.

Some threads of peace stand out in any context. An example is Dr. Patarroyo’s decision: he refused to sell the patent for his malaria vaccine for 74 million dollars to a private company to be used to protect tourists. Instead, he donated it to the World Health Organization so it could reach the poor around the world.

Other threads of peace do not stand out like epic triumphs. Instead, they are quiet, part of the contexts of our lives like the smiles and kind looks we exchange, even with strangers, on a mountain path or a busy street.

Svetlana Broz, in her book and her talk, made several things very clear:

Ordinary peaceful connections: these peaceful connections among lives are quite common, taking place on countless occasions. Although there are instances where those who dare to make these connections risk their lives and may even lose them, they are ordinary, often anonymous, people who do not brag about them and do them simply.

These accounts are reliable by nature, not only because they are close and the reports are easily verified, but even more so because the person who reports them, instead of praising themselves, speaks well of someone on the enemy's side.   

Ignored by the criminal justice system: Svetlana Broz said during her talk that she met with judges and prosecutors from the International Tribunal of the Hague and they told her how amazed they were to learn of the reports in her book where, in the midst of hostilities, Croatians helped Serbs, Muslims helped Croatians and Serbs, Serbs helped Croatians. They had never thought it even remotely possible.

There is an easy explanation: the judges and prosecutors had to construct historical records but they did so from the standpoint of criminal justice, ignoring the threads of peace shown in these reports. Since reports of peaceful connections were ignored in composing the records required by a court, their records serve democratic justice but not co-existence.

Educators about peaceful co-existence: Svetlana Broz also showed how records of times of horror educate for peaceful co-existence to the extent that they include threads of peace from people’s lives. The people from different ethnic groups in the former Yugoslavia are beginning to treat each other better after learning about her book. The book generates self-esteem in each of the ethnic groups and more peaceful coexistence among them all.     

How to build historical records of threads of peace in the school system: another problem we are starting to address in this workshop is how to make historical records interesting to teenagers, who find no meaning in history as it is taught to them today, nor do they feel it is related to their lives. However, the past is no longer seen as distant and boring but instead becomes appealing if they dive into it as explorers in search of hidden, forgotten treasures in their own roots. To these ends, in this workshop, we are gathering information about "shorashim", the name of a subject in schools in Israel that turns students into explorers and presenters of their own roots. We will analyze this report in depth at the session on 7 March 2012. sesión del 7 de marzo de 2012.