In “How Societies Remember” by Paul Connerton, I was reminded of certain gestural and ritualistic practices that serve as collective memory from my own family’s culture. In this text, it is mentioned that David Efron studied the “bundle of pictures” from Southern Italians that are marked in their hand and arm gestures, as a part of their cultural vocabulary. In reading this, I was transported back to my eighteen-year-old self on a family trip to Greece to visit my father’s family and home. While my father was speaking to his aunts and cousins, he made a gesture with his hand that I had never seen before, a slow and repetitive motion with his palm scooping the air. Although I had never seen this motion, I somehow knew what it meant in context with the Greek language being spoken. It served as a lighthearted warning– like a signal insinuating “I am taking the joke, but tread lightly or else.” Connerton’s notion that the body can remember these cultural rules, norms, or manners, for generations, is absolutely fascinating.

In “Generation of Postmemory,” I was particularly struck by Aleida Assmann’s idea of memories being infinitely linked between individuals. From storytelling among members of families, photographs, and other forms of collecting, memories that are not necessarily firsthand accounts become embodied in further generations. There is also this notion of erasure and how that impacts collective memory. An interesting and provocative question is brought up in the text: Is the postgeneration asserting victimhood? By creating art that is so intimate and close to deep historical and familial trauma, is it exploiting the pain of our elders? These are questions I would love to explore in my research of traumatic performance, what is valid to make art our of? Is it necessary to provide a visual representation of historical trauma in order for audiences and people at large to believe that it happened?