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The Cultural Frontline: The art of memory

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The art of memory

14/05/2022 GMT

BBC World Service - The Cultural Frontline, The art of memory

How artists are using the stories and hidden memories of the past

Director Lola Arias on asking people to share their past on stage,  artist William Kentridge goes back to his roots and novelist Sophie Jai on her childhood memories in Trinidad

Lola Arias is a well-known and influential Latin American theatre director, writer and filmmaker. Her powerful stage pieces are created from real life testimony. She gathers material for these works by talking to and workshopping with people who have witnessed, or been part of a particular, sometimes traumatic, shared experience. These people then become her actors, performing their lives in the theatre. She tells Tina Daheley about her working methods and her works including ‘Minefield’, where she brought together British and Argentinian veterans from the 1982 Falklands war, ‘The Day I Was Born’ which included people from different political sides during the Chilean dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and her latest piece, Lengua Madre, Mother Tongue, exploring motherhood in the 21st Century.
 
This year Kaunas, Lithuania’s second largest city, is one of the three European Capitals of Culture 2022. It’s a place with a troubled past and one the topics being explored during this year of Culture is its forgotten or suppressed history.  One of the artists who’s exhibiting there is William Kentridge. His family emigrated to South Africa from Lithuania more than a century ago to escape antisemitism and the pogroms. For years, the internationally acclaimed artist admits he was reluctant to visit the land of his ancestors. Kentridge, who combines his trademark charcoal drawings with animation and sculpture, is well known for tackling difficult subjects such as racial and financial inequality. Lucy Ash met him at the National Art Museum in Kaunas at his exhibition called That Which We Do Not Remember.
 
Sophie Jai’s debut novel Wild Fires is set on the Caribbean island of Trinidad. When her main character Cassandra returns home from abroad for the funeral of her cousin Chevy, she’s confronted by her intergenerational family, all living in different parts of the same house, together but separate, and the family secrets and hidden memories that have dominated their lives for decades. Sophie Jai herself was born and spent her early childhood in Trinidad until moving to Canada and she explains what drew her back to writing about Trinidad and the memories of her childhood.

(Photo: An image from Lola Arias' Minefield. Credit: Tristram Kenton)

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