Fotini Gouseti, Kalavryta 2012 in From Generation to Generation : Inherited Memory an Contemporary Art at Contemporay Jewish Museum.
There are many forms of memory: memories of events we have experienced, memories we have heard as family stories and from popular culture, even memories of an imagined future. The twenty-four artists in From Generation to Generation: Inherited Memory and Contemporary Art, currently running at CJM, work with memories that are not their own. They remember and recall stories that were never theirs and assemble them in a variety of media to be seen, heard, and experienced by others.
Eventually, through their work, the artists in this exhibition search, question, and reflect on the representation of truths related to ancestral and collective memory—ultimately attempting to deal with their own past.
The main key of the exhibition is the concept of postmemory, as coined by Dr. Marianne Hirschis; As Pierre-François Galpin, one of the two curators of the exhibition, mentioned to Ex_posure (read his full interview here) the exhibition researches the role of postmemory in terms of dealing with the past individually and collectively and especially with the traumatic events of the past.
Fotini Gouseti, the Athens born artist who now lives and works in Rotterdam, participates in the exhibition with the work Kalavryta 2012, a work that embodies traumatic memories from that region short after the World War II. On 10 December 1943 the German occupying forces ordered the extermination of the male population and the total destruction of the town of Kalavryta… Gouseti collects a postmemory related to this atrocity and brilliantly interweaves it in her work.
Fotini Gouseti talked to Eleni Zymaraki Tzortzi.