Julia Clever

“When my family moved house in 2016, war-testimonies of my deceased grandfather fell out of the closet: A photoalbum he had never shown us, a story he’d never told us, and a note: “nihil mortui nisi bene”. In this personal project, I trace transformations of our memories by linking his narrations to footage from my video archive and my research on war-re-enactment. This project investigates a range of personal trajectories (re-)constructing and embodying war memories, while opening up perspectives onto the underlaying identity politics.”

“In my project “Devoir de mémoire”, I am investigating affective embodiment of memory in European “Living History” movements. During weekends, “Living History” practicians slip into military front line routines and the decorum of the Second World War period, practicing what they call their “Devoir de mémoire”.  This living archive of obligatory memory has kept developing over several years during its exhibition, in interaction with the collective memory of the public and with the architecture in the different places of exhibition.”

This documentary assembles audiovisual material generated by RITCS-students and myself during the research-project The performance as a Document/ The document as a performance. It decribes the collaboration of RITCS art school students and the “sans papiers” during the 2009 hunger strike in a university’s subterranean parking lot, in order to achieve a coherent regularisation procedure: it examines the creation of “fighting realism”.