Memory

Memory is more than recollection – it is a dynamic system of encoding, storage, and retrieval that operates across individual, collective, biological, and technological realms. It is the architecture of identity, the scaffold of knowledge, and the engine of both trauma and healing. For the coming year, we propose to explore memory not as a passive archive, but as an active, constructed, and often contested phenomenon that binds together the arts and the sciences in profound ways.

From a biological perspective, memory begins in the synapses – the microscopic junctions where neurons communicate. The encoding of experience into long-term memory involves complex biochemical and electrical processes, a dance of molecules that scientists are only beginning to fully understand. Yet memory is also inherently fragile: prone to distortion, erasure, and reinvention. Neuroscience reveals that every act of remembering is also an act of reconstruction, influenced by context, emotion, and expectation – blurring the boundary between what was and what is imagined.

Equally, memory is inseparable from narrative. We are how we remember, and how we tell our memories – in words, images, gestures – shapes who we are. The act of recounting a life, a community, or an event transforms experience into identity. This raises questions: is the “narrative self” a psychological fact or a cultural construct? How do stories of the past become scripts for self-optimisation, for political positioning, or for artistic reinvention? In this field, creative writing, image theory, and performance become laboratories for exploring memory’s poetic, persuasive, and sometimes manipulative force.

Images and representations also play a decisive role in how events are remembered. Photographs, films, and media accounts do not simply depict but actively shape what counts as significant, who is visible, and how responsibility is assigned. Retelling or re-seeing an event can shift its meaning – sometimes radically – altering not only our understanding of the past but also our orientation to the future. Artistic practice engages with this power of representation by testing how memory can be reframed, questioned, or resisted.

Memory also lives outside us – in monuments, libraries, digital platforms, and data infrastructures. From the Stele of the Vultures in Mesopotamia to the cloud servers of today, societies have devised external supports for remembering, often bound to authority and control. In our present, algorithmic systems increasingly profile and predict us based on structured data, turning memory into a tool of governance and surveillance. Yet external archives can also be re-appropriated: artists, communities, and activists create counter- histories that challenge official narratives, finding ways to reclaim memory’s emancipatory potential.

Culturally, memory is never neutral. It is embedded in rituals, institutions, and media – and shaped by power. What societies choose to remember (or forget) tells us as much about their aspirations as their anxieties. Public monuments, museums, and school curricula act as containers of officially sanctioned memory, while counter-memories emerge in protest, subversion, or silence. The politics of memory is as urgent today as ever, especially in relation to decolonisation, climate grief, digital obsolescence, and intergenerational trauma. Philosophically, memory occupies a central place in questions of selfhood, time, and truth. Is the self continuous, or merely a story we tell ourselves based on remembered fragments? Thinkers from Augustine to Freud to Stiegler have proposed that memory is not just a faculty of the mind but the very ground of consciousness – and perhaps even of history itself. Here, the terrain becomes speculative, poetic, and ontological.

This year’s exploration of memory invites personal inquiry and collective reflection. Projects may focus on autobiographical memory, ecological memory, technological archiving, ritual practices of remembrance, or the aesthetics of forgetting. The aim is not to define memory, but to use it as a conceptual lens – a medium through which connections between disciplines, materials, and meanings can be forged.

As with last year’s topic “colour”, memory is not just a theme but a framework – a structure within which students are encouraged to explore freely, critically, and inventively. It provides a scaffold for cross-disciplinary investigation, a bridge between sensation and speculation, biology and narrative, data and dream. In short: a fertile ground for thinking, making, and remembering differently.