Liberation from Memory: Memory, Postmemory, or Subverted Memory in What Does the Messenger Girl Do by Foks & Libera

Abstract

Contemporary discussions of historical narrative initiated by Hayden White like to emphasize the proposition that history is just a scientifically approved narrative about the past, a rhetorical project, an ideological myth. Such a myth has long been under attack for purportedly serving as an instrument of political oppression, and now history is also being challenged by private, individual memory. However, we happen to create our private memories in an era ruled by a media system that manufactures past experiences as simulacra that need not have much to do with the reality of the past. The media can thereby position traumatic experience within completely new and hitherto alien contexts of meaning, a practice responsible for much of the contemporary “culture of entertainment.” What Does the Messenger Girl Do, a book—or, rather, an art project created by Darek Foks and Zbigniew Libera, who presented it to the Polish public in the autumn of 2005—drops us into the very center of the debate on the presence of the past in its current transformation, or, in other words, on the memory of memory.

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