Personal Remembrance as Historical Memory
Eva Koch’s Interactive Visual Work on Her Mother’s Experience of the Spanish Civil War
Abstract
This essay explores the Danish sculptor and video-installation artist Eva Koch’s interactive visual works from 2001 based on her mother’s, and her mother’s family’s, experiences during the Spanish Civil War: Villar and Villar – Los hijos de Manuela. These works are a textualization of the past through remembrance in which no attempt is made to offer a linear account of events or play down uncomfortable sub-narratives. The analysis, which exposes the precarious boundaries between the personal and the collective, draws from theoretical approaches to memory and history by Marianne Hirsch, Walter Benjamin, Jay Winter and Maurice Halbwachs.
Submitted: April 1, 2021 | Accepted: June 8, 2021 | Published Oct. 21, 2021 | Language: en
Keywords Maurice Halbwachs • Villar • Villar - Los hijos de Manuela • Nini Haslund Gleditsch • Jay Winter • Walter Benjamin • Oliva and Norwegian humanitarian aid • Eva Koch • Spanish Civil War • Interactive visual art • Marianne Hirsch
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Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/978-88-6969-460-8/003