Educating the gaze: images of collective memory

Abstract

Among many other things, public education has always been concerned with regulating the forms of interaction between generations. It has been the instance where the legacy of the elders is articulated with the expectations of the youngest,
the space of experience, as Koselleck would say, with the horizon of expectation.
But formal education has always been under the pressure of business logic that privileges training over intellectual emancipation. In the era of digitalization and algorithms, the effective images of the cultural industry, the infosphere, as well as propaganda, saturate the communicative space. Far from contributing to a radical democratization of content, what various authors appreciate is a progressive automation of behaviours. In this context, it is important that education recovers the margins of indeterminacy that allowed it to escape the logic of capitalist profitability. In our opinion, working with artistic creations that involve memory allows the development of alternative forms of sensitivity.
We offer a reading of four artistic images that, from our critical perspective, could be useful as places for reflective pause. The aim is to explore the ways in which these works or aesthetic artefacts are singular producers of meaning that give shape to social memory, shifting its emphasis and causing incorporations from the inevitable present in which they are generated (Pittaluga, Giordano y Escobar, 2016). The repertoire selected for this presentation includes the works of Bettini, “Recuerdos Inventados” (2002-2003); Guagnini, “30.000” (1999), RES, “Tosca memoria” (2012) and by Díaz Morales, “Pasajes” (2013).