Workshop on “Life Peace” and “Commons Memory”. Part 1

By Pablo Sánchez León

"The idea is to try to reconstruct the process that resulted in the elaboration of testimonial documents of foreign remembrances offered by the participants to the workshop, or of proposals for the recovery of such memories.

Since these stories are usually traumatic, or they concern the intimacy of those who tell them, we shall try to create a respectful and intimate environment for listening.

The participants that have stories to tell or projects to share will do so succinctly.

Afterwards, we will organize groups, and each one of them will hold a dialogue with someone who has a story or a project to share. This person will have the opportunity to let the rest know the reasons for using this story as an example, the methodology used to obtain it, what kind of questions and perspectives have guided the messenger, what kind of relationship took place between the messenger and the protagonist of that remembrance, to what point does the messenger think that he or she is transmitting somebody else’s story and to what extent a new story is being told when narrating someone else’s account, what specific aspects of the story have attracted the messenger’s attention more and why.

The dialogue with the group will help the messenger of the remembrance to distinguish between his own role in the elaboration of the story and the role of the person who experimented the event. Advancing in the acknowledgement of the protagonist of the event and placing the focus on him or her in order to help clarify issues related to the context where the event took place: how was the relationship among the people that interacted at that moment, how did they feel, how did they explain the event then, and to what point did that explanation change with time in the eyes of the witness?

There will be a special section dedicated to the silence of the memory: was it a shared memory from the beginning? Who knew about it since it took place? To what degree has it been or not been a “public” memory, and what reasons have there been for it to be so? What importance can we attribute to that?

In the sharing session we shall look for the common features among the different paths taken, the interrogating methodologies and the diverse elaborations of the stories available.

Afterwards there will be a dialogue trying to elucidate what aspects of the stories or projects move us, or move us more, and why. We will contrast these thoughts with the sense and value that the messenger might have added with his or her witnessing. We will reflect on the silence or the decision of maintaining that memory repressed and the motivations behind such a decision or, depending on the case, about its openness, and to what point it coincides with our own interest in the story. This might help us measure the possible distances, large and small, that there might be between the event and the identity of its protagonists, as well as the current narrator-gatherer’s distance with the protagonist and with the public.

This could be the starting point for a dialogue in search of what these memories, transformed into testimonies, might offer beyond the specific event from which they stem, making us confront the moral dilemmas that are at stake in situations that exemplify “life peace”. It is possible to talk about the dealings between perpetrators and victims and, in general, about the conditions that break the barriers put up by violence, ideology or social prejudice. Hence, we tap into a cordial component on which human relations are based and that is capable of functioning in situations of conflict. This is something that might take us to a universal reflection, but also to a dialogue on differences between dominant values in the context where the event, now turned into a story, took place and the current dominant values.

We will be able to ask ourselves if nowadays there are any contexts in which, once again, testimonials of these characteristics might be silenced or find the same problems. This might help us identify the common features of these memories, regardless of time and space."