Moving hearts: How mnemonic labour (trans)forms mnemonic capital

Anna Reading

doi:10.1177/1750698020976465

Abstract

This study explores how memory forms may be understood through an economic lens tracing how the labour of remembering adds value to and (trans)forms memories. The study focuses on embodied memories and imaginaries of migration and belonging and the ways in which these are (trans)formed through mobile and social media witnessing into a collective living archive and into objectified memory forms that include art works and digital artefacts situated within global mnemonic commodity chains. Empirically, the article draws on an arts-based collaborative research project, ‘Moving Hearts’ carried out with the UK Migration Museum in 2016–2018 that examined embodied, artistic, and institutional memories and imaginaries of migration. Theoretically, the article builds on the growing body of research in memory studies on the economies of memory, bringing together a political economy approach to memory and work within participatory arts to provide insights into how memory forms may be understood through mnemonic labour and mnemonic capital. Specifically, it shows how the mnemonic labour of participants making, carrying and walking with clay hearts transforms memories of migration and belonging into new kinds of mnemonic capital.

Highlights

This study explores how memory forms may be understood through an economic lens tracing how the labour of remembering adds value to andforms memories
What is the relationship between the labour of remembering and the forms that memories take? In what ways is mnemonic labour informed through existing embodied mnemonic capital and how is this performed, leading toformations between the individual and the institutional? This article takes as its case study forms of memory within an arts-based memory project with the UK Migration Museum
The UK is no exception: while there has been a rise in violent crimes against migrants, along with a toxic anti-migrant media campaign that went hand in hand with the UK Brexit referendum (Dearden, 2017), Britain saw the establishment in London of the UK Migration Museum

Summary

Introduction

What is the relationship between the labour of remembering and the forms that memories take? In what ways is mnemonic labour informed through existing embodied mnemonic capital and how is this performed, leading to (trans)formations between the individual and the institutional? This article takes as its case study forms of memory within an arts-based memory project with the UK Migration Museum. The third category of participants drew on their embodied value as ‘migration activists’ involved in various community and NGO projects as direct witnesses of the hardships, abuses, and atrocities committed against migrants: these were people who had come to the workshops because they worked for human rights charities, in the UK Home Office, as charity volunteers, or as socially engaged academics Their memories were transformed through their mnemonic labour into new connections, often with other activists or proto-activists. The labour that led to the living archive was a form of memory capital held in common that was different from the embodied memories and imaginaries participants arrived with This ‘memory commons’ (a shared mnemonic resource held in common) rather than memory capital (held by some and not by others), provided new kinds of collective opportunities for people to socially experience together acts of bearing witness within a transitional continuum of ‘migranthood’. The Romanian woman took the cloth-shroud and wrote the words ‘We all belong’ before pinning it beside a message from a homeless man who had written, ‘I am home’

Conclusion

Other examples include the research centre SELMA