Second-Hand Memories. Objects of Desire, Phantom Objects, and Remains of Belgian History (MSM)

The “Second-Hand Memories” project proposes launching a pluri-disciplinary study on a site that is emblematic of the plurality of temporal experiences that are being encountered and restructured today. It is based on the hypothesis that the temporal ecology of the flea market at the Place du Jeu de Balle in Brussels reveals a specific historical moment characterised by uncertainty. The diversity of attitudes toward the objects that are reinvented in this space reflects our experimentation of other possible worlds in response to the environmental crisis, the social work of forgetting, controversies over the  colonial past, alternative approaches to conservation and archiving, and aesthetic and commercial appropriations of the past. We suggest combining disciplinary methods and gazes, between ethnography and archival analysis, anthropology and history, and introducing collaborative and pedagogical experimental frameworks to follow and analyse the meaning of these temporal rearrangements.

Project Leader

Virginie MILLIOT , Université Paris Nanterre

Internal cluster partners

• Laboratoire d'Ethnologie et de Sociologie Comparative (LESC) - UMR 7186
• Institut des Sciences sociales du Politique (ISP) - UMR 7220
• Archives nationales

Associated partners

Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB)
https://www.ulb.be/

African Museum, Tervuren
https://www.africamuseum.be/fr/home

Duration

Keywords

présentisme, mémoires, Oubli, réparation, reconfiguations temporelles