Spaces of Memory: Losses and Reconstructions in São Luiz do Paraitinga, Brazil
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck Main Building, Malet Street
No booking required
Public event in association with the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities 2017 London Critical Theory Summer School
Free event open to all: Book your place
During the first days of January, 2010, torrential rains left São Luiz do Paraitinga, a small colonial city embedded in the mountains between São Paulo and the sea, completely under water, tearing down many of its historical houses and central buildings, such as the church and the public school. The water invaded the houses, dragging with it furniture, objects and documents. The first minutes of the documentary Spaces of memory present the initial moments of the flood, recorded by a filmmaker with the camera from a mobile phone. Based on this, a team made up of two filmmakers, a photographer and a social psychologist carried out an intervention project, through which we asked people from the city to record in photographs the meaningful elements that were connected to losses and reparation of what had been lost. The film documents the processes of photographing and speaking about the photos. The guiding question was the place of the recording of images in the process of working out loss and reconstruction, the relationship between lost objects and their representation in images in the personal and collective work to redeem memories.
The film will be introduced by Belinda Mandelbaum, with a response by Lisa Baraitser.
Professor Belinda Mandelbaum is a psychoanalyst, head of the Department of Social Psychology, University of São Paulo, with research work, teaching and publications in Family Studies, Psychoanalysis and Social Psychology. She is working jointly with Professor Stephen Frosh in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck on a project investigating psychoanalysis in Brazil during the period of the 1964-1985 civil-military dictatorship.
Dr Lisa Baraitser, is Reader, Psychosocial Studies, in the Department of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck, University of London.
Contact name:
Madisson Brown
Contact phone:
(0) 20 7631 6612