We are pleased to announce our next virtual University Seminar on Latin America, which will take place on March 11th at 7 pm EST. The topic of the seminar will be “Marcelo Brodsky: Memory, Human Rights, Art, and Activism in Argentina."
Marcelo Brodsky will be our speaker. Brodsky is an Argentine visual and conceptual artist who focuses on Visual Language, Memory and Human Rights. His work combines text and images to convey multiple meanings and alternative narratives. In 1996-1997 he edited and exhibited the photo essay Buena Memoria (Good Memory) on the effects of state terrorism in Argentina, including his own iconic picture, “The Class,” of his school class intervened to show how the dictatorship shaped the lives of his classmates. It has been acquired and exhibited by the Tate Modern in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Brodsky is a founder of the Parque de la Memoria (Memory Park), a large monument and art exhibition space to honor and remember the victims of Argentina’s last civil-military dictatorship (www.parquedelamemoria.org.ar). He also founded Visual Action (www.visualaction.org.ar) to mobilize photographers and artists internationally to protest human rights violations, starting with the disappearance in 2014 in Mexico of 43 students from Ayotzinapa University.
Brodsky’s major works/photo books include: Nexo, Memory Under Construction, Visual Correspondences and 1968: The Fire of Ideas, which toured Europe and Latin America.
Andreas Huyssen will respond. Huyssen is the Villard Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he has taught since 1986. From 1998-2003, he was the founding director of the Center for Comparative Literature and Society. Huyssen has published a wide range of writings including After the Great Divide: Modernism, Culture, Postmodernism (1986), Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (1995) and especially Present Pasts, Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (2003), which contains a chapter on Buenos Aires’ Memory Park, where Marcelo Brodsky has played a key role.
We will meet via Zoom. Please email Caitlin Liss ([email protected]) to RSVP for the event. At the start of the meeting, all attendees will have to acknowledge the privacy policy by raising their virtual hand and typing their name into the chat. If you are not sure how to raise your virtual hand and type your name into the chat, please review pages 8-10 of the Zoom manual that the University Seminars have prepared for you in advance of the meeting.
