Workshop In the framework of SPEME by H401 and in collaboration with Creative Court, The Hague

Questioning Traumatic Heritage

In this workshop, dilemmas faced in the work field of trauma, memory and heritage, have been  explored using the methodology of Theatre of the Oppressed, developed by theatre practitioner, drama theorist and political activist Augusto Boal (1931 – 2009, Brasil).

Participating in the workshop were a group of H401’s international guests, consisting of academic researchers working on memory, trauma and heritage, and non-academic professionals working in the fields of memory museums and sites of memory of Italy, Colombia, Argentina and the Netherlands. Together, they are exploring traumatic heritage in the framework of the Horizon2020 funded project Spaces of Memory in Europe, Argentina and Colombia (SPEME).

In this three-hour workshop, we have focused on the dilemma’s we are dealing with in our working field and their underlying actors. By bringing these actors into the open we could analyse , share and deepen our  understanding of how traumatic experiences are differently working in the present societies of Italy, Colombia, Argentina and the Netherlands. Embodiment and image-theatre was used to create images, words and movement around the words ‘trauma’, ‘past’, ‘violence’ and ‘country’.

The workshop created awareness about how collective trauma is shaped by the context of the past and the soul and mentality of a people and a cultural mentality. We could see how this was related to the contexts of (politicial) oppression, the way how violence was generated either used, and how the difficult past has been acknowledged, or not.

For more information on Creative Court: https://www.creativecourt.org/

And H401 and SPEME: https://h401.org/2018/05/questioning-traumatic-heritage/

Photos by Lars Ebert