»Memory Matters« Closing Festival 2024
During this year’s CPPD Concluding Festival, we again seek to create a space for concrete discussions and our shared work. Our goal is to bring together and network institutions, organisations, and actors of divergent backgrounds working on a diversity of topics within the field of remembrance policy and remembrance culture, thus generating synergies between topics, resources, and projects.
We would like to share in a discussion with you all about our and your experiences of remembrance policy work in Germany and Europe, and to develop concrete strategies for pluralising European cultures of remembrance.
To do so, we would like to assemble five working groups prior to the event who will come together during the network partner conference in workshops, within which they will intensively grapple with four central areas of our work:
Work Groups
1. Text work Securing democracy – Strengthening a pluralistic culture of remembrance!
At the heart of the work of the CPPD is the conviction that those who wish to create more pluralist present and future societies must also re-tell the story of the past, because this desire also creates an opportunity for our plural democracy. Whoever sees their moments and perspectives of remembrance reflected on the truly decisive level of remembrance culture also gains a feeling of inclusion in society, which in turn encourages them to take on responsibility for that same society. In this sense, the remembrance work of the CPPD network is also about creating resilience and societal cohesion in a plural democracy.
Connected with this effort is also a desire to rethink current funding practices within the field of remembrance culture. In addition to safeguarding established actors, the CPPD and its network members are committed to the pursuit of structural funding for civil society actors who have not yet had a sufficient opportunity to sustainedly contribute their positions to the socio-political discourse, thus sustainably strengthening our plural democracy.
2. Future Practices
The daily work processes of those engaged in remembrance policy and culture work unfold as dynamic practice. ‘Best practices’ developed over years are continually replaced by methods and practices that react to current socio-political challenges, new historical and pedagogical developments, or technological progress. Moreover, best practices in the context of memory politics are often not easily transferable between a diversity of remembrance instances and communities.
Rather than continuing to focus on best practices, the CPPD is therefore shifting its attention to Future Practices: creative, multiperspective, and interdisciplinary methods and practices that aim to enable flexible and sustainable work for a pluralistic culture of remembrance.
While compiling these future practices within the CPPD network, we have been confronted with a simultaneity that has impacted their development from the beginning: how can we develop future practices while simultaneously addressing all the permanent, acute problems and challenges we face? One answer to this challenge is the network itself. By sharing resources, collaboration, and solidarity, the CPPD network and its members can simultaneously confront present challenges and turn to the question of a shared, plural future, while profiting from a unique symbiosis.
Each network member individually works on specific challenges, while future practices are developed collectively, positively impacting the individual challenges at hand. In this way, it becomes possible to simultaneously develop and establish ways of working with pre-emptive impacts that create new sustainability in the context of remembrance policy.
In this workshop, we aim to collectively examine these Future Practices and develop a draft for a practical guide that will be made available to all network members as well as to memory-political and cultural actors, organizations, and institutions for their respective work.
3. Pluralising Moments of Remembrance: Remembrance Future
Plural cultures of remembrance negotiate the diversity of moments of remembrance in our society. What we commemorate is therefore crucial for the pluralisation of remembrance cultures. The experience of our work together makes visible the many serious gaps and empty spaces that predominate in our societal remembrance.
In this working group, we would like to map out those moments of remembrance that are currently missing from the remembrance discourse so as to incorporate them into our work, as they belong to our shared remembrance future. Our Remembrance Calendar offers a first point of orientation for the moments of remembrance that the CPPD Network seeks to address.
4. European Cultures of Remembrance
This year’s European elections once again dramatically laid bare the historical revisionist and denialist parties and powers are on the rise in Europe. Therefore, it is even more crucial for remembrance to be at the heart of our democratic reflections and future-oriented actions. The ‘we’ of European remembrance is evolving. Plural cultures of remembrance offer the opportunity to use stories about our past and present to shape a resilient European society that can be more: a European community. The CPPD and its network are therefore illuminating the European dimensions of cultures of remembrance and are working together to strengthen plural cultures of remembrance in the European context. This is a necessary, complex process that requires cooperation and dialogue between different disciplines and communities.
In working group 4, we would like to share our experiences with European moments of remembrance, cooperation partners, and communities and to develop starting points for shared programmes designed to strengthen European cooperation in the field of plural cultures of remembrance.
5. Remembering the Present
The Covid-19 pandemic, the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine, the political shift to the right in Europe, the terror attack by Hamas in Israel and the subsequent War in Gaza, countless antisemitic, racist, anti-LGBTQI+, and anti-woman acts of violence – our present is marked by wars, conflicts, and the failure of humanity.
How can we commemorate present moments of remembrance that continue in the very act of remembering? What opportunities and risks are inherent in contemporary remembrance, in remembering the present? These are the questions we would like to discuss together in Working Group 5, as we explore ways to give the present space in societal remembrance.
We would be very grateful if you could indicate which working group you would like to participate in when you submit your registration for the conference.
We request your reservation no later than 30 September 2024.
Amplifier | Gustav-Meyer-Allee 25/Haus 12.5 | Berlin
