Memory Objects, Memory Dialogues

“Memory Objects, Memory Dialogues”, a split-screen animated film, explores the complex nature of memory in contemporary post-communist Romania. Using a collection of everyday, household objects as windows into the past, it features 16mm stop-motion animations of these artifacts, projected alongside selections of interviews from the ethnographic research with the objects’ owners. Together, these images serve not to illustrate people’s memories, but rather to evoke the elusive and fragmentary feeling of the act of remembering in itself. Individual and collective memories diverge and intersect, giving a poignant and humorous glimpse into how people are currently looking back at 45 years of communist rule in Romania, two decades after the 1989 Revolution.

Alyssa Grossman

Alyssa Grossman is Associated Researcher at Valand Academy of Fine Art at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology with Visual Media from the University of Manchester. Her film Lumina amintirii (2010) was part of her doctoral thesis on everyday sites and practices of remembrance work in post-socialist Bucharest, Romania. She has an MA in Visual Anthropology from the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology (2005). Her previous film, Into the Field (2005), received awards at the Astra International Film Festival (2006), the Göttingen International Film Festival (2006), and the Society for Visual Anthropology Film and Video Festival (2006).

Selene Kimball

Selena Kimball works in collage and film. She earned her BFA from The Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA from Hunter College. Now she is an associate professor at Parsons, The New School for Social Research, in New York City.