What We Shared: Emotions as Documents of Historical Significance

How do artists respond to events that shatter pre-existing ways of apprehending the world? Looking at What We Shared, a hybrid artist film set in a de facto state of Abkhazia, this illustrated artist talk proposes that in order to effectively process and offer valuable insights into the "unrepresentable" events that contain multiple truths (war, ethnic conflict), it is necessary to examine emotions as documents of historical significance.

Informed by the writings of Svetlana Alexievich, Svetlana Boym and Viktor Shklovsky, this talk argues that engaging with archive, memory, and trauma today requires experiential responses to testimony and that these responses challenge the rigidly defined categories of "objectivity," "fact," and "fiction."

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