Crisis rhetoric between latency and divergence: Memory creation in Portuguese contemporary photo books and novels

• Applicant: Dr. Susanne Grimaldi
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2019 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 415722839

The socioeconomic crisis has solidified within Europe since 2008 as a shared transcultural space of experience and memory. Using the example of photobook and novel, this habilitation project examines contemporary artistic methods of processing crisis in Portugal. Competitive structures of memory are medially negotiated in Portugal, with a variety of discourses prevailing. One part of the artistic methods works with offensive strategies in text and image, polyphony and intersubjectivity as an identifiable close-up of those affected by crisis. In addition, there are those strategies aimed at deconstructing and replacing existing crisis narratives. The aesthetic potential for irritation from some artistic documents lies precisely in the absence or latency of the crisis, which is unique in comparison to different (national) crisis processing strategies. Compared to artefacts in an experiential mode, Portuguese texts work in a rather reflexive, historicizing and monumental mode. To examine the storage, circulation and cue functions of the photobook and novel, a diachronic consideration of reference texts of Portuguese identity reflection from philosophy, sociology and literature is undertaken, where the four axes of interpretation autoimagens (myths and self-images), crise permanente, Europe and desmitificação will be primordial for the analysis. The first goal of the project is to extract and to relate the narrative potential of recurring topoi, icons, plot structures, and protagonists of memory in the Portuguese crisis, to deal the question of how the crisis is currently being consolidated as a European memory space. Second project goal is dedicated to the strategies of emotionalisation in text and image. Which mental and material images are alluded to and how are the motif, presentation tradition, production and reception context conveyed? The third project objective is to identify alternative memory narrative that realigns the course of the crisis. Another goal is to work out the dominances of memory in terms the function of saving, recalling and circulation of both memory media as well as the interaction between the social, mental and material memory dimension. The last project objective is the identification of alternative memory narratives, which reorient the crisis. A final project goal is the investigation of the mobility potential of artistic crises processing strategies in the sense of travelling memory and globital memory. For the three-stage transmedial analysis, fundamental aspects of textual narrative are transferred to the hybrid artifact of image and text (photobook). By analyzing the diagnostic and prospective space artistic methods processing the crisis inhere, the current gap in research will be closed.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants