Memories are incredibly important. They make you who you are. We weave personal experience and ‘history’ into meaningful stories. These stories help us come to grips with the world around us and our own place within it. During The Great Memory Show we will join artists and thinkers from the arts, science and society in exploring the importance of recollection and memory for the present. A day devoted to the workings of memory. To the way artists make memory tangible and evident once again. And to the way in which artists and designers can contribute to important questions in society, like the care for our senile citizens.

Workshop: Back to the Antropocene

We are living in it already for a while, but as of 2016 we will probably live officially in a new geological era: the Anthropocene. Derived from the Greek word antropos, meaning 'human', the Anthropocene is a new geologic chronological term for the epoch that began when human activities had a significant global impact on the Earth's ecosystems.

In the workshop at ArtEZ we will use several contemporary objects to tell the future history of the Anthropocene. Which remnants will function as future markers? Why did they remain, by whom where they used and what was their function? By looking at these individual and thus subjective interpretations it becomes clear that history writing itself is inherently equivocal. When do we know the entire truth? And does it even exist? Through the use of artistic and archaeological methodologies we will look back from the far future to the current Anthropocene, the Age of Men.