Do We Remember What We Have Forgotten?

In Georgi Gospodinov's Timeshelter, one of the characters quotes Renan, who argued that “a nation is a group of people who have agreed to remember and forget the same things.”
Perhaps the same process as a defense mechanism in a scaled-down, monological version runs through each of us. Do personal and shared memories as well as forgetting intersect? If spontaneous memory and willful forgetting are the wall behind which we feel safe, then its outer side should be shared memories, and its inner side - forgetting, the things hidden from others’ view. Where do we fall if this mnemonic wall is stretched over time and bent like a Möbius strip?
Will we know what to remember and what to unanimously or personally forget?

The visual interpretations of Aksiniya Peycheva, Mariela Gemisheva, Kalin Serapionov, Radostin Sedevchev and Sofia Grancharova offer more than one answer or double the questions.

Where do we go when we close our eyes? Is there a gallery without eyes in it? What does Artificial Intelligence know about our DNA? Does the future know what the past was while it was the present? Are other people’s memories happening to us?

 

 

Pravdoliub Ivanov