Welcome to the Digital Archive of Forgotten Memories

POEM fellows created the Digital Archive of Forgotten Memories as a space to talk about the things you consider not worth preserving. The memories that you believe not worth storing for all eternity. The things that might never find a suitable place in your individual as well as the collective consciousness of our societies.

The Digital Archive of Forgotten Memories fosters exchange between the POEM project and the public outside of scholarly environments. In the coming two years fellows are attending a variety of different audience-centered cultural and science events, in the form of a One Stop Shop. Our One Stop Shop is an open space where we invite you, the public, to submit a memory that you would like to forget. We use this as an opportunity to reflect on thoughts about and relationships to forgetting and remembering in our everyday lives. In addition, the One Stop Shop is the place where you can meet our POEM fellows and find out more about the POEM research project.


Last One Stop Shop

Digital Cultural Heritage Day, Digital Humanities Lab at University of Uppsala, 18 February 2020

Conference: What’s Missing? Collecting and Exhibiting Europe
Museum Europäischer Kulturen, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 27 June 2019

#Digital Archive of Forgotten Memories

The Digital Archive of Forgotten Memories provides access to digitised forgotten memories. Browse through the growing collection of submitted forgotten memories below. Each document carries a number to anonymize the creator, destroyer and memory itself. Click on the image to learn more about the provenance and origin of the object. When available, a short description can be found as well. The memory has been dismantled following the process detailed in our “Policy of Forgetting”.

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We ask all participants: why forget?

"Forgetting is important because it allows you to forget all that is bad and evil in your life."
"Forgetting is important because it allows us to move on."
"Forgetting is important because we remember often too much things that are unimportant a few minutes later"
"Forgetting is important for overcoming traumas."
"Forgetting is hard!"
"Forgetting is important because if not, the brain goes wobbly with all the information & then people will gaga and no longer be working-hard sub/objects in a capitalist neoliberal economy.2
"Forgetting is inevitable but also related to power, hence: what is forgotten is political."
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"Forgetting is important and unimportant because forgetting can heal and forgetting means letting go unintentionally often."
Forgetting is unimportant because it makes us who we are as we learn from our experiences!"
"Forgetting is important because it may be a relive, and you have been shaped by the respective event anyways, so nothing can actually ever be lost at all"
"Forgetting is important because otherwise you will not stand all the information you acquired during your life."
"Forgetting is important so we remember."

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POEM

Coordination and Project Management

University of Hamburg
c/o: Institute for Anthropological Studies in Culture and History
Grindelallee 46 | postbox: H8 | 20146 Hamburg | Germany

+49 (0)40 42838-9940

poem.gw@uni-hamburg.de 
POEM Uni Hamburg

Concepts, strategies and media infrastructures for envisioning socially inclusive potential futures of European Societies through culture.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 764859.