According to the theory of therapeutic forgetting by Aleida Assmann, trauma can not be erased without a re-presentation of them. In a traumatic event, people will remember it firmly and the memory of the people who experienced a traumatic event can not be changed. If an official or reliable announcement is lost, blocked, changed or disappeared, the collective civic memory becomes a formation of absence which can not be tracked because of lack of proof. Furthermore, they are not allowed by the authority to re-present the event, so the ritual/process of healing can't continue and the trauma can't be cured.
When the 'white paper protest' happened in China, it was the result of the accumulated repression of citizens' memory. China's citizens have several times faced a series of traumatic events (trafficking of women going unnoticed, misguided or overblown epidemic closure policies, etc.) and the problems of blocked and modified archives (including official announcements, photographs and social media contents, etc.) repetitively appear, which led to the protest. The repression of the memory by the government prevents the trauma from being healed and even the government perpetuates the trauma.
How could archival images be re-activated and manipulated to be a way to heal collective trauma?
According to Freudian psychotherapy, a traumatic memory has to be remembered and then 'worked through' in order to be forgotten. Based on this, the project consists of a series of archival images, representing different blocked events, and the photos selected from these events are the most famous and symbolic. To defy the selection by the authority, these photos follow criteria according to which each of them would be the one that the government want to erase most, and arranged chronologically.
These archival recordsļ¼1-2 different photos, with descriptionļ¼are printed as memory cards, which are burned into ashes. The whole process is a ritual in which the spectator as the witness (especially the spectator who knows what happened in China) will share the collective memory in which the participator is partially healed from the previous trauma.
The ashes from the burning of the cards are collected for sealing and placed in an opaque document bag to create an archive. The cover has the name of the archive on it, but when the inner archival records are taken out there are only ashes. This physical archive serves as evidence that the memory cards, and the traumatic events they represent, once existed.
