Avowing Loss

Contemporary cultural memory has been organized around a disavowal of loss. For today it is somehow possible to believe that cultural objects remain identical over time, that they do not go through changes by which parts of them go away. That they will remain identical from one moment to the next, or from one century to the next. This talk will examine the rather particular unnatural ecologies that have been built to sustain this disavowal of loss, and the kinds of climatic, financial costs, as well as logics of exclusion and dispossession, that this logic has created. It will then call for the need to abandon once and for all this unsustainable disavowal of loss. It will do so by breaking the false equation that modernity has enforced upon us which states that memory and permanence is only possible by negating change and disavowing loss. It will then conclude by asking what kind of cultural memories and pasts can be created through a radical avowal of loss, that is, by accepting the change and loss as productive elements to be embraced rather than elements to be fixed or eliminated.

About the Speaker: Fernando Domínguez Rubio is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, University of California, San Diego. His research straddles sociology, science and technology studies, anthropology, art, design and architecture. His recent book, Still Life: Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum (University of Chicago Press, 2020), was the 2021 Winner of Mary Douglas Prize, the 2021 Winner of the Annual Book Award of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP), and also received and Honorary Mention for the 2021 Robert K. Merton Award of the American Sociological Association. He is currently working on a number of projects, including an edited volume with Jéróme Denis and David Pontille entitled Fragilities: Essays On The Politics, Ethics And Aesthetics of Maintenance And Repair (MIT Press).