What to Let Go?

What to Let Go? – This book explores the historical narratives and political memories associated with objects, sites and ceremonies that have been lost, looted, returned, repatriated, reanimated or reinvented. Through a diversity of discourses, poems and original artistic contributions, it brings together subjects and geographies that are usually dissociated – from looted cultural goods held in colonial collections to processes of renaming or destroying symbols of past eras – and examines their relationship in the context of recent social upheavals and political processes across continents. In an age of dangerous revisionism, when history has become a battleground for both left and right, the question arises: how can art reconfigure our collective founding myths? And what should we discard in our quest for understanding?