Individuals act as their own historians, suppressing some stories and emphasizing others. But at the scale of nations and cultures, and especially in this age of ubiquitous digital memory, it has become more difficult to forget. Building on questions about history and its uses, raised by exhibitions like Educating Architects: Four Courses by Kenneth Frampton and Besides, History: Go Hasegawa, Kersten Geers, David Van Severen, we invite special guests like Evgeny Morozov, Craig Hodgetts, and Johannes Grenzfurthner to propose acts of mass amnesia—precise and universal erasures of a place, person, or idea from our collective memory. What forces might be let loose, and what new ideas could emerge from fruitful forgetting?

Chus Martínez is Head of the Institute of Art of the FHNW Academy of Arts and Design, Basel, Switzerland and was also Chief Curator at El Museo del Barrio, New York and Head of Department and Member of Core Agent Group for dOCUMENTA (13). Previously she was Chief Curator at MACBA, Barcelona (2008–11), Director of the Frankfurter Kunstverein (2005–08), and Artistic Director of Sala Rekalde, Bilbao (2002–05).

This lecture is part of the Come and Forget series.