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Memory studies at turn of century are in boom; struggles with concept of increasingly occupy contemporary artists, writers, historians and theorists across fields as diverse as cognitive sciences, cultural studies and psychology. Artmakers such as Christian Boltanski have become familiar focus problematics of understanding personal and cultural remembrances and their relationship to history, identity and memorial, yet they also offer us new ways to map performativity of memory. His theatrical installations highlight engagement of and art to body and cultural space. Boltanski's works point to memories as continuously recreated events, based on past, but understood through present. Through re-examining Boltanski's 'performances', we can therefore find optimism in crisis in that grips modern society. Boltanski's work seems to seat comfortably in its uncertain twilight space. Rather than rushing to ineffectually freeze-frame past, Boltanski seems happiest articulating, questioning and unsettling conceptions of mnemonics through complexities of photographic medium. Revisiting Boltanski it is thus possible to map not just as host of floating signifiers nested in fragile physiologies, but performative form, set of concurrences which hover between original and copy, theatrical source of creativity. Replicating Memories Andreas Huyssen locates millennial critical and artistic with in a deepening sense of crisis often articulated in reproach that our culture is terminally ill with amnesia. This is crisis, born of dangers to memory, perceived in growth of technology, image-laden spread of mass communication and rapid acceleration of modern living. Memory may have been continuously and obsessively archived, memorialised, monumentalised, recorded and mapped through photographic and filmic image, but time, as Scott McQuire says, for judgement [between one flicker on screen and next] disappears. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Huyssen goes on to claim that, ... boom however is potentially healthy sign ... contestation of informational hyperspace and an expression of basic human need to live in extended structures of temporality however they may be organised. It is also reaction formation of mortal bodies that want to hold on to their temporality against media world spinning cocoon of timeless claustrophobia and nightmarish phantasms and simulations. Jay Winter maps strengths and weaknesses of contemporary fascination, even obsession with memory when he notes that, [t]he study of is one of most fashionable branches of scholarly inquiry in wide variety of disciplines. ... Consequently, we have dazzling array of inquiries into memory, postmemory, counter-memory, traumatic memory, collective memory, collected memory, national memory, testimonial memory, witnessing, repressed memory, distorted memory, underground memory, deep memory, cultural memory, and so on. No pair of these terms can be equated; indeed, there is no consensus at all on even rudimentary elements out of which some kind of conceptual ordering of studies could be built ... He questions vagueness as the term becomes metaphor, but what is unclear. For melancholy? For nostalgia? For uncanny? And what's more, term does not mean same thing in German or French as it does in English. Metaphors multiply in this field at an exponential rate. Without delving too deeply it is possible to see that memories are potential, simultaneously irretrievable, instable, fluid, transient poignant, melancholic and goldenly nostalgic. …
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