Centre for Popular Memory celebrates ten years with exhibition and catalogue launch

IMAGE: NIKLAS ZIMMER

This month sees the tenth anniversary of the Centre of Popular Memory (CPM), which will be celebrated in tandem with the launch of the Centre's archive holdings catalogue. The exhibition, We Remember, will be opened by esteemed guest speaker Alessandro Portelli, from the University of Rome - one of the world's boldest proponents of oral history. It marks the beginning of an ongoing project to 'visualise' the archive by combining interviewee images with details and quotes from the related interview.

A newly published print catalogue listing and describing the Centre's entire audio archive of over 2 000 hours of interviews (divided into 10 holding collections) will be distributed at the launch on 22 May in the Centre for African Studies Gallery, opened by Deputy Vice Chancellor Crain Soudien.

Located within the Historical Studies Department and the Humanities Faculty of the University of Cape Town, the CPM houses a multi-lingual electronic audio, video and text collection, which includes over 3000 recordings in nine languages, many with full transcripts and translations.

Born out of the Western Cape Oral History Project (WCHP), which was established in 1985, the CPM is an academic centre that engages with the archival preservation of audio and audio-visual recordings, with specialised concentration on oral history and related research materials produced by UCT staff, researchers and students. The core focus of the centre is on how memory-work produces diverse knowledge forms and the ways in which these contribute to intellectual, research and social change.

The centre has concentrated not only on the preservation and growth of these collections over the last 25 years, but also on the analysis of archival collections as critical knowledge systems. The centre recognises the post-apartheid South African context of widespread poverty, inequalities, post-traumatic experiences and the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Acknowledging how the past-in-the-present has created 'networks of support' across class, racial, gender and citizenship divisions within Cape Town and elsewhere, the centre's projects aim to make contributions to social change.

Starting at 5.30pm, the evening's events will be accompanied by musical performance by As Is, featuring Brydon Bolton, Garth Erasmus and Niklas Zimmer.