 Well, thank you so much, Sarah, for this lovely introduction. Thank you all for being here this afternoon, and thank you for the barns for hosting us this year. In 1988, Vic Muniz suffered a lapse of memory. It occurred when he began working on a series of drawings entitled The Best of Life, in which he rendered from memory some of the most famous journalistic photographs taken from Life's magazine, 1973's special edition, also called The Best of Life. This commemorative issue anthologized the most prestigious images published by the news magazine as a memorial to Life's history from 1936 until its death in 1972. Muniz purchased a copy of The Best of Life at a garage sale in Chicago in 1987, right after moving from Brazil. To the artist, the book was a device of acculturation, because it made him feel, quote, more of a part of the place where I was living, end quote. Since the magazine's special edition offered a large variety of images, ranging from pictures of celebrities to political achievements, Muniz felt that by owning the book, he could not only absorb more of American culture, but also, in a way, include himself in that culture. According to the artist, he carried the book at all times like a family album. But he lost it in the summer of 1988. It was the loss of this item that led to Muniz's desire to recollect from memory some of its most remarkable pictures. He recalled and rendered nine photographs from Life's volume, but the images he chose had already been exhaustively reproduced. Indeed, the pictures remembered by Muniz were, in art to this day, key contributions to the American collective imaginary due to their mainstream circulation and or emotional impact. Ayodhima, Vijay Day, the cinema audience watching the first 3D movie, John F. Kennedy Jr. during his father funeral, the execution of a Viet Cong, Man on the Moon, Ken State shooting in Ohio, the napalm girl in Trang Bang, and John Lennon with a New York T-shirt in his apartment. For Muniz at first, the memory rendering was a pastime. He explains, quote, I would wake up and work on a few every day and each day I would remember a bit more, end quote. It took him a few years to capture most of the picture's general features without looking at them. In order to make his renderings appear more like the images from Life magazine, Muniz photographed the drawings. But he did so in soft focus, as you can see here. I pressed the wrong button, sorry. So he did so in soft focus, as you can see here, with the image on the right, ostensibly to emphasize the elusiveness of the lost reference, and to remove evidence of his hand. He later photographically printed them through a halftone screen to simulate the pixelated quality of photographs published in magazines, mimicking the format in which most people first encounter the pictures. So the grains that you actually see on the screen are not a distortion of the projector or the image. It's an actual printing process. So the end product is thus a blurry line that resembles a bad photo reproduction of the well-known picture. When paired against the images reproduced in Life magazine, Muniz's memory drawings retain many details from the original source, such as body configuration, overall scale, facial expressions, and even the point of view from which the photographs were taken. However, despite having an outstanding visual memory, Muniz seems to have forgotten many details. He left out peripheral information and it is precisely such absences the focus of my paper today. I'm interested in the staging of forgetting, in examining the nuances of memory loss and the social political implications of these gaps. For instance, in execution of a Viet Cong, the artist neglected to include some of the details of the photograph's original background, emitting markers of built environments, forgetting parts of the place to which the image is historically bound. The figure's body seemed to stand in an abstracted vacuum of blurry lines as if refusing to belong to a particular locus. So what does it mean for Muniz to forget? To produce images that argue that something has been forgotten or to partially remember some politically charged images that pertain to America's past. In the 1980s and 90s, around the time when Muniz is working on this series, memory loss was mostly being addressed as a cultural pathology. Forgetting appeared as that which erased history and inspired anxiety. Amnesia was usually associated with repression, trauma, oppression, and passivity. It was mostly understood as a type of flaw, a malicious disruption, a condition related to neurological damage, and thus something to be avoided. In his seventh volume entitled Le lieu de mémoire, French historian Pierre Nora discusses Western society's fear of forgetfulness and obsession with preserving the past in the post-war era. He explains that the anxiety of memory loss is tied to the loss of what he calls, quote, environments of memory, end quote, or physical places that contain the recollection of our past, such as war sites. And because of this detachment between place and memory, Nora argues that instead, quote, modern memory becomes, even more, becomes archival. Similarly, in his book Twilight Memories, Andreas Hoisen discusses society's fixation with fighting cultural amnesia and preserving history, but attributes this phenomenon to the spreading of data storing technologies, such as computers. Many attempts to talk about forgetting have thus led to discussions of the desire to preserve or recover memory, which reinforces the cultural rejection of amnesia. But instead, I propose that memory loss be seen as holding critical function, as perhaps creating a site for contesting power. Moniz's staging of amnesia or selective forgetting actually challenges notions of American historical memory. Specifically during the 80s and the early 90s, a time in US history marked by an effort to make peace to the conflicted nostalgia of the past, evidenced by the erection of both Vietnam and the Korean War memorials in 1982 and 1995, respectively, as well as the creation of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1993. Hoisen notes that during this time, both the US and Europe built memorials and museums to stand as, quote, theaters of memory, end quote, as they represented antidotes to forthcoming traumatic loss and placed emphasis on remembering. In earlier decades, objects that established the type of association between memory, trauma, and loss are exemplified by Gerard Richter's early photo paintings. As artistic precedents to Moniz's series, works such as Uncle Rudy from 1965 also complicate the connection between memory, photography, and painting. By intimately depicting his deceased uncle smiling in Nazi uniform after a black and white family photograph, Richter connects memory loss to trauma and violence. He alludes to the repressed memories of Nazi culture and tries to come to terms with the atrocities of the Nazi past in post-war Germany. Moniz's subjects are instead detached figures taking from media culture. The blurry lines of his rendering don't allude to traumatic forgetting, but actually stage a different kind of forgetting through visual cues such as the very loss of resolution. The lack of clarity along with the omission of certain details point to a type of memory loss that actually unsettles hierarchical relationships of power. Nowhere is this more palpable than in the Man on the Moon rendering. In the celebrated photograph captured by Neil Armstrong, we see the American flag printed on Buzz Aldrin's left shoulder. The blue square and red stripes contrast with the astronaut's white gear. The rectangular outline of the flag was still registered in Moniz's memory. He carefully delineated the area the flag was supposed to occupy, not forgetting its geometric perimeter. However, Moniz did not include the flag's defining features, despite it being a pervasive symbol, quite impossible to forget. The stars and stripes which identify the flag as being American were reduced to a grayscale blob that is barely visible, revealing the staging of the artist's forgetting. And even in Brazil, images of the moon landing were one of the most prominent subjects to be reproduced in magazine covers and receive great media attention. The Apollo 11's journey helped deviate attention from the country's aggressive dictatorship regime and instead offered entertainment through America's conquest of the moon. In Javisa Monchici, Armstrong's picture of Buzz Aldrin was featured in the front cover. And other periodicals like Fatos e Fotos even sold a mini LP with the voice recordings of the astronauts as a free gift. The magazine also published many American advertisements, a clear reminder of American imperialist presence in Brazilian media culture. With this in mind, Moniz's selective forgetting might actually open a space to refuse, critique, and subvert the cultural memory that is exported and imposed. The staging of amnesia this offers an alternative response to America's dominant narratives, specifically during the 80s and 90s, a crucial moment for memory studies and revisionist theories in disciplines like social history. Intellectual Gayatari Spivak, for example, questioned hegemonic power structures in the very making of history by interrogating the status of historical memory of what gets remembered and forgotten. In her acclaimed essay, Can the Subaltern Speak, Spivak advocates a reconsideration of history in colonies such as India through politics of inclusion. She claims that, quote, imperialism establishes the universality of the mode of production narrative, end quote. Pointing to the idea that suppressing and forgetting the past has been deployed in service of the holders of hegemonic power. When Moniz began recollecting the photographs from life in 1988, the following year marked the 20th anniversary of the moon landing. Commemorative stamps and stickers circulated assuring that nobody forgot one of the most successful achievements in America's history. The New York Times issued articles to commemorate the anniversary with titles such as How the Moon Was Won, referring to the moon exploration as a colonizing expedition. And pictures and drawings of the flag planted on the moon's surface recalled colonial connotations of settlers planting flags in the grounds of conquered lands to establish territories. In this way, the missing details of the American flag in Moniz's rendering amidst national identity and resists imperialistic narratives. Looking closely at both Aldrin's helmet from the picture reproduced in life, one also notices that his visor becomes a convex mirror reflecting the astronaut's own shadow, the eagle's shuttle on the far right, Neil Armstrong taking the picture in the center, as well as a tiny presence of the United States flag in the solar wind experiment at the very back. Here, reality is confirmed by its own reflection. In Moniz's version, on the other hand, the artist forgot to register everything except for Armstrong's body, which becomes instead an unrecognizable white spot. Convexity already suggests a certain distortion by its own bent surface, as in Jan van Eyck's Arnofini portrait. The reflection of the convex mirror at the back of the wall reveals the room's altered extension being occupied by two additional figures, one of them believed to be van Eyck himself. Like Buzz Aldrin's visor reflection, van Eyck's mirror attests to reality. It becomes a type of dependable memory, a trustworthy documentation of the past. For Moniz, the convex visor is instead a displaced mirror, one that interrupts memesses and instead places cultural memory in a state of vulnerability. The artist refuses to trust and accept reality. He disturbs the media's imposed reflection through forgetting, substantially questioning the veracity of historical memory. The mirror proves important as it also relates to ideas of colonialism, the mirror being one of the symbols of colonial conquest in the conceptualization of the other. Because the mirror allows for both mimicry and othering, as discussed by scholars like Homie Baba, it reinforces hierarchies and asymmetries. Baba suggests that mimetic representation, quote, emerges as one of the most elusive and effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge, end quote. And in his psychoanalytical study of colonialism and racism, Franz Fanon notes that black man becomes the white man since, quote, the eye is not merely a mirror, but a correcting mirror of cultural mistakes, end quote. Moniz's rendering of the convict's reflection invites then the viewer to experience metaphorically a myopic correction of the representation of the colonial other. The photojournalistic images of Life Magazine are more than mere historical witnesses. They become visual evidence that American democracy succeeded, regardless of its many wars and conflicts. As mass media became one of the most important discursive medium in American history, in American culture, it also became tied to the construction of the country's historical memories. When Moniz is unable to recall specific signs that are encoded in America's history, he permits important political and historical emblems to be forgotten. The staging of memory loss for Moniz is thus a tool for criticizing social political hierarchies, American hegemonic power, the photojournalistic media that helped define it, and with his lapse of memory, he forgets pieces of American life. Thank you.