HISTORICAL MEMORY
The expression ”historical memory” indicates the collective effort made to incorporate to today’s historical discourse, that shared by the citizenry, all of the people, events and details silenced and manipulated by a partial and biased point of view which has refused to be shaken off with time.
While totalitarianisms are the great falsifiers of history, often the origin of these silences, these expulsions from the common memory, similarly lie in collective fears, in deep-rooted prejudices, such as racism, xenophobia or religious intolerance.
From the people assassinated during the repression of the Franco years, to the thousands of soldiers from the colonies who joined forces with the French army in the fight against Nazism, history is full of forgotten heroes. Their memory, apart from settling a debt, is also a way of getting to know ourselves better and of turning towards a shared, exclusion-free future.