Memory is always associated with traumas. Moreover, the very structure of memory is based on trauma. At the same time, paradoxically, trauma is not compatible with memory, or to quote Lacan, trauma refuses to withdraw from memory. This impossible symbolization is just the challenge for art to address. The role of art can hardly be overestimated in archival research and in the aestheticization of trauma, its covering with aesthetic bandages. Concealment of emptiness is an opening of a trauma releasing ghosts. Art techniques, art as a set of techniques, does not drive away the ghosts but rather opens its hospitable embrace to them. The problem of memory, trauma, and ghosts is articulated anew in the new digital universe. All these questions require a comprehensive transversal consideration. Therefore we need to unite the efforts of artists, philosophers, critics, media theorists, and psychoanalysts to discuss these vital themes.

VICTOR MAZIN (RUSSIA) Theoretician of visual culture, art curator, psychoanalyst. Ph.D in Philosophy. Honorable Professor at the International Institute of Depth Psychology (Kiev), head of the section for theoretical psychoanalysis at the Eastern-European Institute of Psychoanalysis (St Petersburg). Founder of the Freud Museum of Dreams (1999); Honorary member of the council at The Museum of Jurassic Technology (Los-Angeles); Editor-in-chief of the journal Cabinet and co-editor of the Journal for Lacanian Studies (London), Journal of European Psychoanalysis (Rome), Transmission (Sheffield), Psychoanalytic Discourse (Tehran). Curated exhibitions in Russia, Austria, Finland, Germany, and USA. He has many published books and articles to his name. His papers were published in The Art Magazine (Moscow), Critical Mass (Moscow), DI (Moscow), Cultural Studies, Cabinet (N.Y.), The New Formation (London) Journal for Lacanian Studies (London), Journal of European Psychoanalysis (Rome), Transmission (Sheffield). His books and article were translated into German, English, French, Japanese, Slovenian, Dutch, and other languages.

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"BLACK / as memory's wound / the eyes root for you" wrotes Paul Celan (SCHWARZE, Atemwende, 1967). The same poet also wrote, however, "WE WERE LYING / deep in the macchia, by the time / you crept up at last. / But we could not / darken over to you: / light compulsion / reigned."
(WIR LAGEN, Lichtzwang, 1970).
Still humanizing, always humanaizing - like Euridice, the erotic antennae of the psyche is searching for a glow – a sign of possibility for being-towardlife. Is it possible to work through art toward a being-toward- birth in a world that massively enjoys its own Deathdrive? We can look in the pain's eye and connect to the sorrow of the other and to the wounds of its oblivion by fragilizing our own self. Beauty is one of the names of the transformation of trauma in the space opened by affective trans-sensing, when the memory of oblivion emerges and takes shape while the abstract research for aerial depth meets the underwater traces of trauma.

BRACHA L. ETTINGER (ISRAEL / FRANCE) Artist-painter, artist-theorist and psychoanalyst. Professor at EGS. Author of articles and books on trauma, memory, feminine subjectiity and the matrixial gaze and space. Her recent exhibitions include Muzeum Śląskie (Katowice) (Solo show), 14th Istanbul Biennial; Colori, GAM (Torino); The Image of War, Bonnier Konsthall (Stockholm); Encounters, MAS/KMSKA (Antwerpen); Lyric on a Battelfield, Gladstone Gallery (NY).

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Mnemonics, born to traumatic event, uses the location of the trauma to restore lost memory, ranging from Simonides to the hero of Alexander Luria's Little Book about Big Memory. The theater of memory or a mental walk along familiar landscape populated by eidetic images helps to recall what is no longer there. Mystical experiences lead one from one room to the next as in the Inner Castle of Teresa de Avila. What is happening when artists take the role of archeologists searching for things lost? How is trauma being symbolized in the epoch of memory industrialization and digitalization of archives?

OLESYA TURKINA (RUSSIA) Critic and curator, senior research fellow at the Russian Museum's department of latest art trends, associate professor at St.Petersburg University and head of the Master's program on "Curators' Research" at the faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Curated more than 100 international exhibition projects.

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There are two traditions of critical perception of mass media. Experimental cinema in the West emphasized relationship between physical film stripe and its material image. Physical material of film is visible at the same time as image, no longer being just a carrier but an equal part of the content. In the East the critical perception of mass media was due to its politically controlled content. These circumstances motivated artists to develop allegoric visual language of cinema, allowing a viewer to make his or her individual interpretation of cinematic narrative. These two positions became a starting point of Narkevicius's artistic practice in the mid 1990's. The presentation will start with the screening of His-Story (1998, 8 min.). It is an early film installation by the artist, referring to personal traumatic experiences from political collisions of the Soviet past. In this work Narkevicius applied an archaeological approach to the medium of film by re-engaging anachronistic technology of the early 1970's.

DEIMANTAS NARKEVIČIUS (LITHUANIA) Filmmaker and artist. Narkevičius started using film during the early nineties. His films exercise the intricate practice of memory and portray a contemporary society confronted with the painful processes of history. The camera offered him the possibility of exploring different narratives, allowing him to play with the course of time. In film he found a perfect medium for exploring both sound and visual language. The disjunctions between words and images in Narkevicius's films make manifest the impossibility of an objective documentary. He eschews the closeups that are a common feature of contemporary documentaries, used to demonstrate the veracity of an interviewee's testimony. The central characters of Narkevičius's narratives are often absent from the screen, replaced by objects, drawings and other surrogates.

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Anyone who sees the dead or hears their voices is a victim of obsession. Similarly to Swedenborg, who had been ridiculed by Kant, such a person is a visionary, that is, he/she suffers from a chronic disease of imagination which Kant called Schwärmere. However, communication with the dead is our everyday experience. The devices recording and reproducing sounds and images allow us to see and hear the dead and thus they put us in a position which is similar to that of Kantian Schwärmere. It is not a coincidence that shortly after its appearance photography became an object of close attention on the part of occult scientists. Occult theorists viewed photography as an instrument of mediation between the two worlds, the visible and the invisible, material and spiritual. It is well known that Derrida did not perceive ghosts as a phenomenon of the past, the product of the "ancient mansions culture" and the 19th century occultism. Modern technology with its rationalism does not at all exclude the existence of specters; on the contrary, technology contributes to the growth of the illusionary, fantastic, phantasmal dimension. Photography belongs to this very dimension as its ontological status is dual, flickering between presence and absence. The role of photography as a place of "hospitality" and "refuge" for specters is especially relevant in our age of mass violence and genocides whose perpetrators always strive to condemn their victims to total annihilation.

DENIS SKOPIN (RUSSIA) Holds the degree of Cand. Sc. in Philosophy from the Russian Academy of Science' Institute of Philosophy (2003) and a PhD from Université Paris 8, 2012. Specialist in contemporary esthetics, the theory of photography, and the philosophy of technology. Author of books in Russian, English, and French, which include La photographie de groupe et la politique de la disparition dans la Russie de Staline. Paris: Éditions l'Harmattan (2015).

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