”The Future of Memory. Educating about yesterday for a better tomorrow.” is a transnational, multicity platform for Holocaust (Jewish and Romani) remembrance lead by Uma Ed Romania Association. The mission of the project is to raise awareness about individual cities’ past, reactivating memory through contemporary art, performance and media, connecting the past to the present, documenting the last witnesses, personalizing history through oral histories, creating networks and opening up public spaces for debate and mutual understanding to combat increasing nationalism, antisemitism, revisionism, racism and ethnic hatred. BPI will be responsible to organize a public event in Slovakia – Bratislava, including the promotion of the event, recording of the event, and reporting from the event and for collection of the oral histories/interviews from Slovak survivors.
Documentary Gestures of Resistance connects the personal testimonies of some of the last survivors of the Holocaust from Romania, Czech Republic and Slovakia through their presentations of antifascist resistance – chapter 1: Armed Resistance, chapter 2: Civic/Political Resistance, chapter 3: Resistance through Art, chapter 4: Resistance through Solidarity. We use these personal stories to inquire further into their relevance in today´s society, what our protagonists feel about the right-wing political movements gaining power, and how they think we can use their stories to resist current tendencies. Taking our prompt from a quote from 1978 by Simon Wiesenthal – (“The obligation to engage in resistance begins when people begin to be harmed by violations of their rights. If resistance is offered from the very beginning, then there need be no heroic fight later on, because those who violate human rights are always in the minority and they must be shown the limits of their power in good time before it is too late”….), Gestures of Resistance weaves filmed footage from protest movements and individual acts of solidarity today, with filmed testimonies of our protagonists, archival material, and artworks depicting resistance and antifascism, to plead for a path that reshapes our present and future into one governed by equality and justice for all, and asks us to resist the closure of our societies now before it´s too late.
