ABSTRACT
How does memory of “real time” given formal shape in a sound or visual image facilitate grasping the movement connecting things from the past, acts or deeds situated in the present, and an unfolding future? The question requires closely examining different forms of contemporary representation as well as the way in which historians pose the notion of a present within which they recount a past story about art with social, cultural, and political implications for the future. The historian’s account itself is an active “fragment” of a movement always in transformation. The question, finally, leads to a stress on the present that reconsiders the parameters appropriate to genealogy, to the archive, and to historical research and then fluidly joins the elements of personal life to a repertoire of artistic, literary, cinematic, and philosophical allusions.
