ABSTRACT
Migrants often initiate and take a leading role in grassroots memory activism. They perform and reenact scenes in which they faced discrimination, as well as memories of events that occurred in their country of arrival, their country of origin, or while they were in transit. This activism frequently elaborates on the different temporalities migrants live in by showing how humanitarian discourses suspend them outside of state citizens' time, relegating them to a perpetual state of waiting and thereby denying them their agency. In this chapter, I describe Mood and Memory, a series of short films released in Austria and Germany in 2017, as a practice of memory activism that intervenes in this process of suspension by interrupting the regime of time that often leaves refugees denied of a past and a future.
