The Soap Factory
Minneapolis, MN
September 13 – October 26, 2008
“In other words, we rely upon the overly simple circle which has as its content the passing present and as its shape the part of reminiscence. However, the order of time, time as a pure and empty form, has precisely undone that circle. It has undone it in favour of a less simple and much more secret, much more torturous, more nebulous circle…” – Gilles Deleuze
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To some, there’s comfort in the notion that ‘history repeats itself’. If historical events can be thought of as a set of similarly recurring episodes, then history is a resource that can be drawn from for the experience and knowledge necessary to stem imminent wars, natural disasters, and cultural upheaval. Instead of being unprepared by the future, we’re able to predict it. This way of thinking about history does a few things. In terms of how history is written or visualized, it creates a series of events that succeed each other while creating affinities to what has already happened. More problematically, the trouble with ‘history repeats itself’ is that it creates, through repetition, too tidy an equivalence across events that are actually very different. We’re more interested in creating a likeness rather than appreciating the nuances of what has happened that make every event unique.
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