Radical Remembering Lab is an interdisciplinary cultural memory initiative dedicated to rethinking how individuals and societies engage with inherited histories, silences, and erased narratives. Working across art, research, public humanities, and community-based practice, the Lab develops projects that move beyond passive commemoration toward active engagement with the ethical, cultural, and political stakes of memory in the present. Through film, writing, archival work, education, artistic collaborations, and experimental forms of storytelling, Radical Remembering Lab approaches memory not as something fixed or inherited intact, but as a living, participatory process — one shaped by transmission, rupture, migration, trauma, identity, and the ongoing negotiation between past and present. Its work engages particularly with Jewish memory, postwar and diasporic identities, and the complex afterlives of hidden histories in Central and Eastern Europe and beyond.
A little background:
What emerged from stories of hidden Jewish identity was not only a question of ancestry, but a larger question about the nature of human knowing itself. Long before facts surfaced, before family histories became explicit, there existed something else: a hunch. A persistent and gnawing sense that reality and narrative were somehow out of alignment.
I have become increasingly interested in the hunch not as mystical certainty or romantic intuition, but as a form of investigative pressure — the mind and body responding to silence, contradiction, absence, emotional atmosphere, inherited behavior, repetition, rupture, or narrative gaps. A hunch is often what initiates the search long before evidence arrives.
In this framework, remembering is not merely retrieval. It is reconstruction under conditions of uncertainty. The hunch becomes the engine.
While my own work emerged from questions of concealed Jewish identity, intergenerational silence, grief, and postwar memory, the phenomenon itself extends far beyond those contexts. Many lives are shaped by forms of knowledge that precede verification:
- adoptees sensing hidden family histories
- queer people recognizing themselves before language or permission exists
- children intuiting violence, addiction, instability, or secrecy within a family system
- individuals sensing that a parent is not biologically related to them
- seemingly irrational attractions to places, languages, histories, or cultures
- artistic intuition and obsessive thematic return
- bodily forms of knowing connected to trauma and memory
- diasporic longing
- uncanny recognition
- false memories and productive hunches
- political or social hunches that emerge before systems visibly fracture
A deeply human response to silence, the hunch is not always right. Human beings are pattern-seeking creatures. Intuition can illuminate, distort, protect, or mislead. That tension is part of what makes the subject compelling. The hunch occupies a space between perception and projection, history and imagination, memory and invention. When official narratives fail, when histories are suppressed, when families do not speak openly, when grief cannot fully metabolize itself, people begin constructing alternative routes. Sometimes they lead toward the truth. Sometimes toward fantasy. Often toward both at once. This unstable territory between intuition and evidence touches on questions of:
- precognitiion
- inherited emotional realities
- epistemologies of absence
- postmemory
- intergenerational trauma
- diaspora and displacement
- narrative dissonance
- the ethics and dangers of intuition itself
Radical Remembering Lab is where cultural memory, documentary practice, archives, identity formation, oral history, Jewish studies, and storytelling converge. We are interested not only in what people remember, but in what compels them to search in the first place.
RADICAL REMEMBERING LAB is a new initiative - stay tuned for updates soon.
