Beyond the Future: Papers from the Third Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

arranged like the trophies of white-mens' pillage - are yet again being used in a futile attempt to re-invest the energy of a spiritually depleted Europe. But perhaps there are other ways of embodying hopes for the future than those projects and models that are erected from the bones of the oppressed and the forgotten . I want to use the words of Andreas Huyssen : For this 20th century was simultaneously a century o f indescribable catastrophes and of ferocious hopes, and often enough the hopes themselves ended up legitimising some dictatorship of the future (whether for the pure race or the classless society or the pacified consumer paradise), turning a blind eye to persecution of resources and environment, migrations and dislocations of populations to the extent the world had never witnessed before. Memory and representation , then, continue to figure as key concerns at this fin de siecle when the twilight settles around the memories of this century and their carriers 2 And so the title of this paper makes a plea for remembering the future - for a kind of corporeal re-membering - a kind of gleaning of the flotsam and jetsam of the past that has already been abandoned in the conservative will towards imagining the future at the expense of dealing with the crucial moments of the present. It is a re-membering that is an appeal against the dismemberment of issues and ideals that have been cut across by the hyphen of 'post'. The issues of the recent past - and of the present - are issues with which we are not yet finished . Grayburn , Nelson H . H . Ethnic & Tourist Arts. Cultural Expressions from the Fourth World. 1 976 . Un iversity of Cal ifornia Press, Berkeley & Los Angeles CA, USA. 2 Huyssen , Andreas. Twilight Memories. Marking Time In a Culture ofAmnesia. 1 995. Routledge, NY & London, p2 . 1 54 1