"On an unnamed island, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses. . . . Most of the inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few able to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten. When a young writer discovers that her editor is in danger, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her floorboards, and together they cling to her writing as the last way of preserving the past." (Penguin Random House)

Selection

I’m interested in the roles that collective memory, knowledge, and imagination can have in creating or connecting communities and in resisting violence and oppression. The five books I’ve proposed span a range of genres, but each text explores the instability and collective potential of knowledge (from memory and forgetting to ideas of truth in images, as well as the histories and mythologies that underlie the climate crisis).

As a filmmaker, I feel it is urgent that media workers grapple with growing anxieties about the truth-value of photography and find new possibilities for seeing and narrating a world entangled in a complex climate crisis. For me, Community Reading Group has been a reassuring source of connection through shared study, and I hope our exploration of one of these texts may reflect on the ideas of collective knowledge that CRG practices weekly.

– Sara Suárez