Synopsis:

Brilliant historian Eric Hobsbawm made persuasive arguments about the importance of building memory or mounting a 'protest against forgetting'. Conceived with this in mind, The Unforgetting Space is an interactive and participatory installation featuring old textbooks, dating back to the 1970s, that Tan Biyun has collected.

Tan posits a speculative near future where the urgency to remember is central to counter the fast-spreading enterprise of forgetting. No longer just dusty old tomes with questionable relevance, these books have been repurposed as triggers to initiate a process of reclaiming histories by the public.

Paying no heed to 'look but don't touch', Tan invites her audiences to participate in the experience by asking them to select a paragraph or two from a historical episode described in the textbooks and retype it using the typewriters provided. The audiences are further encouraged to contribute a text from their own sources to co-create their histories.

With The Unforgetting Space, Tan hopes to offer a space of reflexivity that seeks an inclusive understanding of the past so as to expand the possibilities of the future.