Ap­proach­es for me­di­a­tion prac­tice with refugees

Is it possible to speak of a collective memory of people who have fled their places of home? Can mediation contribute to contruct a collective memory of refugees? In a first step, this paper differentiates memory from history, followed by a dicussion of theories of memory. Memory is the operation by which past events are reconstructed and organized to give sense and values to our current reality. This is followed by a dicussion of the archive: the archive is understood as a system of ordering and knowledge production, a place of the cultural memory. This theoretical background informs a reflection on my own practice in mediation, connecting cultural memory, gallery education and political empowerment of refugees.