memory making of the present, for the future

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Preactive Memory differs from the unconscious creation of memory. It is memory being created, saved, and ritualised explicitly in response to a past and ongoing current crisis that appears to continue in the future. These actions of memory work could be directed towards an outcome such as a memorial created for the present and/ or for a later time and future generations. In its positionality, it advocates for marginalised people, persecuted people facing an existential crisis to utilise it as a form of exercising agency and ensuring a record of their existence and the challenges they are experiencing, with reflections on their present times and their predicted future. 

Preactive Memorials are the memory works arising out of it, actively make a claim on the word ‘memorial’ in the here and now, without waiting for the memorialisation being done at a much later time, officially sanctioned or appropriated later by those with more considerable centralised powers, whether it be institutions, the state or the government.

The works may be presented for engagement during a crisis, such as the AIDS Memorial Quilt or COVID Wall, or kept for the future, like in the case of the Ringleblum Archive. It is for the individuals and groups who work on these memory projects to decide this.

As memory works could refer to thinking and action, reflection, embodiment, practices and materials, not all of it may lead to a memorial. However, all the artefacts and evidence of such could be seen as part of or being preactive memorials.

The word ‘preactive’ was selected to emphasise the prescient nature of the memory work and highlight the activities inherent in this form of memorialisation, so a combination of pre + active.