Artists and UC Berkeley Professors Discuss Illuminations: “Fractured History”
“History is always fractured. There’s a certain group that’s going to tell the story and, very likely, they’re going to tell their version of the story.”
Produced and directed by Mina Girgis, Cal Performances’ Director of Education, Campus and Community Engagement; Directed and edited by Maruf Noyoft. Full credits below.
Our understanding of history is neither static nor complete; rather, it is dynamic and ever-changing due to the malleability of our collective memory. Examining the evolutions in our historical narratives often entails re-evaluating our collective understanding of what is fact, and finding new sources and voices with the potential to add layers to our understanding. Through this year’s Illuminations theme of “Fractured History,” we aim to explore and expand our understanding of the past. Illuminations performances and public programs in partnership with campus thought leaders will investigate what gets lost in abridging complex events, how to “zoom out” to be more inclusive in historical perspective, and what role the arts might play in restoring valuable nuances in the way we view our past, present and future.
In this video, UC Berkeley professors and artists participating in Cal Performances’ presented season tease big ideas and considerations for engaging with the theme, and share learnings from their own work on the topic.
Learn more about Illuminations: “Fractured History.”
This video features Christine Philliou, PhD, UC Berkeley Professor of History; David Ono, journalist and filmmaker, Story Boldly (Story Boldly’s Defining Courage comes to Zellerbach Hall April 4, 2025); Martha Redbone, singer-songwriter (This Land is Our Land comes to Zellerbach Hall February 28, 2025); Beth Piatote, PhD, UC Berkeley Professor of Comparative Literature, Director of the Berkeley Arts Research Center; Debarati Sanyal, PhD, UC Berkeley Professor of French, Director of the Berkeley Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry; and William Kentridge, stage director, draughtsman, performer and filmmaker (William Kentridge’s The Great Yes, The Great No comes to Zellerbach Hall March 14–16, 2025).
Transcript
Christine Phillou:
History is a study of change over time, study of the past… and that we can tell from histories that are written, we can read much more about the time that the history’s being written than the time that it’s writing about.
David Ono:
History is always fractured. There’s a certain group that’s going to tell the story, and very likely they’re going to tell their version of the story.
Martha Redbone:
A lot of that story has been erased deliberately. As they always say, history is told by the victors.
Beth Piatote:
I think art is what makes it possible to enter into these histories that are so painful or unbearable otherwise.
Debarati Sanyal:
Let’s keep fracturing those histories, but also kind of recognizing in the breakages, all the ways in which histories connect and are entangled and have these long aftermaths.
William Kentridge:
We are on board a ship, the captain Paul Lemaire from Marseille bound for Martinique, June 1941, refugees escaping from Vichy, France. Communists André Breton, Claude Lévi-Strauss the anthropologist, and on board the ship also is the captain who in fact is Karen the Ferryman of the dead, who not only are transporting these people across the Atlantic, but is able to call up historical characters from the past and even some from the future to reflect on the shift between Europe and its colonial past.
Debarati Sanyal:
A figure that I thought was really interesting that Kentridge brings into this imagined exodus from occupied France is Frantz Fanon because this is someone who basically realized as a psycho analyst in colonized Algeria that the colonizers and the colonized both suffering from the violence of colonial occupation and from this position of quasi-statelessness, or exile at the very least, was combating and therefore entangling different histories of occupation and oppression, entangling them in the name of a transnational liberation struggle.
Martha Redbone:
I don’t like the stories of the past. They’re very painful stories, but they’re truth and it’s about the truth that has to come up, that people can talk about. When it comes to the work that I do, it’s not for me. It’s really sharing a little piece of something and the hope that it sparks conversation because that is what has been lacking and albeit painful, or they call it uncomfortable, truths.
Christine Phillou:
There are two different kinds of historical fractures. One is due to the fact that we’ve often had a dominant historical narrative, which leaves out important dimensions and perspectives, so that’s almost an intentional fracture versus the kind of fractures that are due to incomplete knowledge or incomplete evidence about a particular period.
David Ono:
Historically, our country at times has failed, sometimes catastrophically. And how we treated Japanese Americans during World War II was certainly one of those chapters. The beauty of this particular chapter is it does go back 80-something years, but it doesn’t go back too far to where all those people are gone. That’s how we can make up for it. There are still people who lived that era who can correct it, who can help us better understand it today as opposed to how we taught it immediately after in the decades to come. And this is a perfect example of how these guys are considered the greatest fighting unit in American military history, and yet they’re not in our history books. Why is that?
Beth Piatote:
For artists and to be able to enter into the fracture and be able to actually simultaneously heal and make it bigger or make it something else. There’s this transformative possibility of the fracture.
Christine Phillou:
Taking as many different kinds of evidence and perspectives to heal the fracture, right? To include the different versions and to address the power relations that went into making the dominant version, and then these sort of subversive or these competing versions or these new layers of history that were not perceived, let alone valued in the past and trying to arrive at some sort of fair and inclusive story.