Art historian Ruth Rosengarten, in her book Between Memory and Document: The Archival Turn in Contemporary Art, notes a key feature of documents: they contain remnants of the past and support certain historical events, but they say nothing about how these events are remembered.

Our meeting is an attempt to talk about the consequences of the fire at the National Art Gallery of Abkhazia, which occurred in January 2024 and destroyed almost all the paintings in the collection, on the border between memory and history. In the discussion, we propose to draw on interviews with activists and artists who have worked on this topic: Denef Khuvaj, Naida Abidova, and Apcha Hagba. The meeting also has an olfactory dimension: our friend Katya Porutchik sent us a micro-selection of the smells of flames and what remains after matter encounters fire. Among them are cade, birch tar, guaiac, styrax, and pyrogenic styrax.

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