Cancel Strategies. Images, public space, identity and memories.

The paper analyses the process of image erasure as a political and cultural strategy aimed at favouring or defusing values, identities and affiliations. Drawing on a wide range of examples, it examines in detail the aims and effects of operations to subtract, omit and mask works of art, monuments or languages whose potential agency is to be neutralised. More broadly, the essay explores the relationship between images and collective memory, distinguishing between experiences of imposed forgetting and necessary forgetting.