Will You Remember What I Choose to Forget? - Incite at Columbia University

Avantika Seth returns to Shimla to film her family, discovering how rooms and kinship reshape the ethics of oral history.

Avantika Seth returned to Shimla to make a film with her mother, father, and brother across the two houses that have held their family life. While she arrived with the tools of oral history: structured life-history questions, consent, and an expectation that the interview would hold the work, the rooms began interfering with the method.

Stepping into their family home changed the direction of the process. Rooms triggered memories that had not surfaced in conversations, familiar gestures reopened wounds, and being physically present in the spaces where family life had unfolded unsettled the chronology of the interview. The house became an archive, carrying traces of what had been remembered, differently remembered, withheld, or forgotten.

Rituals brought back memories that no question had reached. Silence no longer meant forgetting. Speaking did not always mean consent. And when the interview ended, oral history did not: memory kept unfolding at kitchen counters, around the dining table, and on walks.

Will You Remember What I Choose to Forget? grew out of this collision between the practices Seth had been taught and the realities of making oral history among kin. Her work reveals family oral history as its own ethical terrain: here, authority is negotiated not only in the interview, but through the existing familial roles. Care may mean asking a question, but it may also mean abandoning it. One of its most important formulations came from what Seth’s family gave back to the practice: consent became not simply the granting of permission, but the act of staying.

Built around scenes from the film, in this session, Seth joins live from India for a virtual talk. We move between footage and the thinking that emerged from it: what the rooms surfaced, what established oral history guidelines could not hold, and the methodology she developed in their place.