The Forgetting Syllabus is an archival initiative undertaken by an unnamed artist investigating and documenting what remains of Calimut Island, a small and remote island in the Philippines placed under Martial Law and where inhabitants are afflicted with some sort of progressive amnesia.

On the 15th of March 2023, the initiative exhibited an archive of the artist’s ongoing research and documentations in a small room at the Center for Integrative Technologies, Providence, RI. They presented a collection of found artifacts from the island — some gathered, some passed down, some materialized by speculation. The archive included redacted poetry out of the Martial Law declaration documentations, a samizdat comic book, blueprints of a memory modification device, large format photographs depicting an unknown girl at the beach, postcards containing cryptic codes between distant lovers, a burnt book covered in sand, a map of a cartographer’s effort to piece together his last memories of the land, among others. Each one a fragment of a narrative that had been erased by an atrocity; each one a reminder of a brutal history thrown in a violent cycle of revision and distortion.

In an audio recording playing in the space during the exhibition, the artist claims that, “... memory is a form of resistance and remembering is radical.”