We remember and forget as a society, just as much as we do as individuals. One of the most influential aspects that carries, shapes and changes our common remembrances and “social memory” is the notion of place. What and how we remember is closely relevant with “where” we remember.

In Once Upon a Time, the relationship between the social memory and place is opened up for a discussion through theoretical and case studies. Thirty six writers from various fields follow the traces that is left by the places on memory and vice versa, and tries to clarify the rapid social (and spatial) change Türkiye has gone through in the last seventy years.

What has changed as families from Istanbul moving from the wooden mansions to apartments? Did the dams in Artvin merely destroyed the villages? How the memories of the slums have changed in the minds of the victims of the urban transformation? How come a prison turned into a museum can reshape the memory? How did the 1980 Turkish coup d’état was remembered in literature and cinema?

Once Upon a Time pays its respects to the compex natue of the memory, and shows that remembering does not necessarily mean to “have”, or forgetting means the “absence”.