Abstract
The imaginative, and often speculative, approaches afforded by creative inquiry enable creative practitioners to interpret memory in material and embodied ways that are not always easily translated into traditional journal articles. As a community of scholars, it is important that Memory Studies takes this kind of critical-creative inquiry seriously as contributions to the field – not (only) as objects of study from which meanings are extracted and interpreted in a quest to produce knowledge, but as alternative forms of research ‘output’, producing and displaying knowledge on and in its own terms. While they have not been able to be included within this special edition, many of the artists and filmmakers who produced work for the 2023 Memory Studies Association annual conference cultural programme engaged deeply with the complexities of community as a site of memory and a locus of change.
The ‘Communities and Change’ Cultural Programme that ran alongside the main conference at Newcastle University included films, sound installations, cultural excursions, workshops, and exhibitions. 1 This programme not only offered conference participants the opportunity to perform, or connect with, alternative forms of memory work, but was also a deliberate effort to embed the conference in place (the North East of England) and to open up the conversation to wider publics and communities. As part of this embedding process, we developed collaborations with local artists and cultural organisations that resulted in an expansion of the conference beyond the bounds of academic life. Many of these creative cultural organisations are experiencing uncertainty in the face of the combined impacts of the current economic and political climate, the COVID-19 pandemic and the UK’s decision to leave the European Union. One of these critical organisations is the Amber Collective, 2 a film and photography collective that has called Newcastle home for over 30 years and has a special place in local hearts. At the time of the conference, its iconic Side Gallery and Cinema had closed due to cuts in funding that had been vital to its existence and sustainability as an independent cultural organisation. Nonetheless, Amber re-opened its exhibition A Wounded Landscape: bearing witness to the Holocaust 3 by Marc Wilson for two nights during the conference; they also put on special screenings of two Amber films that explore the impacts of industrial loss in the North East of England – What Happened Here and Easington: People, Places, Heritage. 4 We were also proud to host the Curious Monkey storytelling caravan on site during conference days (see Image 1). Curious Monkey 5 was a theatre company of sanctuary which has now also shut down due to lack of funding – at the time of writing, work is ongoing to archive this important work within the Newcastle University Special Collections Library. Curious Monkey had become a family for many members of under-represented and marginalised communities, a sign of the vital role creative practice plays to foster inclusion and care within and for communities.
The Curious Monkey Caravan at the conference venue. Image credit: the MSA and Newcastle University.
The Communities and Change exhibition 6 at Newcastle Contemporary Art was a central part of the cultural programme of the conference and brought together local and international artists. Here, we offer a reflection on some of the intersecting themes that emerged from those works: ecology and place; intersecting emotions; scales of memory; limits of community. This piece is not intended as an exhibition review; instead, it details some of the insights that these works offered alongside the more traditional academic proceedings, a selection of which composes the rest of this special issue. Short of being able to reproduce the exhibition here for those who were unable to attend, we have, where possible, included links to online versions of the works exhibited to allow readers to discover them as directly as possible.
Visually anchoring the exhibition by taking over the large central wall of Newcastle Contemporary Art, Henna Asikainen’s ecological installation, ‘Delicate Shuttle’, explored migration and belonging through the metaphor of the white poplar (Images 2 and 3). 7 Asikainen’s work reminded us that memory moves, often in unexpected ways that both connect and disrupt existing narratives. And sometimes memory disperses, leaving behind only silences. This affective and surprising aspect of memory was explored in many of the installations, including the intimate short film Where We Will Go 8 (Kate Sweeney, with Anne Whitehead and Judith Rankin), which dealt with pregnancy loss of a twin and its impact on the micro-community of a family through the process of walking, foraging and natural dying. The film delicately explores a subject that is fraught with complexity – the survival of a co-twin when one baby has been lost – navigating the joy experienced by families alongside deep sadness and grief.
‘Delicate Shuttle’, Henna Asikainen. Image credit: Toby Lloyd, Newcastle Contemporary Art.
Detail of ‘Delicate Shuttle’, Henna Asikainen. Image credit: the MSA and Newcastle University.
The narratives of change explored in the exhibition draw out the idea of community as a site for investigating the difficult, complex or problematic aspects of the past alongside the more celebratory aspects of memory. This was perhaps most obvious in the Amber Collective’s work ‘Shipbuilding on the Tyne’, 9 which featured iconic images from the 1960s and 1970s taken by photographers Bruce Rae and Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen – examples of archival images that children from a local Wallsend primary school had the opportunity to connect with while hearing first-person narratives of former shipyard workers. These images were presented in dialogue with photographs taken by the school children during a visit to a former shipyard (Images 4 and 5). The short film Return to Swans, also included in the installation, featured interview footage with both the children and adults. This creative re-interpreting of deindustrialisation brought out painful and emotional memories for those who had lived through it, but also demonstrated the power of emotions in generating intergenerational connections of joy and pride.
‘Shipbuilding on the Tyne’, Amber Collective. Image credit: Toby Lloyd, Newcastle Contemporary Art.
Detail of ‘Shipbuilding on the Tyne’, Amber Collective. Image credit: the MSA and Newcastle University.
Another demonstration of the power of emotional connection in building community was Verónica Troncoso’s ‘120 Steps and a Cup of Coffee’ 10 installation (Image 6), and opening-night performance, during which exhibition visitors read first-person statements from the women who had experienced detention and silencing during the Chilean military dictatorship (1973–1990) in the disappeared Buen Pastor prison. This act of re-reading the women’s words drew strangers into this memory community (Image 7). After each reading, the scrap of paper was stuck to the gallery wall alongside the carefully displayed printed words and images, a nod to the messiness and unpredictability of memory. Less directly, but nonetheless powerfully, Taiwanese artist and PhD candidate I-Wei Wu’s film and photography installation ‘The Becoming of Absence’ similarly invited strangers to ‘travel’ to another place of memory, while also asking us to consider the challenging question of what happens to memory when it crosses generational and cultural boundaries.
‘120 Steps and a Cup of Coffee’, Verónica Troncoso. Image credit: Toby Lloyd, Newcastle Contemporary Art.
Detail of ‘120 Steps and a Cup of Coffee’, Verónica Troncoso. Image credit: the MSA and Newcastle University.
Asikainen’s use of the white poplar drew our attention to the importance of moving beyond the symbolic to consider the other-than-human world in our engagement with memory. Asikainen’s artistic practice explores relationships between the human and natural world, and intersections of social and climate justice, migration and belonging – themes developed further in her parallel exhibition ‘Future Pasts’ 11 at Northumbria University’s Gallery North (in collaboration with D6: Culture in Transit, a local organisation whose aim is to develop collaborative arts projects that challenge polarising cultural narratives and contribute to social resilience and environmental consciousness). The leaves used in this installation were collected during foraging walks with people who have experienced displacement, and are part of Asikainen’s own explorations of migrant experience. During the research that informed ‘Where We Will Go’, parents were also invited to go on a ‘memory walk’ and to forage for materials which were then used to produce inks as a form of memory expression.
In ‘The Becoming of Absence’, Wu presented images of sites of injustice that have disappeared into nature, questioning the reasons behind disappearance and remembering, and the importance of place (or places) as a part of the process of acknowledgement that ‘something happened here’. The renga poem ‘An Organic Adventure’, a response to Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table written communally by a group of Newcastle University staff and students, explored the memory that exists in our very beings, reminding us that we are all linked through the basic structures of the heroic carbon atom.
On the other side of the NCA exhibition space, in the second, smaller gallery, Tara Hipwood and Pablo Martinez Capdevila curated a showcase of work by Northumbria University architecture students: ‘Memory and Reinvention in the Post-industrial Periphery’ (Image 8) considered the physical space of the River Tyne by asking students to propose ideas for re-connecting communities to the now-inaccessible deindustrialised riverside. In the process, this installation raised questions of power and politics and considered who has the right not only to access but also the right to the memories and ecologies of these sites. Similarly considering questions of borders and boundaries, Nergis Canefe’s ‘People on the Move’ consisted of a series of small images reflecting on the experience of those migrants who have died in the perilous crossing of the Mediterranean. Canefe aimed to draw attention to the structures and practices of governance managing both living and dead migrant memory.
Detail of ‘Memory and Reinvention in the Post-industrial Periphery’, Northumbria University architecture students. Image credit: the MSA and Newcastle University.
An important theme that threaded through all of these artworks was the intersection of scales of remembering, particularly in the navigation of difficult pasts. While this theme was visible in almost every work in the collection, it was perhaps most powerfully explored in James Craig’s ‘Transitional Objects’ (Image 9) – the image here an example of the way this work drew gallery visitors into dialogue with the work. Craig’s practice draws on his architectural training, as well as psychoanalysis, and in this work he revisited the intimate traumatic loss of his cousin in a car bombing during the sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland, known as ‘The Troubles’, using this autobiographical position to make connections with recent border debates in the context of Brexit (the UK’s withdrawal from Europe disrupting the Island of Ireland’s internal border) and fears this could stir up past violence. Craig’s non-representational drawings were presented as ‘transitional objects’, and perhaps also translational objects. While they could be understood within the tradition of seeing traumatic memory as ‘unspeakable’, this and the other works in this exhibition also remind us that sometimes the best way to speak across an experiential divide is not to use words.
Detail of ‘Transitional Objects’, James Craig. Image credit: the MSA and Newcastle University.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
