CityArts and the Heritage Council in association with the Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media and the School of Media, DIT present Archive | Image | History
December 3rd Moved to December 2nd 5.00 – 7.00pm – The Oval Room, The Rotunda, Parnell Sq. W. Dublin 1
Whilst archives and archival practices have been a consistent feature of the historian’s work, visual artists and cultural practitioners have also engaged the archive as site, form and source to appropriate, reconfigure and interrogate it. This forum brings together a number of practitioners and researchers to focus on notions of memory-building and archiving in the context of historical representation, exploring ideas of experience, memory and community, authenticity and authorship, notions of the public and public-ness, and the politics of the archival imagination.
Participants
Walid Raad
The Loudest Muttering is Over: Documents from The Atlas Group Archive. Raad uses photographic slides, notebook pages, and videotape excerpts as historical artifacts attributed to various sources or characters such as Dr. Fadl Fakhouri, a leading historian of Lebanese history, or Souheil Bachar, an ex-hostage. The findings and claims of these figures are inspired by historical circumstances and objects such as the role of the car bomb in the Lebanese wars, and existing captivity narratives.
Anthony Haughey
Remembering to Forget the Past: The Destruction and Recovery of Archives. Haughey has been working on post-conflict situations over the last decade specifically in relation to Northern Ireland and the Balkans where the destruction and recovery of archives has been one of the features and legacies of conflict. A starting point for some of this work is the description by Dr. Kemal Bakarsic, librarian of Bosnia’s National Museum, of the firebombing of the National and University Library during the bombardment of Sarajevo when ‘fragile pages of gray ashes, floated down like a dirty black snow. Catching a page you could feel its heat, and for a moment read a fragment of text in a strange kind of black and gray negative, until, as the heat dissipated, the page melted to dust in your hand’.
Catherine Morris
The praxis of community remembrancing: projections from lost Irish archives The cultural practices of the Irish Cultural Revival breathed new life into the dying body of the nation. The Revivalists called the past into being through street parades, collecting of folklore, staging and publishing Irish legends and histories, initiating art and museum exhibitions, and by travelling with theatre productions and magic lantern shows. Using archival sources, Morris will investigate how this emergent nationalist culture depicted itself in public space drawing connections between the politics of commemoration and repressed histories.
Chair: Martin McCabe, DIT Fellow, Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media
