Academic Sessions: Belfast 2007
Makers and Making: Between Trauma and Cultural Memory
Convenors:
Vanessa Corby, York St John University v.corby@yorksj.ac.uk
Elsa Chen, UCLA elsahcchen@gmail.com
In the context of a post-conflict Northern Ireland this session turns its attention to the means by which particular social and psychic traumas can be creatively negotiated and transformed via artistic production to challenge and expand the territories of cultural memory. In ‘The project for Scientific Psychology,’ (1895) Sigmund Freud theorises trauma as constituted by the relationship between two events. Rather than a simple store and response, however, its dynamic is dependant upon a period of latency’, revival and revision. Though trauma may be worked through in artistic production its significance, as that which exceeds everyday experience, may not be realised until a receiving context has been established. Performed within creative practice hitherto unthought knowledge may thus become caught between art production and cultural memory.
The socio-political territories of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have produced multiple sites of oppression. Differences of class, ethnicity, gender, politics, religion and sexuality thus form the focus of this session. Hitherto occluded by the receiving contexts and cultures that have assigned socially acceptable meaning to practices on the basis of non-recognition, this session examines the means by which highly charged ‘Othered’ experience returns from the limits of representation. Critical analyses from artists, scholars and curators situate specific examples of creative production and the discourses that produce meaning for them. Particular focus has been given to questions of conflict, belonging and not belonging, longing and displacement, mourning and loss. The panels grouped under Makers and Making will thus examine and produce the means by which experiences hitherto denied adequate representation and/or critical reception may be made visible.
Speakers:
Doris Rohr (Interface, University of Ulster)
Communication or Communion: commemorating the dead
Anthony McCann (University of Ulster)
Crafting Gentleness: The Political Possibilities of Gentleness in Everyday Life
Pat Hardy (Courtauld Institute)
The Parting Cheer: drawing out emotions in images of Victorian emigration
Jennifer Way (University of North Texas)
Irelantis and traumas of prosperity
Jules Dorey Richmond & David Richmond (York St John University)
How will we remember when all the witnesses are gone?
Mark Edwards (University College London)
The Re-Emergence of Conflict – Jeremy Deller and Mike Figgis’ ‘The Battle of Orgreave’
Alice Correia (University of Sussex)
Black and British? The Art of Donald Rodney
Svea Josephy (Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town)
Truth, Lies and Videotape: Imaging Trauma, Memory, Truth and Reconciliation
Christine Conley (University of Ottawa)
Rebecca Belmore: Screening the Traumatized Body