sempozyum_bildiri_kitabi

complex, fragmentary, sound snippets constantly interrupt and contest each other vying for
attention to be heard. Moreover, the start up of the soundtrack is aligned to a movement sensor
which is only activated when the viewer comes in very close to the work, for example, to pull out and
examine the files but if the individual leaves this intimate orbit the soundtrack stops and returns to
the beginning. This places autonomy with each individual viewer but, only those who are prepared to
give their full embodied, cognitive attention, have access to the totality of the artwork.
The project was confined to a relatively small and personal collection of artefacts, my role as a
visual artist was to bring these familial, individual and subjective documents into dialogue with a
wider audience in a public space. I drew on key, contemporary, art strategies of appropriation and
experimental film techniques and deployed ethnographic and oral history methodologies. By
experimenting with various narrative registers and mixing fact and fiction I created formations with
the potential and possibility of offering the spectator an encounter with specific spatial and temporal
spaces ‘in action.’ The art installation creates a discursive, contested, plurivocal terrain in contrast to
a fixed, entombed, homogeneous site. Individual artworks employ the tactile, the sonic, and moving
image to capture the delicate web of feelings, attitudes and values that though not always visible
radically underpin activities, memories and events documented by familial, archival processes and
which play such a critical role in both performing and maintaining identity.
Keywords: Family, Archive, Collective memory, Installation art, The voice
Dr. Margaret FITZGIBBON
Independent scholar/artist
ftzgibbonmargaret1@gmail.com
Website: www.margaretfitzgibbon.net
Notes
1 For an excellent account of the social context to this ‘second wave’ emigration from Ireland to
Britain see Liam Ryan ‘Irish Emigration to Britain Since World War II’ in Migrations: The Irish at
Home and Abroad, ed. Richard Kearney (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1990), 45–67.
2
See Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Routledge Classic, 2002), 142‐
148
3
See Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1998).
4
The Archive: Documents of Contemporary Art (2006),editor Merewether, Charles, (2006) p.17
5
Maurice Halbwachs (1877‐1945) was a French philosopher and sociologist and a student of
Henri Bergson who influenced him greatly. In On Collective Memory (1950) published after his
death he was one of the first to argue that collective memory plays a vital role in how we form
and maintain our identities and that this memory is dependent upon the "cadre" or framework
within which a group is situated in a society.
6
“The Sound of Memory” in The German Quarterly 74.4 (Fall 2001): 368‐378. Morris, Leslie, p.377
Bibliography
Bergson, Henry. Matter and Memory. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications Inc, [1886] 2004.
Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. London and New York: Routledge Classics, 2002.
Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory, trans. Jr Ditter F. J. and Ditter V. Y., New York: Harper and
Row, [1950] 1992.
Hirsch, Marianne, ed., The Familial Gaze. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999.
Kearney, Richard, ed. Migrations: The Irish at Home and Abroad. Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1990.
Merewether, Charles, ed. The Archive: Documents of Contemporary Art. Whitechapel London: The MIT
Press, 2006.
Morris, Leslie. “The Sound of Memory”. The German Quarterly 74.4 (Fall 2001): 368‐378.