The Amnesia Forums
Tuesday 6th November, 12-4pm
University of Glasgow, Turnbull Hall, Chaplaincy Centre, Southpark Terrace
(Attendance is by invitation only. Please contact Andrew.Hoskins@glasgow.ac.uk for details.)
An interdisciplinary forum for artists, scientists, geographers, historians, writers and researchers to explore key directions and debates surrounding current scientific insight into amnesia, and contemporary discourse around the themes of individual and cultural amnesia, location, spatial politics and identity.
- How do individual and cultural amnesia transform the evolving social, cultural and historical landscape that we inhabit?
- Can amnesia be considered as a form of latency, which continues to have a powerful affect on societal perception and experience of the world?
- Does the monumentalising effect of exhaustive processes of gathering, examining and archiving materials and evidence in relation to conflicted historical events conversely precipitate a form of cultural amnesia?
Participants are invited to respond to the questions presented using a photograph, writing, music, image, film clip or other material of their choice.
Artist Shona Illingworth will present two key projects currently in development:
St Kilda (untitled)
Developed in dialogue with cognitive neuro-psychologists Professor Martin A. Conway and Dr Catherine Loveday. Supported by the Wellcome Trust.
The historical lesions in the physical and cultural landscape of St Kilda provide an extraordinary physical and metaphorical context within which to explore the self-experience of broken memory and dense cultural retrograde amnesia. By creating a multi-layered interplay between Claire, (a woman who has dense retrograde and anterograde amnesia, and prosopagnosia) and St Kilda, this project sets out to explore powerful synergies between the complex space of the mind, and that of the outside world, and in turn, examine the profound implications amnesia and cultural erasure have on the social, geopolitical and cultural topologies that inform contemporary constructions of identity, place and location.
216 Westbound (working title)
Developed with John Tulloch, Professor in Media Studies and an expert in the study of Risk, and ASRF Visiting Senior Research Fellow in dialogue with Professor Martin A. Conway and Professor Andrew Hoskins.
In exploring the multiplicity of forces at play, the film sets out to challenge the ‘monumentalising’ effect of the media coverage and subsequent public enquiry into the 7/7 London Bombings, by countering the public enquiry’s exhaustive process of gathering, examining and archiving materials and evidence in relation to the event as a form of closure, to reanimate questions about the evolving conflicts and fallible processes of individual and collective memory in relation to major historical events.
Dr Issie MacPhail will present a discussion paper titled:
Who Has A Keeping On These Things?: Speech Acts By Claire, Kilda and The Ceardannan
A presentation by Issie MacPhail about her work in progress deriving from her on-going collaboration with artist Shona Illingworth on the topic of memory and forgetting. This intervention explores issues of power, powerlessness and memory elucidated through the interfaces of written and oral testimony and their traces. This work explores the ways in which ‘movement’ in accounts of Highland and island histories is generally construed as a trajectory of ‘loss’ and counterposes this thought habit with instances of creative and creating movements. These thoughts and paths are indicated through consideration of the ways in which writing, and the power to write and be read, can erase the presence of non-writing subjects and the traces they have gifted to others. The conceptual aspects of this work are informed by Ingold’s considerations of transitive and intransitive aspects of wayfaring and literatures around the implications of dendritic connections. Murdo MacDonald’s discussion of ‘systemic ignorance’ and the positioning of certain artforms and their creators as ‘out of history’ is used to critically interrogate these strands in the light provided by attempted Spivakian ‘speech acts’ by Shona’s research subject Claire, St Kilda and St Kildans and Sutherland’s travelling people with whom Issie works – The Summer Walkers or ‘ceardannan’.
This work was carried out as part of Issie MacPhail’s Wingate Scholarship, September 2011 to March 2013. Dr Issie MacPhail is an Honorary Research Fellow at The School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow; a part-time lecturer at The University of the Highlands and Islands Centre for History; runs ARC (Assynt Research & Consultancy) and carries out contract work and voluntary research for Mackay Country Community Trust Ltd and similar grass-roots community groups in the Highlands and Islands.