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.