The practice of aestheticising the memories of others

The presentation discusses the development the interpretive strategies adopted across two digital video projects, both of which explore the relationship that exists between private memory and public space. While Monument 1 Well I Never..? is largely concerned with the mapping of individual memory experiences in a small urban environment, Monument 2 will borrow from the essay film. Rather than focusing on the mapping of individual memories, Monument 2 will investigate locations and places that hold a multitude of memories. Thus, it engages with the building of an urban memory monument, and attempts to render visible Doreen Massey's conceptualization of place: If space is rather a simultaneity of stories-so-far, the places are collections of those stories, articulations of the wider power-geometries of space. Their character will be a product of these intersections within that wider setting, and of what is made of them. And, too, the non-meetings-up, the disconnections and the relations not established, the exclusions. All this contributes to the specificity of place. (Massey 2005:130) For the artist as translator this means that there is a necessity to join up and link into “the collection of interwoven stories of which that place is made” (Massey 2005). Such linking and joining up allows the artist to explore more fully the potential of artist as translator who can renew, rewrite, challenge and innovate film form as well as constructions of identity and community. Screening examples of Monument 1 the paper argues how this practice as research project continues to pursue the aims of Monument 1 in making visible a community's subjective reality, and at the same time explore conceptual approaches to space and place.