Category Archives: Memory

Julie Poitras Santos, flight Paths (2018)

four people walking down a street on a hill

“In Flight Paths participants were invited to walk together, considering significant moments of departure. Whether actual or metaphorical, departure – with its twin, arrival – asks us to give up something in order to find the new, but we aren’t always ready to go. Beginning our walk at the Kulturcentrum in Ronneby, we walked through the narrow streets of the oldest part of the city, making our way to the town square. In the square participants traded stories about departure and leaving.

(photo: Simone Aersoe) Created for the Kulturcentrum, Ronneby, Sweden in partnership with the AIR Blekinge.”

Credit: “Flight Paths.” Juliepoitrassantos.com, juliepoitrassantos.com/section/519153-flight%20paths.html. Accessed 1 Oct. 2023.

‌

Graeme Miller, Linked (2003-)

aerial view of a roadway

Graeme Miller, Linked (2003-)

“Commissioned by the Museum of London, Graeme Miller’s ongoing Linked project opened in July 2003 as a massive semi-permanent sound work and off-site exhibition of the contemporary collection of the Museum of London.

Stretching across from Hackney Marshes to Redbridge, the M11 Link Road was completed in 1999 after the demolition of 400 homes, including Miller’s own, amid dramatic and passionate protest. Concealed along the three-mile route, 20 new transmitters continually broadcast hidden voices, recorded testimonies and rekindled memories of those who once lived and worked where the motorway now runs evoking a cross-section of East London life. Day and night, voices and music were broadcast along the length of the route.

IN RECOVERY

Linked has endured as perhaps the largest sonic installation and sculptural entity in London for over 18 years. Since 2003 its transmitters have broadcast over a million times the voices of former residents of the 500 buildings demolished to build the M11 Link Road motorway.

Over these years some of the transmitters have been lost – to a lorry crashing into a lamppost, to accidentally being taken down by contractors, to weather, time and entropy. Amazingly many have endured and have become an almost secret layer of the landscape of East London. It is not only time to refurbish this work, but time to look at how it works in time and how public art endures or de-commissions itself. With this in mind Graeme Miller is currently looking to stage RE-Linked in 2022: the first annual 48-hour restoration of the entire network that will also include a reflective public conversation between former residents, interviewees and interviewers, sound and radio artists, eco-activists and, as ever, the wider curious walking public.

Please watch this space for developments and join us in 2022

“I found myself wishing that more of Britain was covered by such transmissions, ghosts of ravaged neighbourhoods set free to speak again.”

Libby Purves, The Times” (credit)

Carol Maurer, Walking Forward, Looking Back (2018-19)

people on the floor in a gallery

Carol Maurer, Walking Forward, Looking Back (2018-19)

“Walking forward, looking back is a practice-based project utilizing a journey through the landscape. Artist Carol Maurer walks from her ancestral home on the Eastern Shore of Maryland through Delaware to Chester County PA, collecting stories, photos, memories and objects along the route. Rediscovering histories – both true and false. ​The journey began as a way to experientially confront her responsibility as a descendant of enslavers and slowly weaves into a meditation on the time, tempos, conversations and understandings walking can make space for.” (credit)

Beverly Buchanan, Marsh Ruins (1981)

Beverly Buchanan (1940-2015)

“This text originally appeared in ART PAPERS Fall/Winter 2020, Monumental Interventions, as part of a special dossier highlighting seven artists who have fought—and continue the fight—to transform their public spaces by uncovering suppressed histories, resisting oppression, and telling formerly silenced truths. 

Beverly Buchanan’s practice referenced southern vernacular architecture to interrogate relationships between Black people, history, and the landscape. In 1981 Buchanan (1940–2015) placed a triangular formation of three sculptural mounds on the edge of the tidal marsh in Brunswick, GA. Titled Marsh Ruins, the large amorphous forms were made by layering concrete and tabby—a concrete made from lime, water, sand, oyster shells, and ash—and then staining the forms brown. This grouping is the most referenced work in the series of sculptural markers Buchanan placed in Georgia to memorialize sites of Black presence. Buchanan often explored the concept of ruination to uncover the transformative powers of distress and destruction. These markers symbolically bear witness to the 1803 mass suicide of enslaved Igbo people who collectively drowned themselves off the coast of nearby St. Simons Island. Although their exodus was forced by the traumatic capture and abuse of their bodies, their act of defiance made them free. The work remains visible to the public, though it is not clearly marked and blends in with its natural surroundings.

Tabby was used throughout the American South to construct shacks and quarters for enslaved people. This material functions as a protective shield for Marsh Ruins. Buchanan’s use of tabby, rather than such enduring materials as marble or steel, gestures to the material historically employed to construct Black people’s homes, which she revered. Vulnerable to nature and unstable marsh ground, these forms were intended to be lost to erosion. Buchanan welcomed nature to shift, fragment, and disintegrate her sculptures, knowing that, like the body, they would one day be completely obscured or forgotten. Succumbing to the earth, the materials live on in new forms. Marsh Ruins rejects the representational form of conventional monuments and memorials to speak poetically through the languages of materiality and ephemerality.” (credit)

—

There is also a 96-page book on this artwork.

Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds, Most Serene Republics (2007)

Hock E Aye VI Edgar Heap of Birds, (Cheyenne/Arapaho, 1954-)

This work was a temporary memorial for Native Americans who died in Italy as part of Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show in the late nineteenth century, and was installed at the Venice Biennale in 2007. It consisted of a series of 16 outdoor signs to remember and honor their loss, 8 outdoor signs that serve as commentary, several signs in the water-taxis encouraging repatriation of the Native people’s bodies from Europe to the U.S., as well as a large billboard at the Venice airport that stated ‘welcome to the spectacle, welcome to the show’ as a faux welcoming sign, which was visible as people walked through the airport check point. These Lakota warriors were formerly imprisoned in the U.S. and were given the choice to remain in prison, or go perform in Europe, which was not much of a choice.

Jeremy Deller, Battle of Orgreave (2001)

“In 1998 I saw an advert for an open commission for Artangel. For years I had had this idea to re-enact this confrontation that I had witnessed as a young person on TV, of striking miners being chased up a hill and pursued through a village. It has since become an iconic image of the 1984 strike – having the quality of a war scene rather than a labour dispute. I received the commission, which I couldn’t believe, because I actually didn’t think it was possible to do this. After two years’ research, the re-enactment finally happened, with about eight-hundred historical re-enactors and two-hundred former miners who had been part of the original conflict. Basically, I was asking the re-enactors to participate in the staging of a battle that occurred within living memory, alongside veterans of the campaign. I’ve always described it as digging up a corpse and giving it a proper post-mortem, or as a thousand-person crime re-enactment.” (credit)

Christine Sun Kim (LISTEN) (2016)

[CREDIT] – “A Silent Soundwalk, Noisy with Abstract Compositions” by Claire Voon via HyperAllergic

person with ipad outside

Christine Sun Kim during her sound walk (LISTEN) on October 29 (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic unless otherwise noted)

“What is the sound of arms moving? Or of rats gossiping? What about the sound of slight anticipation, or the sound of memories?

These were among the many sounds that artist Christine Sun Kim invited us to consider during “(LISTEN),” a recent soundwalk she led in the Lower East Side organized by Avant.org. We were a group of about a dozen, following her as she visited a handful of sites around the neighborhood to pause, share a personal memory of hers, and offer us an accompanying composition.

But these compositions were technically silent. Serving as audioguides of sorts, they were void of mp3 players, headsets, or other audio devices. Instead, Kim presented a series of textual prompts on an iPad, like flash cards, that described sounds ranging from those that may play immediately in our minds (the sound of a bicycle spinning) to those that are utterly abstract (the sound of an urge to punch someone). Born deaf and originally focused on painting, she has been exploring sound as a medium for nearly a decade and the various ways we may experience and understand it.

“(LISTEN)” readapts Max Neuhaus’s own soundwalk, “LISTEN,” when, 50 years ago, the musician took a small group of his friends on a sonic journey through the Lower East Side. For his iteration, Neuhaus stamped the word LISTEN on his companions’ hands and encouraged them to absorb the familiar noises of the city. As he recalls:

After a while I began to do these works as ‘Lecture Demonstrations’; the rubber stamp was the lecture and the walk the demonstration. I would ask the audience at a concert or lecture to collect outside the hall, stamp their hands and lead them through their everyday environment. Saying nothing, I would simply concentrate on listening, and start walking. At first, they would be a little embarrassed, of course, but the focus was generally contagious. The group would proceed silently, and by the time we returned to the hall many had found a new way to listen for themselves.

person with ipad outdoors

Christine Sun Kim during her sound walk (LISTEN)

“(LISTEN)” made me hyper-vigilant of surrounding sounds, but with its designated stops and paired stories,  it also brought a more focused approach to Neuhaus’s exercise. At each site, Kim animatedly relayed in American Sign Language the associated memories that her interpreter Vernon Leon spoke aloud. They ranged from her serendipitous encounter with someone who ended up writing her a recommendation for graduate school to a rage-filled bike accident outside the New Museum caused by a negligent cab driver. Outside Audio Visual Arts gallery (currently on hiatus), she recalled experiencing John Andrew’s 2009 exhibition The Now with Before and After. She could not hear its audio component, but she pressed her hands against the room’s yellow walls and through the strong vibrations, experienced the throbbing waves.

The iPad slides that followed such recollections probed our own understanding of sound: descriptions moved from the familiar to the obscure, increasingly prodding individual memories, imaginations, and sensibilities. Short but suggestive, the text pushed sound beyond an experience dependent on hearing; it may be seen or felt, as Kim made incredibly clear as she invited us so associate it with the material and texture (“the sound of pavement floor”); with moments (“the sound of condensation”); with emotional states (“the sound of uncertainty”); and with action and restraint (“the sound of not trying to smell”).

a drawing of words

Christine Sun Kim, “a map of a sound as a space” (2016) (image courtesy Avant)

Parentheses often appear in Kim’s visual works, which deal largely with text. The coupled curves appeared in “(LISTEN),” too, bookending each phrase she showed. When anchored in the space between the two lines, words and their sonic implications are visually isolated and highlighted yet are also reduced in both presence and volume. The physical pockets of the neighborhood Kim carved out on her soundwalk worked similarly, becoming temporary spaces for each of us to consider the subjectivity of experiencing sound, which extends beyond the use of just a single sense.

We ended “(LISTEN)” at a quiet creperie next to a boisterous bar, where Kim crossed out the word stamped on each of our hands. As I walked away, my ears picked up the rough grating of a trash can hobbling across park gravel; the metallic tinkling of a trotting dog’s leash nudging its collar.

(LISTEN) took place on October 29 and October 30 around the Lower East Side.”

Dakota Commemorative Walk (2002-2012)

“They walked past red barns and white picket fences, past new housing developments and plowed fields dusted with snow. They walked with blisters on their feet and with hats pulled low to ward off the winter wind. They walked to remember.

The sixth annual Dakota Commemorative Walk ends Tuesday, Nov. 13, 2012 after six days retracing the footsteps of the 1,700 Dakota women and children who were forced to march 150 miles to Fort Snelling after the U.S. Dakota War of 1862.

Some call it Minnesota’s Trail of Tears.

“This is a ceremony,” said Gwen Westerman, who teaches humanities at Minnesota State Mankato and who has walked with the group since 2004. “It’s not a protest. It’s not a re-enactment. It’s a spiritual ceremony for healing and for honoring those women and children we descend from. We remember their strength and their determination.”

The first commemorative walk was organized in 2002, and organizers have held one every two years, leading up to this year, the 150th anniversary of the original march. After the Dakota War of 1862, the Dakota men who attacked government offices and white settlements were given cursory trials. Just more than 303 were condemned, and 38 were hanged in Mankato, remembered as a notorious event in Minnesota history.

After the war, 1,700 men, women, children, elders and mixed-race noncombatants were marched to a fenced camp along the river beneath Fort Snelling. During the winter of 1862-63 hundreds died of illness and exposure. In the spring, the remaining 1,300 were taken by steamboat and trains to a semiarid reservation at Crow Creek, S.D., where many more died of starvation and illness.

“They lived through three horrific experiences,” said Chris Mato Nunpa, a retired professor at Southwest Minnesota State University, who was bundled in a black coat and who talked as he walked along the shoulder of the road.

“They lived through this forced march, through the concentration camp, and through the forcible removal from Minnesota.”

He called their ordeal a genocide.

This year’s walkers set out just after dawn Wednesday from the parking lot of the Lower Sioux Agency in Morton, in the Minnesota River Valley. By Monday afternoon, the group had passed through the town of Jordan after covering about 20 miles a day. They walked on the shoulder of Scott County Hwy. 17, followed by a caravan of cars and vans carrying friends, supporters and elders too frail to make the journey on foot. Some people walk all six days; others join for a few days or even a few hours.

Each day, the procession is led by a woman carrying a sacred pipe wrapped in a blanket, surrounded by a quiet group. Farther back, people chat. The walkers stop and place a marker about every mile and honor two ancestors from the march.

At one stop Monday, a woman cleared weeds growing at the base of a tall electrical pole. She pounded a stake into the ground, topped with red and yellow ribbons. Someone called the names on the ribbon into the chilly wind: “Alek Graham. Maline Mumford.”

Then one by one, people went forward, took a pinch of tobacco from a leather pouch and sprinkled it over the stake.

“The name is not just a name. When we call their name, they come,” explained Nick Anderson, cultural chairperson for the Mendota Mdewakanton Dakota Community. “They are here with us.”

He said he walked as a way to thank his ancestors, one of whom was a sister of Chief Little Crow.

“When I think of what they had to endure, I don’t know if we can ever give enough thanks,” he said. “We survived, but we have lost a lot of our culture. Participating in this is a way for me to get some of that back.”

Other people came long distances to walk.

“The reason I’m here is because my great grandmother was on this march with her four kids and her mother,” said Reuben Kitto, who flew in for the march from Florida, where he spent 30 years working for Honeywell. Kitto spent his childhood on the Santee Sioux Reservation in Nebraska where many Minnesota Dakota were sent.

“This walk brings us back to the reality of how hard it was for them,” Kitto said. “The weather was a lot like this, there was a little bit of snow.”

“It’s a way for me to spend a day with my grandmother,” he said.

It’s also a way for him to spend time with his living family. His nephew Robert Thomas drove up from Winona to join the march for a day. Thomas is working on a commissioned play about the Dakota war and exile for the Minnesota History Theater and is concerned with helping both Dakota and non-Dakota remember the Dakota’s past.

“The old aunties and uncles are still passing down the stories,” he said. “The struggle is to get the younger generation interested.”

Kitto’s daughter, Ramona Kitto Stately of Shakopee, also was on the march, bundled in a long red coat and walking next to her father. Stately coordinates Indian education for the Osseo Area Schools and this year, as in past years, brought several students along on the walk.

As the sun started to dip low, she and others arrived at the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community center, where they would eat dinner together and reflect on that day’s walk.

“We carry a deep grief inside and if we don’t connect with that grief, we can’t heal,” Stately said.” [credit]

 

Stuart McAdam, Lines Lost (2013-14)

“A project tracing the routes of branch lines that were cut following the Beeching Report in 1963

Stuart McAdam came to Huntly in Summer 2013 from Glasgow.

Stuart’s Lines Lost project was triggered by the infamous railway cuts which saw train tracks closed as a result of Dr Richard Beeching’s recommendations 50 years ago. Through a series of performative walks with all kinds of people along the former Portsoy to Huntly route, McAdam’s aim was to bring into focus the historic and contemporary concerns surrounding our transport legacy.

Through walking the former track again and again, people have seen him reawaken the route that has been subsumed into the landscape – like remains of ghostly traces of the line that once linked communities. Linking natural with industrial and social history of the past 50 years he interrogated the historical, cultural and contemporary resonances through a series of documented walks.

The North of Scotland was one of the areas most affected by the Beeching cuts with local stopping train routes such as Aberdeen – Inverurie, Aberdeen – Keith – Elgin, Huntly to Banff and Portsoy, Banff – Tillynaught, Fraserburgh – St Combs, Elgin – Lossiemouth, Aberdeen – Ballater and Fraserburgh, Maud – Peterhead and Aviemore – Elgin via Inverness, cut. Many of those that crossed the county have never been replaced by other forms of public transport making journeys difficult and adding hours to travel time for those not having access to private cars – passengers have to travel south to Aberdeen or north to Elgin to get connections often having long waits between buses.  McAdam repeatedly walked the route from Huntly to Portsoy, experiencing it through different eyes every time.

“Physical and transparent remnants of most of the lines still exist within the landscape and I hope to reawaken them in the public consciousness”, said McAdam, who has explored journeys, boundaries and slow travel in a range of artworks.

“As we mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of the Beeching report is also fitting time to consider the impact that the cuts had on the relative development and decline of the many towns and villages that lay along the historic routes, routes that were often life lines for outlying communities.”

McAdam was at the Edinburgh Art Festival the 1st of August. For more information go to the event page.

Stuart also participated in the Room to Roam Festival” [credit]

Rozalinda Borcila, Center for Getting Ugly – Kara Holland’s Walk to the Beach (2006)

“In a city built around the logic of automobility, a small group documents several attempts to walk to Tampa’s last remaining public beach. We rely on instructions from passers-by who struggle to conform their mental map of the city to the possibilities of walking.” [credit]

From the original invite: ”

Kara Holland invites participants on a walk from the Westshore Palms neighborhood to the beach located directly west, less than 1 mile away. This public beach is one of the last few remaining in the city of Tampa. We will try to get to the beach on foot, navigating terrain that, not unlike much of the city, is hostile to walking. The walk will explore the ways in which otherwise “benign” structures (a corporate park, a mall, the highway and so forth) are aggressive to bodies not trapped in cars and effectively colonize public space. Participants will pause to mark especially hostile boundaries, using materials found on site. We will share a picnic upon arriving at the beach, or wherever we can no longer travel on foot. Recording devices for documenting the walk are welcome and encouraged (cell phone, cell phone camera, digital camera, video camera, audio recorder, etc). This walk is a collaboration with The Center For Getting Ugly as part of the “Walk, Talk, Eat, Talk Some More” project.

Date: April 15, 4:30 pm
Meeting place: Kara’s apartment, 4601 Gray St. Tampa FL, 33609
Duration: 2 hours (??)” [credit]

“Center for Getting Ugly – dedicated to the research, practice and sustained experimentation with conflict as essential political activity. the Center seeks to develop individual and collective capabilities for the production of radical politics. must embrace conflict as an essential, productive aspect of collaboration. must be perpetually dissatisfied with, and suspicious of, existing aesthetic or semantic strategies.

…

The Center for Getting Ugly is dedicated to the research, practice and sustained experimentation of social conflict, with the goal of encephalizing collective organs and social technologies for the production of radical politics. In other words, the Center operates on the premise that, given sufficient practice, we can develop collective revolutionary organs. The Center is not a group, a project or a place, but an open infrastructure. Its various subdivisions target specific practices or arenas for the production of critical deviance, with collective activity as its main underlying principle.

The Center for Getting Ugly launches invitations, provocations. it facilitates collaboration between multiple practitioners. it imagines, invents and sometimes even deploys probing devices. currently, its subdivisions are:

Can’t we all just get along? Counter-Cartographies of Playing Nice – invited or self-appointed Special Fellows conduct research on dominant modes of subjectivation in various concrete situations. though not all maps take the form of two dimensional representations, the desire is to produce interpretive works which may be used to incite, illuminate or facilitate intervention.

Walking and not Walking – develops extended skill-sharing, experimental workshops specifically focused on walking practices – and, given the ways in which mobility is structured around consumption and other forms of subjectivation, on practices of not walking: standing, stopping, pausing, staying and occasionally lying down.

A Synchronized Swimming – Different collectives are invited to design an un-resolvable conflict equation based on their own, unique working methods. These equations are passed on to another collective, who develop interpretive extensions/models for the sustension of conflict. A Synchronized Swimming then dives into the Pool: an exhibition/symposium/forum for incorporating these models into action.”

SOURCES: