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TO MATAU MIHI MAIOHA KI A KOE, NGA RANGATIRA, ME NGA HONONGA MAI I TE AO WHANUI. HE MIHI AROHA, MAIOHA KI A KOUTOU KATOA!We acknowledge you, all dignitaries, orators and the many affiliations from around the world. This is a greeting to you all.

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Eric F. SpinaVice Chancellor and ProvostSyracuse University United States of America

Steve MahareyVice-Chancellor Massey UniversityNew Zealand

On behalf of Syracuse University, I am pleased to welcome you to the 2010 Contained Memory Conference. We are honored to partner with Massey University and the Museum of New Zealand in crafting this important international scholarly exchange, and we are grateful to our hosts for their many efforts to ensure a successful conference. Remembering together is a powerful activity. Memories of triumphs and of tragedies shape our identities and guide the ways we engage the world around us. Over the past decade, faculty members at Syracuse University have been exploring the ways that we shape our memories and the ways these memories shape us. The study of public memory at Syracuse has taken on a decidedly interdisciplinary tone. The ‘Public Memory Project’ has attracted faculty from across campus including rhetorical studies, art and design, geography, philosophy, political science and religion, among other areas. It is heartening that the Contained Memory Conference also embraces this interdisciplinary tone with scholars not only from around the world but from across the academy joining together in this conversation. The study of public remembrance is not, however, a purely academic endeavor. Memories are powerful aspects of our cultural identity and so any intervention into public memories also involves an active engagement with the world. Syracuse University’s mission of ‘Scholarship in Action’ has helped to foster the study of public memory on our campus and the same spirit of engagement and cross-sector collaboration is evident in the abstracts of the participants at this conference. On behalf of Syracuse University, we want to thank the organizing committee and welcome you to the Contained Memory Conference.

Massey University is delighted to join with Syracuse University and the Museum of New Zealand to host the 2010 Contained Memory Conference.

A wise person once said that the greatest gift any of us can give children is the gift of great memories. This is true for all of us. Our memories define who we are and lay the foundation for our next step in life. As a University that has actively sought to define the shape of New Zealand society while taking the best of New Zealand to the world, memory is central to everything we do. In all areas of academic endeavour, whether it be science, education, business, creative arts, humanities or social science, we seek to understand what it means to be a New Zealander and then, through teaching, research and engagement with the wider community, we push the boundaries forward in creative and innovative ways. In doing so we hope to create new understandings – new memories.

But all memories are not created equal. We understand that the process of creating memory takes place in the context of struggle, conflict and renegotiation amongst the diversity of social groupings that make up a society. There is no such thing as a memory; rather there are memories that contest with each other. This is certainly the case in New Zealand where our understanding of ourselves melts just as we think it has been secured. We are a young nation still deciding who will feature in whatever memories we retain.

Massey welcomes the Contained Memory Conference as an opportunity for academics from many disciplines to talk across boundaries and foster new partnerships. It is our view that through interdisciplinary work greater insight into the issues we face as societies is likely. On behalf of Massey University, I wish all conference participants an enjoyable and productive time together.

WELCOME

Michael Houlihan Chief Executive OfficerMuseum of Te Papa Tongarewa New Zealand

The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa is privileged to be working in international partnership with Massey University and Syracuse University to bring together this year’s Contained Memory Conference.

The recent opening, here at Te Papa, of the Slice of Heaven exhibition, exploring the twentieth century story of Aotearoa, highlighted for me one of the intriguing challenges facing today’s museums. Do we express the authoritative, historical narrative of people and nation or do we serve a more ambiguous role as arenas where cultural memory is reaffirmed and represented? Many of us working in museums increasingly find ourselves tip-toeing across a fragile, and sometimes melting, cultural surface. There can be no doubt that our communities perceive us as appropriate and prestigious places of memory. Whilst historians can sometimes be careless in their interest of how societies remember through oral tradition, icons, monuments and ritual this is truly the realm of the museum; this is our stock in trade; this is where we connect to people. But, there is danger. A sense of the past transmitted through memory is not easily disproved by history; and therefore can undermine the conventional historical process. On the one hand, history is the reconstruction, usually incomplete, of what is no longer; but memory is organic and alive within the minds of living societies and, frequently, in permanent, subjective evolution. For communities, as for individuals, there can be no sense of identity without remembering. However, the selection of what is remembered will be determined by the group to which we belong; this in turn sets limits to the perceptions and aspirations of the next generation and, just maybe, to our museums.

Welcome to the Conference and I hope that you will also have time for a memorable visit to Slice of Heaven.

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KEYNOTE SPEAKERS AND PANELS

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Welcome

Keynote Speakers and Panels

Programme at a Glance

Abstracts: Friday Session 1

Abstracts: Friday Session 2

Abstracts: Saturday Session 3

Abstracts: Saturday Session 4

Navigation

Credits

CONTENTS

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James E. YoungThe Stages of Memory in Berlin and New York

What have monuments and memory to do with each other? “Every period has the impulse to create symbols in the form of monuments,” Sigmund Giedion has written, “which according to the Latin meaning are ‘things that remind,’ things to be transmitted to later generations. This demand for monumentality cannot, in the long run, be suppressed. It will find an outlet at all costs” (Giedion, 1958, p. 28). This is still true, I believe, which leads me to ask just what these outlets and their costs are today. Indeed, the forms this demand for the monumental now takes, and to what self-abnegating ends, throw the presumptive link between monuments and memory into fascinating relief.

In this meditation on the “stages of memory” in Berlin and New York, I trace the conceptual arc of two memorial processes – the Denkmal to Europe’s Murdered Jews and the 9/11 Memorial at Ground Zero in New York City in – order to explore the ways both the monument and our approach to it have evolved over the course of the 20th century. Here I look at the ways the monument itself has been reformulated in its function as memorial, forced to confront its own limitations as a contemporary aesthetic response to recent past events such as the September 11th attacks and more distant past events such as the Holocaust. In this somewhat contrary approach to the monument, I try to show what monuments do by what they cannot do. Here I examine how the need for a unified vision of the past as found in the traditional monument necessarily collides with the modern conviction that neither the past nor its meanings are ever just one thing. And then with these thoughts in mind, I would like to share with you the conceptual foundations for a World Trade Center memorial that I kept in mind during my time on the jury that finally chose Michael Arad and Peter Walker’s design for the World Trade Center Site Memorial at “ground zero” in New York City in 2004.

James E. Young Professor of English and Judaic Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he has taught since 1988, and currently Chair of the Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies.

Professor Young is the author of Writing and rewriting the Holocaust (1988), The texture of memory (1993), which won the National Jewish Book Award in 1994, and At memory’s edge: After-images of the Holocaust in contemporary art and architecture (2000). He was also the Guest Curator of an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York City, entitled The art of memory: Holocaust memorials in history (March – August 1994, with venues in Berlin and Munich, September 1994 – June 1995) and was the editor of The art of memory (1994), the exhibition catalogue for this show.

In 1997, James E. Young was appointed by the Berlin Senate to the five-member Findungskommission for Germany’s national “Memorial to Europe’s Murdered Jews,” which selected Peter Eisenman’s design, finished and dedicated in May 2005. He has also consulted with Argentina’s government on its memorial to the desaparacidos, as well as with numerous city agencies on their memorials and museums. Most recently, he was appointed by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation to the jury for the World Trade Center Site Memorial competition, won by Michael Arad and Peter Walker, and now under construction.

In 2000, he was appointed as Editor-in-Chief of the Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, a ten-volume anthology of primary sources, documents, texts, and images, forthcoming with Yale University Press. At present, he is completing an insider’s story of the World Trade Center Memorial, entitled The stages of memory at Ground Zero: A juror’s report on the World Trade Center Site Memorial.

KEYNOTE SPEAKER

…THE NEED FOR A UNIFIED VISION OF THE PAST AS FOUND IN THE TRADITIONAL MONUMENT NECESSARILY COLLIDES WITH THE MODERN CONVICTION THAT NEITHER THE PAST NOR ITS MEANINGS ARE EVER JUST ONE THING.”

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Biographies Anne DemoAssistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies and the School of Art and Design at Syracuse University. Professor Demo’s work explores the relationship between rhetoric, identity, and US cultural politics through two primary research concentrations. Her primary area of research has focused on the visual rhetoric of contemporary immigration policy and politics. A past recipient of the National Communication Association’s Golden Monograph award, Demo is co-editing, Sighting memory: Rhetoric, remembrance, and visual form with Bradford James Vivian. She has published articles in Quarterly journal of speech, Critical studies in media communication, Rhetoric & public affairs, Environmental history, and Women’s studies in communication.

Amos KieweChair of Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University. He is coauthor of a previous publication by Texas A&M University Press, FDR’s body politics: The rhetoric of disability (2003), as well as three other books and a number of articles and book chapters on presidential rhetoric. His PhD is from Ohio University.

Roger HallasAssociate Professor of English at Syracuse University. He is the author of Reframing bodies: AIDS, bearing witness and the queer moving image (Duke University Press 2009) and co-editor of The image and the witness: Trauma, memory and visual culture (Wallflower Press, 2007). He has also published in Camera obscura, GLQ, Canadian journal of film studies, Millennium film journal, The scholar and the feminist and afterimage.

Kendall Phillips(For biographical details see page 21)

Syracuse Public Memory Project and BeyondAnne Demo (Chair, Syracuse), Amos Kiewe, Roger Hallas, Kendall Phillips (Chair, Wellington)

Amos KieweUnsolved Civil Rights Murders: A Public Memory Project

Some fifty years after the last gasp of the Civil Rights struggle culminated in dozens of related murders, scholars and activists began re-opening unsolved related murders. Though the initial purpose in opening these unsolved Civil Rights era murders was to bring culprits to justice, the legal and other difficulties made it clear that solving these cases was not likely but that telling the stories of these murders would be a more productive endeavour. The successful efforts of one individual – Keith Beauchamp – in documenting the murder of Emmett Louis Till would bring the Justice Department to reopen cold Civil Rights cases. Yet, the enormity of the task – researching and documenting more than a hundred cases brought activists and documentarians like Keith Beauchamp to partner with academic institutions. Syracuse University entered this project primarily for realizing this project’s public memory potential. The Public Memory project was already an established entity and faculty-scholars were on hand to shape this project into one that would tell the story of individual Civil Rights murders by turning them into public memory documentation. Over a three year period, some fifty or so cases had been studied and documented, leaving to others a narrative of documentation and visuals that collectively put single murders in the larger context of the Civil Rights movement, the story of individual events, people and turmoil.

Roger HallasQueering Robben Island: Anachronism and Public Memory in PROTEUS

Robben Island is one of the most politically charged sites in South Africa. Although it has a long history of imprisonment dating back to the 18th century, its contemporary significance stems from the period 1961-1991 when it held apartheid’s most important political prisoners. Today a memorial site, Robben Island bears a dual representational burden as both site of brutal colonial subjugation and liberating political resistance. This paper examines how John Greyson and Jack Lewis’s 2003 film PROTEUS reframes this historical legacy through the queer optic of an obscure archival record from 1735. Set on the Dutch Cape Colony in the early 18th Century and based on an actual trial, PROTEUS explores the ten-year relationship between two convicts on Robben Island – a Dutch sailor, Rijkhaart Jacobsz, and a Khoi herder, Claas Blank – who are tried, convicted, and executed for “mutually perpetrated” sodomy in 1735. Lewis and Greyson became fascinated by the central question raised by the archival record: what kind of a relationship did the men have and how did they perceive it? This question of how to name structures the film in both formal and thematic ways, including its complex use of historical anachronisms from 1960s South Africa (court stenographers with beehive hairdos, jeeps, radios, wetbag torture). This incongruous narrative strategy emphasizes how history comes to us only through explicit acts of interpretation and translation, and more specifically, urges us to read the 18th century narrative of sexual oppression in relation to the political struggle against apartheid.

LIVE WEB PANEL DISCUSSION

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Dame Claudia Orange DNZM OBEThe Memory of a Nation

In every country a sense of belonging to the place, to its people and to its future is in some way related to memory. We sometimes refer to it as having a sense of national identity. Shared experiences are often the primary reason for shared memories. But over a person’s lifetime, memory can fade; and over a span of history in any country, each generation will have different memories.

To develop or encourage a sense of belonging, a nation depends on a range of memory stimulators that governments usually support: institutions that hold archival records, those who engage in preservation of various kinds such as museums, those who develop major repositories of knowledge such as libraries. Outside of government assistance there are those individuals who research the public and private record to make sense of the past by publishing analyses of various kinds. Historians have played a significant role in such analysis, exploring the past to better understand the present, and hoping that their work might play a part in shaping the future. Sometimes it does.

New Zealand’s recent published memory has included works that dealt with indigenous rights and national identity. This lecture deals with some of these works – with The Treaty of Waitangi and the multi-volume, bi-lingual Dictionary of New Zealand biography. They helped create an awareness of the multiple narratives of the nation’s memory, and this found greater expression in museums in the 1990s, and especially in the national museum, Te Papa, opened in 1998. Over recent decades, something of a revolution in public understanding of the country’s history and heritage has occurred through this capture of public memory.

BiographyDame Claudia Orange is Collections and Research Group Director at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. She leads the museum’s research and is responsible for the curatorial and collection management

functions in the main collections areas – Art (including photography), History, Pacific Cultures, Matauranga Māori and Natural Environment. As one of five Directors on the museum’s Leadership Team, she contributes to Te Papa’s vision and direction across the breadth of the museum’s diverse activities and outreach.

Dame Claudia previously held the position of Te Papa’s Director of History and Pacific Cultures for five years. Prior to coming to Te Papa she was General Editor of the multi-volume government project Dictionary of New Zealand biography (1990-2003). She had been inaugural staff from 1985, with special responsibility for securing well-researched biographies on women and Māori, the latter being translated and published in five Māori-language volumes as Ngā tāngata taumata rau. She also served as Chief Historian at the Department of Internal Affairs (1997-2000), leading a team that researched and produced histories of government departments.

She is the recipient of significant honours and awards – the OBE in 1993, the University of Auckland’s Distinguished Alumni Award in 1997, and in 2009 the Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit with the title Dame. She has published widely in New Zealand history, on race relations and on the Treaty of Waitangi, her first book, The Treaty of Waitangi (1987), winning Goodman Fielder Wattie Book of the Year award. Her most recent publication is An illustrated history of the Treaty of Waitangi (2004). Over many years she has worked with Television companies on key New Zealand content, including Frontier of dreams and Lost in translation, and has been involved as curator or subject expert in several Te Papa exhibitions, including Treaty 2 U, which twice toured New Zealand and Auckland secondary schools, and sits in Te Papa above Signs of a Nation.

KEYNOTE SPEAKER

TO DEVELOP OR ENCOURAGE A SENSE OF BELONGING, A NATION DEPENDS ON A RANGE OF MEMORY STIMULATORS THAT GOVERNMENTS USUALLY SUPPORT….”

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Humberto VélezHumberto Vélez’s work actively explores the possibilities of working in collaboration with different groups (artists and handcrafters, special communities, athletes, musicians and groups conformed especially for the project), in different places and cultures. The artistic projects are conceived from what he calls ‘the ability to create aesthetics’ of, for, and with these groups, according to their different lifestyles, thereby managing different concepts and expressions of popular culture, power, and ethics. The human relations on which Vélez constructs his creative processes are as important as the final project. In his work, as it was described by curator Gerardo Mosquera, “the community should be an active agent” at the same time as his art also “interweaves personal memories, dreams, visions, and the determination of pretending to invent new worlds”. For this, the artist works with diverse media, ranging from the popular to the high-tech, from the traditional to the contemporary.

Humberto Vélez studied law and political sciences in the University of Panama and was awarded a scholarship from The Foundation of Latin American Cinema for studying Filmmaking and TV in the International School of Cinema of San Antonio de Los Baños, Cuba, funded by Gabriel García Márquez.

He has been an artist in residence in Vienna (Ministry of Foreigner Affairs, 1998), London (Triangle Arts Trust-Gasworks, 2001), Sheffield (Yorkshire ArtSpace, 2007) and Toronto (York Gallery University, 2009). In 2010 he was invited to be artist in residence at METAL Art Foundation in London Southend.

Born in Panama in 1965, Humberto Vélez lives and works between London and Rio de Janeiro as an artist, art teacher, independent filmmaker, and a culture and arts projects producer. His present art projects include: an invitation to create public art projects in 2010

for the Pompidou Centre; for the V Congress of the Spanish Language in Valparaiso, Chile ; and for the York University Gallery in Toronto. He has been commissioned for the DAROS-Latinamerica Foundation to create a performance for the opening of CASA DAROS, a new art centre for Latin American arts in Rio de Janeiro in 2011.

Selected solo exhibitions

2008 Bodydream, bodybuilding performance and competition at the Centro de Arte La Regenta in Las Palmas de Gran Canarias, Canarias.2007 The Fight, boxing performance in collaboration with boxing clubs from south London, TATE Modern.2006 The Skyline, Kite Performance and Land Art Project, Egilsstadir, Iceland. 2005 Regata Cantata, In association with Artwayofthinking, parade and regata, Venice. Artists United, Hip Hop Dance Football Match, Sheffield, Yorkshire Artspace.2004 The Mancunian Way, Hip Hop Parade and concert at Victoria Baths, Manchester.2002 L’ Avventura, piñata sculpture-installation in St Peter’s Church in Vauxhall, London.2000 Instalaciones, Mixed media, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Panama.1998 Traumland/ La tierra soñada/Dreamland, Video and CD-Rom, Cafe Savoy, Fellowship from The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Vienna.

Humberto’s work has been exhibited in many international biennial, group exhibitions, and film and video festivals including in: Belize, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, China, Cuba, Ecuador, France, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Puerto Rico, Rumania, Spain, United Kingdom, United States, and now, New Zealand.

BiographiesDr Hans-Michael HerzogSince 2000 Dr Herzog has been the Director and Curator of the Daros Latinamerica Collection based in Zürich, Switerland. From 2005 to 2009 he was the Artistic Director of the Daros Classical Collection, also based in Zürich. He is currently the Funding Director of the future Casa Daros in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Hans-Michael Herzog is an acknowledged international expert on contemporary art, particularly from Latin America.

Born in 1956, he studied art history, philosophy, and classical archaeology at the University of Bonn, and was awarded his PhD in 1984 with a focus on Venetian Proto-Renaissance Sculpture. From 1987 until 1989, Hans-Michael Herzog worked for the Bayerische Staatsgemāldesammlungen, München. Between 1989 and 1999 he was Curator of the Kunsthalle Bielefeld. Critical writer on art and architecture, Dr Herzog has been responsible for numerous exhibitions and publications, largely on international contemporary art. These include: Manolo Millares (1992), Sean Scully: The Catherine paintings (1995), Langlands & Bell (1995), Jonathan Lasker: Paintings, 1977-1997 (1997-1998), Ronald Bladen Sculpture (1998), La Mirada – Looking at photography in Latin America today (2002-2003), Cantos cuentos Colombianos contemporary Columbian art (2004-2005), Le parc lumière: Kinetic works by Julio Le Parc (2005), The hours: Visual arts of contemporary Latin America (2005-2006), Guillermo Kuitca (2006), Face to face (2007-2008). He has also been a lecturer at various German universities.

Hans-Michael Herzog’s involvement in the conference will include participating in a plenary discussion with the conference’s featured artist, Humberto Vélez.

Latin America has unquestionably been one of the most fascinating and richly productive world regions in terms of modern and contemporary art and culture. From pathbreaking modernist abstraction and photography to the multimedia and mixed genre works of today, innovation and intellectual breadth has characterized its visual arts production. A region traversed by diverse populations and divergent cultural beliefs, the very definition and reception of the term “Latin American Art” is highly problematic and often all too reductive. Despite this, one could also state that this very diversity is one of the key attributes making the increasing commentary upon and exhibition of contemporary Latin American artists so significant and timely. Certainly the works made by artists of the region contend with issues that are global in scope and shared by many international artists to varying degrees. Questions that arise from even an initial investigation might include: What is particular about the expression of memory within the broader context of Latin American art? What are some of the specific issues relating to art made in the Postcolonial era? How have the varied political contexts deeply affected art made by Latin American artists? Is there a shared sense of identity in terms of the region and its place in the world? What are the challenges of working in a region too often marginalized in the context of traditionally US- and Euro-centric art histories? What about the situation of artists who more frequently work and live far from their places of origin? How does making art to be viewed in the international context for a global audience change expectations and intentions of the artist and curator?

Unreliable Thoughts: The Use of Memory in Recent Latin American ArtHumberto Vélez, Hans-Michael Herzog,David Cross (Chair)

PLENARY SESSION

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Professor Sir Mason Durie KNZM CNZMAotearoa New Zealand: Indigenous Memories, Colonial Legacies and the Evolution of Nationhood

Amazingly, despite different starting points, conflicting philosophies, divergent pathways, and misunderstood traditions, Aotearoa New Zealand is evolving into a nation state where indigenous memories and colonial legacies are jointly shaping the nation’s future. Not only do the markers of nationhood reflect two sets of symbols, but society itself is cautiously weaving a fabric within which future prospects can be embroidered with the threads from two memory banks and two world views.

BiographyDistinguished Māori academic, Professor Sir Mason Durie is the inaugural Assistant Vice- Chancellor (Māori & Pasifika) and Professor of Māori Research and Development at Massey University. He is a leading contributor to national debates on a range of social policy issues, and has published widely, including four books and many journal articles on health policy, Māori mental health, and indigenous development including: Nga tai matatu, tides of Māori endurance (2005), Ngā kāhui pou: Launching Māori futures (2003), Mauri ora the dynamics of Māori health (2001),Te mana te kawanatanga the politics of Māori self determination (1998), Whaiora Māori health development (2nd Edition, 1998).

He is the recipient of significant honours, fellowships, and awards including: Hon LLD (University of Otago 2008), Mark Sheldon Award (Royal Australian & New Zealand College of Psychiatrists 2008), FNZAH (New Zealand Academy of the Humanities 2007), Wunderley Medal (Thoracic Society of Australia and New Zealand 2007), Public Health Champion 2003 (Public Health Association of NZ), Te ORA Mairere Goodall Award for Māori and Polynesian Health (Māori Medical Practitioners Association 2003), DLit (Massey University 2002), FRSNZ (1994), QE II Commemorative Medal (for services to Māori, 1990). From 1986 –1988 Sir Mason was a Commissioner on the Royal Commission on Social Policy. In 2001 he was awarded Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit and in 2010, Knight Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit.

KEYNOTE SPEAKER

… AOTEAROA NEW ZEALAND IS EVOLVING INTO A NATION STATE WHERE INDIGENOUS MEMORIES AND COLONIAL LEGACIES ARE JOINTLY SHAPING THE NATION’S FUTURE.”

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Paul BroksBetween a Thing and a Thought: The Neuropsychology of Selfhood

Neuropsychology is coming of age. Traditional ‘lesion studies’ – the painstaking method of observing the effects of localised brain damage on behaviour – have combined with ever more sophisticated brain imaging technologies allowing direct observation, and manipulation, of the living, working brain. We are now building maps of the brain’s functional architecture – the structures and circuits underlying perception, emotion, language, memory and voluntary action – that, in scope and detail, could scarcely have been imagined 50 years ago.

And yet, it seems to me, something fundamental is missing from the scene. Where is the ‘person’? Where is the ‘self’? How do the various systems and subsystems of mentality (perception, memory, emotion, etc.) collude in the construction and maintenance of the conscious, introspective, unified and continuous sense of individual identity that we take as the bedrock norm of human experience? Until very recently such questions were simply not on the scientific agenda. They are now, and as this century unfolds the neuropsychology of personhood is going to stir up questions of profound concern not merely for neuroscience but for society at large. In this presentation I offer my own, sometimes very personal, reflections on the neuropsychology of selfhood from the perspective of a scientist-practitioner working in the field of clinical neuropsychology, but one who also has lately spent as much time exploring questions of memory and identity through theatre and film. The talk will incorporate excerpts of recent film work.

BiographyPaul Broks is a clinical neuropsychologist, author and dramatist, based at the University of Plymouth. He combined research and clinical practice for a number of years before gaining recognition as a writer. His

first book, Into the silent land (2003) mixed neurological case stories, fiction and memoir in an extended meditation on selfhood and the brain. Shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, it has been translated into 13 languages to date. A second book,The laws of magic, exploring memory and imagination, is forthcoming.

Paul’s theatre work includes two plays,On ego and On emotion (co-written with the writer/ director Mick Gordon) and Seized, a new play commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company which examines the neuropsychology of belief. He wrote and narrated Martino unstrung, a documentary film about the jazz guitar virtuoso, Pat Martino (Dir. Ian Knox; Sixteen Films, 2008) and is currently working with the acclaimed film director, Hugh Hudson, on a documentary about brain injury. Paul is a regular contributor to the British current affairs magazine, Prospect, and writes a column for The Times.

KEYNOTE SPEAKER

HOW DO THE VARIOUS SYSTEMS AND SUB SYSTEMS OF MENTALITY (PERCEPTION, MEMORY, EMOTION, ETC.) COLLUDE IN THE CONSTRUCTION AND MAINTENANCE… OF INDIVIDUAL IDENTITY THAT WE TAKE AS THE BEDROCK NORM OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE?”

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Jenny Bornholdt The Rocky Shore – Poetry and Memory

A few years ago I read a short story by Tove Jansson – Grandpa-Grumble – from her book Moominvalley in November. It begins:

He was frightfully old and forgot things very easily. One dark autumn morning he woke up and had forgotten what his name was. It’s a little sad when you forget other people’s names but it’s lovely to be able to completely forget your own.

This story stayed with me. It’s an incredibly tender, sad, description of someone losing their memory – not only losing, but choosing to lose their old life. When I was awarded the Victoria University Writing Fellowship this year, I said I wanted to write about memory and forgetting. Stating your intentions can be a dangerous thing, but a proposal was needed and this was what I was interested in. I really had no idea of what I’d actually do, or where I’d start, but reading is usually a good place to begin. I read a lot about memory, and about forgetting. I read many theories about how the brain works, how memories are stored, and how accurate and inaccurate they can be. There were gorgeous metaphors for memory: wax tablets from Socrates; memory as an aviary containing birds of knowledge; Augustine’s caves and treasure chambers; the skull; cells in a monastery; a library; beehives... I read and read, and then I wrote some poems, which gathered themselves together into a book titled The hill of wool. This book will be published by Victoria University Press in 2011. In my session, I’ll read from this new manuscript and will also read earlier poems which are concerned with memory. Here are the first two stanzas of a villanelle:

Memory Sometimes we forget that we remember;Find it distressing that the pastCould so evade us, remain as merely tremor

In our brains, so that we know the formerLife is there, but can’t quite graspThe detail. Sometimes we forget that we remember…

BiographyHer last book, The rocky shore, was a collection of six long(ish) poems, described as ‘…as much autobiographical essay as long poems’. This book won the Montana Book Award for Poetry in 2009.

Jenny has written nine books of poetry, including a selected poems: Miss New Zealand. She is also an occasional anthologist. With her husband – poet and artist Gregory O’Brien – she has co-edited My heart goes swimming: New Zealand love poems (Godwit/Random House, 1996) and The colour of distance: New Zealand writers in France / French writers in New Zealand (Victoria University Press 2005). With Mark Williams, Bornholdt and O’Brien edited An anthology of New Zealand poetry in English (Oxford University Press, 1997), which won the 1997 Montana Book Award for Poetry. Jenny has been an Arts Foundation of New Zealand Laureate, and was the Te Mata Estate New Zealand Poet Laureate 2005-7.

INVITED ARTIST

DAYS HURTLE BY WITH ALL THE WEIGHT OF MEMORY BEHIND THEM.”

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BiographyProfessor Kendall Phillips is the Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies in the Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University. His research attends to the intersections between citizenship, rhetoric and culture with particular interest in issues of memory, film and controversy. He has published several books including, Projected fears: Horror films and American culture (2005), Framing public memory (2008), and Controversial cinema: The films that outraged America (2008) and his essays have appeared in such journals as Literature/ film quarterly, Communication monographs and Philosophy and rhetoric. Kendall holds a PhD from the Pennsylvania State University and has taught at Syracuse for the past ten years where he has received several awards including the University Scholar/Teacher of the Year (2008) and the Judith Greenberg Seinfeld Distinguished Faculty Fellowship (2009).

Kendall PhillipsCONFERENCE SUMMATION

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PROGRAMME AT A GLANCE

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JAMES E. YOUNG

WELCOME & INTRODUCTION6:00 – 7:00

7:00 – 8:00

8:00 – 9:30

THURSDAY

10:00 – 3:00

12:30 – 4:00

ARTIST AND CURATION WORKSHOP

TE PAPA TOURS

HUMBERTO VÉLEZ AND DR HANS-MICHAEL HERZOG

With Contained Memory Invited Artist and CuratorLocation: School of Fine Arts, College of Creative Arts, Massey University.

Contained Memory Tours at Te Papa. Front / back of house guided tours of Te Papa exhibitions and collections for attendees.

Soundings Theatre, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

Mihi Whakatau / Mana Whenua (welcome by local Māori)

Introductions by: Asssociate Professor Tony Whincup (Head of School, School of Visual and Material Culture, College of Creative Arts, Massey University)

Michelle Hippolite (Kaihautū [Māori leader], Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa)

Professor Sally Morgan (Pro Vice-Chancellor, College of Creative Arts, Massey University)

Professor Kendall Phillips (Associate Dean, Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies, College of Visual and Performing Arts, Syracuse University)

REGISTRATION OPENS

REGISTRATION CLOSES

11.00

5:45

KEYNOTE ADDRESS

OPENING FUNCTION

Introduction: Associate Professor Kingsley Baird, School of Visual and Material Culture, College of Creative Arts, Massey University

In Icon, Te Papa, First floor level 2

All keynotes, panels, and sessions are located in Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa Cable St, Wellington, unless otherwise specified.

Artist and Curation WorkshopHumberto Vélez and curator Dr Hans-Michael Herzog

The ‘Waking’ Project Art/Science ForumPaul Broks, Philippa Gander, and Sam Trubridge

CONFERENCE EVENTS

The School of Fine Arts at Massey University invites artists, art administrators, curators, and students to a 1-day artist and curation workshop with international contemporary artist Humberto Vélez and leading international curator Dr Hans-Michael Herzog. The workshop will provide insights into contemporary art and curatorial practice with an emphasis on dialogue and discussion. Participants will be able to work with each of the presenters across the course of the day. The workshop will be facilitated by Dr David Cross and Dr Martin Patrick.

Thursday 9 December 2010, 10:00 am – 3:00 pm.School of Fine Arts, College of Creative Arts, Massey University, Wellington.Limited to 25 participants. Free.www.containedmemory.org/programme-information/h.ulrich@massey.ac.nz

Exclusive front- and back-of-house tours of Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa collections for conference attendees only will be held on Thursday 9 December 2010. The focus of the tours will be the containment of memory in the museum context. This is a unique opportunity to see collection stores, conservation labs and exhibitions.

Thursday 9 December 2010. Tours between 12:30 pm – 2:00 pm, repeated 2:30 pm – 4:00 pm.Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and the Tory Street research facility.www.containedmemory.org/programme-information/h.ulrich@massey.ac.nz

Following the art Plenary Session in Soundings Theatre at Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, conference attendees are invited to proceed to the City Gallery Wellington (a 10-minute waterfront stroll) for the opening of the exhibition of works by Humberto Vélez and Oscar Muñoz.

Friday 10 December 2010. Exhibition opening at 6:30 pm.City Gallery Wellington, Civic Square www.containedmemory.org/programme-information/citygallery@wmt.org.nz

Waking is the transition between our dreaming interiors and conscious exteriors. The Waking Project is a unique arts/science collaboration that explores this transition, bringing together the hyper-sentient disciplines of performance with the scientific study of sleep - a state where sensory input is minimal and the only audience is the self. This forum features renowned English neuropsychologist Paul Broks in dialogue with sleep scientist Philippa Gander and performance designer Sam Trubridge. Their collaborations in neuroscience science and theatre provide the framework for discussions in the intersection of arts and sciences.

Monday 13 December 2010, 9:00 am – 1:00 pm.Location to be confirmed. Free.k.e.pathirana@massey.ac.nz

Te Papa ToursFacilitated by Matthijs Siljee

Invited Artists’ ExhibitionRolling with the Punches: Humberto Vélez in conversation with Dr David Cross and Dr Martin Patrick

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LUNCH BREAK12:30 – 1:30

Soundings Theatre Chair: Associate Professor David Cross, School of Fine Arts, College of Creative Arts, Massey University

City Gallery Wellington Humberto Vélez in conversation with Dr Martin Patrick and Dr David Cross, School of Fine Arts, College of Creative Arts, Massey University

PLENARY SESSION

EXHIBITION OPENING

Repetition and Difference: The Dissemination of Photography Geoffrey Batchen

Materializing Memory: Space, Memory, and Transference at Roadside Car Crash Shrines Robert M. Bednar

Bridging the Gap, Maintaining Connections with the Dead Tony Whincup

Lest We Forget: Military Myths, Memory and Canberra’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Memorial Anne Brennan

Re-containing Memory: Observing the Process of Unbecoming a Self Paulo Bernardino and Maria Manuela Lopes

Creating Memory of National Identity through Sound: A Case Study of Selected Musical Works by Alfred Hill and Douglas Lilburn Donald Maurice

A Nested Sense of Self Doris McIlwain

Battlefield Pilgrimage and Performative Memory: Contained Souls of Soldiers in Sites, Ashes, and Buddha StatuesAkira Nishimura

Sites of Memory: Dis(re)membering at Płaszów, Poland Danielle Drozdzewski

Whiteout: An Examination of the Material Culture of Remembrance Generated between New Zealand and Antarctica Peter Wood

Hazard Figures: Heritage, Memorial and Wasting in Appalachia Maria McVarish

Revisiting Boulcott’s Farm: The Public Memory of New Zealand’s Hutt Valley War in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries Ewan Morris

Deconstructing the Libraried Self: A Personal Story of Social Memory Contained in Australian Childhood History Texts Lisa Armitage

Where We Come From: The Role of Place in Family Memory Belinda Castles

To Live in the Ruins: Autobiographical Film of the Exile Nina Seja

Twisting Memory for ‘the fun of it.’ Marcus Moore

5:00 – 6:00

6:30 – Onward

2.1 Memory FormsRoom: Rangimarie 1 Anne Noble ONZMSoFA, CoCA, MU (Chair)

2.2 Performing MemoryRoom: Rangimarie 2Dr Sandra HeffernanIDIE, CoCA, MU (Chair)

2.3 Siting MemoryAngus 1 & 2Jacquie NaismithICD, CoCA, MU (Chair)

2.4 AutobiographyRoom: Rangimarie 3Patricia ThomasICD, CoCA, MU (Chair)

FRIDAY / PM

AFTERNOON TEA 2:30 – 3:00

1:30 – 2.30

3:00 – 5.00

KEYNOTE ADDRESS

SESSION 2

DAME CLAUDIA ORANGE DNZM OBE

INVITED ARTISTS: ROLLING WITH THE PUNCHES

Soundings Theatre Introduction: Professor Sally J. Morgan, Pro Vice-Chancellor, College of Creative Arts, Massey University

FRIDAY / AM

REGISTRATION AND REFRESHMENTS

MORNING TEA

8:30 – 9:00

10:00 – 10:30

9:00 – 10:00

10:30 – 12:30

Soundings Theatre: Presented by Syracuse University (in Syracuse, US, Dr Anne T. Demo (Chair), and in Wellington, NZ, Dr Kendall Phillips)

1.1 Memory FormsRoom: Rangimarie 2Mark Bradford ICD, CoCA, MU (Chair)

1.2 Siting MemoryRoom: Rangimarie 3Averil MartinMU (Chair)

1.3 WitnessRoom: Rangimarie 1Richard ReddawaySoFA, CoCA, MU (Chair)

1.4 Public & PrivateAngus 1 & 2Caroline McQuarrieSoFA, CoCA, MU (Chair)

1.5 National Identity Soundings TheatreSally J. MorganCoCA, MU (Chair)

KEYNOTE

SESSION 1

Wearing the Cowboy: Global Western Collector Culture from the1950s to the 21st Century Michael Kackman

Global Memories & Tourism – The Internationalising of Memorial Design & Tourist Engagement: A Cambodian and Rwandan Case Study Shannon Davis

Memory Studies and Distributed Cognition: Interanimated Resources in Practices of RememberingJohn Sutton

Affect and Memory Under Totalitarianism Maria Tumarkin

Memory, Forgetting, and Time: Australian Anti-Memorial Design SueAnne Ware

Containing Marginal Memories: Hart Island (New York), Cockatoo Island (Sydney), Ripapa Island (Christchurch) Jacky Bowring

Re-touching History on Matiu-Somes Rachel Buchanan

Contained Memories or Catalysts? Catherine De Lorenzo and Vivien Chow

‘Prison Rocks!’: Locking-up Memory at Three Former Sites of Incarceration Cassandra Secrease-Dickson

Representing Trauma in Kobayashi Masaki’s The Human Condition Erik Ropers

The Event Horizon: Photography After the Fact Donna Brett and Ann Shelton

Photography/Memory Leonard Bell

The Subway Gassing and Me: Embodied Memory and Politics in Post-Aum Victim Memoir Mark Pendleton

Representing Memory: Genocide in the Archives Martine Hawkes

Memory and Oblivion: The Photographic Work of Anne Ferran and Rosângela Rennó Susan Best ‘The Diverse Figures of the True’: Home Movies and the National Archive Minette Hillyer

Illusions of History: Magnum P.I. Remembers Vietnam Rachel Shulman

9000 Sharks; 11,000 Baskets of Potatoes; 4000 people; 100 words: Exhibition Narratives and the Construction of Public Memory Georgina White

Popular Culture, Public History, and Passchendaele (1917): The Creation of Memory and National Identity in Canada and New Zealand Stephanie Cousineau

Remembering Katyn: Mourning, Memory and National Identity Vanessa Fredericks

Memory, Myth and Monuments: The Commemoration of a Contested Past in Western Ukraine John C. Lehr and Natalia Aponiuk

Remembering Modernity: On the Function of Print Heritage Kevin Absilis

Uplifted Landform and Land as Cultural Form: Interpreting National Atlases of New Zealand Katrina Simon

SYRACUSE LIVE WEB PANEL DISCUSSION: SYRACUSE PUBLIC MEMORY PROJECT

HUMBERTO VÉLEZ AND DR HANS-MICHAEL HERZOG

JENNY BORNHOLDT

PROFESSOR KENDALL PHILLIPS

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LUNCH BREAK12:30 – 1:30

POETRY

CONFERENCE SUMMATION

5:00 – 6:00

SATURDAY / PM

AFTERNOON TEA2:30 – 3:00

1:30 – 2:30

3:00 – 5:00

KEYNOTE ADDRESS

SESSION 4

PAUL BROKS

Soundings Theatre

Soundings Theatre Introduction: Dr Bryan Walpert, School of English and Media Studies, Massey University

4.1 Migratory MemoryAngus 1 & 2Matthijs Siljee IDIE, CoCA, MU (Chair)

4.2 Remembering SpacesRoom: Rangimarie 2Rebecca SinclairCoCA, MU (Chair)

4.3 Recovered MemoryRoom: Rangimarie 1Dr Rebecca BishopEMS, CoHSS, MU (Chair)

4.4 Mediated MemoryRoom: Rangimarie 3Roy ParkhurstICD, CoCA, MU (Chair)

Afterimages of Migration: A Visual Critique of Sites of Amnesia Ela Kaçel

Remembering and Containing the Holocaust: What is the Use Of Chronological Narratives? Jordy Silverstein

Bedouin Memory Between City and Desert Alan S. Weber

Memory as a Sense of Place: Migration and Narration in Whanganui, New Zealand Suzanne MacAulay

Dwelling as Assembling Memory Across Time Frames: The Heiberg House in Vanløse, Denmark Robert Gassner

Reversible Metaphors: The Language of Architecture, Space, and Memory Nicole Sully

The Museum Junkerhaus: Monument to an Unhappy Love Anne-Kathrin Wielgosz

Architectural Myopia: The Contested Authenticity of a Tasmanian Mia-Mia Jacqueline Power

Memory, Work of Dreams and the Testimonial Horizon in Brazil’s Post-Dictatorship Paulo Cesar Endo

Janet Frame and Ethical Remembrance Simone Drichel

Nga Tohu o Nga Kairaranga: The Signs of the Weavers Hokimate Pamela Harwood

The Phenomenology of Memory and its Relation to Belief Abbas Yazdani

Containing and Accessing Memories of Blackfoot Life at the Time of Treaty Seven, 1877: The Case of Crowfoot’s Shirt and Exeter’s Museum Stephanie Pratt

Remembering the Family: Photograph Albums in the Digital Age Sophie Johnson

Boxed Set History: Facilitating and Containing Public Memory through DVD Special Features Mary Celeste Kearney

Lost and Found within New Media Design Tanya Marriott

De Architectura as Architectural Time Capsule: On Inventing a New Classical Memory Daniel M. Millette

Soundings Theatre Introduction: Professor Philippa Gander FRSNZ, Director, Sleep/Wake Research Centre, Massey University

SATURDAY / AM

REGISTRATION AND REFRESHMENTS

MORNING TEA

8:30 – 9:00

10:00 –10:30

9:00 – 10:00

10:30 – 12:30

KEYNOTE ADDRESS

SESSION 3

PROFESSOR SIR MASON DURIE KNZM CNZM

3.1 Migratory MemoryRoom: Rangimarie 1Dr Caroline Campbell, ICD, CoCA, MU (Chair)

3.2 Remembering SpacesAngus 1 & 2Julieanna Preston IDIE, CoCA, MU (Chair)

3.3 Recovered MemoryRoom: Rangimarie 2Antony NevinICD, CoCA, MU (Chair)

3.4 Collective MemoriesRoom: Rangimarie 3Sam TrubridgeIDIE, CoCA, MU (Chair)

‘Noli Me Condemnare’ – Migrant Memories Set in Stone: The Seventeen and the Eighteenth Century Scottish Epitaphs in Poland Peter Paul Bajer

‘To Fill This Void Land’ Sally J Morgan

Containing Memory of Settlement Stephen Turner

Forgetting and Remembering: Exploration of Memories with Elders in Singapore Ha Young Hwang

Wall-Wounds: The Wall as Memory Archive Sarah Bennett

Thinking Inside the Box: Objects of Mental Space in the Psychoanalytic Consulting Room Julie Leavitt

Between Remembrance & Recreation: Containing Memory in Urban Landscapes Russell Rodrigo

Intimate Spectacles: House Museums, Heroes and their CanonsLinda Young

Remembering Murndal: ‘Home’, Place and Displacement in a Western District Homestead Harriet Edquist

The Case of the Island Cache: What Do You Call the Political and Cartographic Erasure of a Community Anyway? – Geographacide? Mike Evans and Stephen Foster

The Spanish Maquis as a Case of intermedial Construction of Collective Memories Elina Liikanen

Whose War? Pamela Gerrish Nunn

Contained Memory: Using Cross-Disciplinary Analysis of the Traditional Maori Fishhook Design and Function to Recover Knowledge and Identify Cultural Change Chris Paulin

Pupuri Pohewa: Collective Memory Ross Hemera

Rituals and Commemorative Performances: The European Memories of an Act of Resistance in World War I I Adeline Remy

Cultural Facilities and Collective Memories Bryan H. Massam and Brian J. Hracs

Nga Tatai Whakapapa: Memory Dynamics in Maori Oral Tradition Rawiri Taonui

Soundings Theatre Introduction: Associate Professor Ross Hemera, School of Visual and Material Culture, College of Creative Arts, Massey University

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10 December 201010:30 am – 12:30 pm

ABSTRACTS

FRIDAY SESSION 1

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Michael KackmanDr Michael Kackman is an assistant professor in the Department of Radio-TV-Film at the University of Texas-Austin. He is the author of Citizen spy: Television, espionage, and Cold War culture (Minnesota, 2005) and Pan-Am cowboys: Hoppy & Cisco from B movies to global TV (forthcoming, UT Press). He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in media studies, cultural studies, media historiography, and popular history, memory, and trauma practices.

Shannon DavisDr Shannon Davis is a lecturer in the School of Landscape Architecture, Lincoln University. Her doctoral research involved carrying out field research in relation to the memorial landscapes of Cambodia, Rwanda and Germany.

1.1 Memory Forms

Michael KackmanWearing the Cowboy: Global Western Collector Culture from the 1950s to the 21st Century

Shannon DavisGlobal Memories & Tourism: The Internationalising of Memorial Design & Tourist Engagement; A Cambodian and Rwandan Case Study

While researching the extensive archival files of the children’s Western programs Hopalong Cassidy and The Cisco Kid, an archivist recently shared with me a particularly cherished item: a costume collection that draws collectors from around the world who seek to replicate it for their own collections. These programmes, which I’ve previously written about as key US exports in the burgeoning international television market of the 1950s and also 1960s, captured the attention not just of US audiences, but those in Australia, Asia, Africa, and Europe. The export of these programs, I argue, helped to constitute American childhood and material culture as key sites for the negotiation of media-driven modernization.

This paper explores more specifically how the memory practices of reenactment, embodiment, and mimesis have shaped the cultural history of children’s Western programs from the 1950s to the present. Through a combination of cultural history and collector ethnographies, and building upon such work as Philip Deloria’s Playing Indian and Michael Taussig’s Mimesis and Alterity, I examine the active collector culture that still thrives around these figures worldwide. This culture was first promoted by US distributors’ attempts to use the sale of children’s Western consumer products and toys to create global media brands organized around a nostalgic vision of the US West, but that fascination has not ended. These programs contradictory discourses of liminality, exoticism, and modern global citizenship were central to the development of a global media culture, and they have continued to make them sites of ongoing identity formation and negotiation.

In recent years the critical view of memorialisation has become increasingly complex as a result of globalisation. Today, as the world grows ever-smaller, the opportunities offered to us to engage the international landscape are many and far-reaching. Memoryscapes – memorial landscapes, infused by the tension between cultural relativism and universalism, between the local and the global, offer highly concentrated places in which to investigate the complex relationship between the global memory of atrocity, and tourism. Engrossed in the demands of society, politics, and economics, the multiple pressures, both internally and internationally are seen to dictate the form, function and narrative told by memorials in post genocide societies. With growing tourist industries, countries emerging from genocide, such as Cambodia and Rwanda, are today engaging the international visitor through their memoryscapes of genocide. This paper will introduce the concept of Euro-Western ‘cues to connect’, a process whereby the ‘distant’ or ‘less familiar’ history expressed within the narrative of the case study sites, becomes more accessible to Euro-Western visitors, by placing the contained memory of ‘these’ sites, within pre-understood ‘Western’ frames. Explored through a phenomenological investigation enlisting the participation of Euro-Western tourists to three case study sites in Cambodia and Rwanda, pre-understood western memorial ‘frames’, such as the representation of mass human death through the display of victim clothing and belongings, the act of giving identity by presenting lists of victim names, and the use of symbolic colour and form, are discussed in relation to the global internationalisation of genocide memory.

LIFE IS NOT WHAT ONE LIVED, BUT WHAT ONE REMEMBERS AND HOW ONE REMEMBERS IT IN ORDER TO RECOUNT IT….”Gabriel García Márquez, Living To Tell The Tale

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SueAnne Ware Dr SueAnne Ware is an associate professor of Landscape Architecture at RMIT University, Melbourne. Her research and design work explores the ways in which contemporary memorial design can reflect ephemeral conditions of site and memory while maintaining its importance in the public landscape. She has published widely with regard to concepts engaging in anti-memorials and received various awards in recognition of her design work from the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects.

Jacky BowringDr Jacky Bowring is an associate professor, School of Landscape Architecture, Lincoln University and editor of Landscape Review. Her research investigates the intersection between melancholy and memory. She is author of A field guide to melancholy (2008) and successful in a number of memorial and cemetery design competitions, including finalist Pentagon Memorial (2002), a Cavalier Bremworth Award for memorial for road workers killed in the Otira Gorge (2000), and the Holy Trinity Cathedral Memorial Garden Auckland (2007).

1.2 Siting Memory

Jacky BowringContaining Marginal Memories: Hart Island (New York), Cockatoo Island (Sydney), Ripapa Island (Christchurch)

Contained within tight geographical margins, islands are places where memories are intensified and heightened. These microcosms are not, however, the islands of travel brochures, but the antitheses of dreamy palm-covered paradises. Spatially and socially marginalised, such islands become memorials to the darker dimensions of civilisation: prisons, landfills, military bases, lunatic asylums, cemeteries. Hart Island, Cockatoo Island and Ripapa Island are liminal zones at the edges of our consciousness. There are no permanent residents on these islands, yet they are replete with cultural memories. Hart Island, despite being the US largest cemetery, is practically invisible. Out of bounds to the public, it is a cemetery for the nameless, the homeless, with graves dug by prisoners from Riker’s Island jail. The island’s ruins include a lunatic asylum, prison, amusement park, and Nike anti-missile base, dissolving into the picturesque greenery. Cockatoo Island is a wholly transformed landscape with silos, dry docks, and buildings sculpted directly into the sandstone. The infrastructural modifications have housed prisons, reform schools and shipyards. Ripapa Island is also highly modified, with its defensive opportunities realised in its long history as a pā, a military fort, and a prison, which in the late 19th century housed followers of Te Whiti from the passive protest at Parihaka. Bearing their weighty cargo of memories, each island presents a conundrum, a ‘what now?’ dilemma that vexes those charged with their care. To be preserved in a reserve as at Ripapa? Or gentrified as a recreational site like Cockatoo? Or to remain resolutely off the map, like Hart Island?

SueAnne WareMemory, Forgetting, and Time: Australian Anti-Memorial Design

Andreas Huyssen (1986, p. 71) writes, “Remembrance as a vital human activity shapes our links to the past, and the ways we remember define us in the present. As individuals and societies, we need the past to construct and to anchor our identities and to nurture a vision of the future.” How then do we consider the abstruse qualities of memory and remembrance? Memory is always affected by a complex spectrum of states and stimuli such as forgetting, denial, repression, trauma, recounting, reconsidering, changes in context and changes over time. If we begin to think of memory not as some platonic ideal that is pure or complete, but as a periodic process of re-evaluation and reconstruction given present contexts, do our ideas about designing memorials then evolve accordingly? There is an incongruity between the inherent changeability of landscapes and memories and conventional formal strategies of commemoration.

The case studies presented in this paper negotiate with the changeability of states and conditions as generative for design. The Anti-Memorial to Heroin Overdose Victims, (2002) and The Road-as-Shrine (2005) and The SIEV X Memorial (2008) negotiate with slippery qualities of memory as a way of generating memorial form. Memorial design is constantly imbibed with expectations of specificity, permanence, and local identity within a national context. The design project work presented and critiqued in this paper reflects challenges of memorial outcomes which are not permanent and offers further speculation into how landscape architecture can utilise ephemeral qualities of landscape and memory in an innovative manner.

John SuttonResearch Professor in MACCS, the Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science at Macquarie University, where he was previously head of the Department of Philosophy. He is coeditor of the Sage journal Memory studies, and author of Philosophy and memory traces: Descartes to connectionism and papers on memory, distributed cognition, dreaming, and the history of science. His current research addresses social and collaborative remembering, embodied skills and kinesthetic memory, and the extended mind in early modern England.

Maria TumarkinHistorian and a writer. She is the author of Traumascapes (2005), Courage (2007) and the recently released Otherland (2010). Maria has just completed a three-year Research Fellowship at Swinburne University of Technology, where she was working on an international ‘Social Memory and Historical Justice’ project.

John SuttonMemory Studies and Distributed Cognition: Interanimated Resources in Practices of Remembering

Maria TumarkinAffect and Memory under Totalitarianism

Activities of remembering are complex and structured, involving at once many distinctive, interanimating dimensions: neural, affective, kinesthetic, sensory, material, interpersonal, historical, political, cultural, technological, and so on, where each dimension in this truncated list is itself wildly heterogeneous. Distributed cognition, a line of research developed over some 20 years in cognitive anthropology, science studies, philosophy of mind, and human-computer interaction studies, thus offers a productive framework for memory studies, because it treats remembering as the more-or-less successful coordination of a whole array of disparate resources - bodily, phenomenological, social, and ecological - none of which is accorded analytic priority. Remembering is hybrid and integrative, as internal processes naturally coordinate with the operations of particular objects or other people, each with their own dynamics, their own histories and tendencies. So although memories are only ever contained temporarily, the distribution and interaction of such diverse resources, exograms, and practices occurs at many different timescales. This paper presents case studies in two domains to illustrate this approach to memory studies. In relation to place memory and the cognitive life of things, I examine two artworks which fuse distinct sensory and historical experiences to absorb audiences in the polytemporality of personal and collective urban memory: Janet Cardiff’s site-specific audio walk The missing voice (Case Study B), and Norman Klein’s interactive DVD-ROM Bleeding through: layers of Los Angeles. Secondly, I discuss the interanimation of autobiographical and social memory, using examples from our own experimental and ethnographic work on socially distributed remembering.

In the Soviet Union, for seven long decades, common hubs of memory comprising artistic work and cultural texts, commemorative rites, memorials and museums, rituals and public story-telling, courts and libraries, and even the inter-generational transmission of memories within families have been sites for whole-scale ideological interference and control by the State. So where did all the memory go? In responding to this question, my paper explores the subterranean flows and technologies of memory that have emerged in the Soviet Union in the absence of the conventional memory media. It focuses on the containment of memory in shared emotional and affective states in a totalitarian society, where most conventional sites and repositories of memory were either unavailable or fatally compromised.

In this paper I do not intend to use the Soviet example as merely a stand-alone case study. Rather, my intention is to draw on my research into memory under totalitarianism to begin theorising emotions and affect as one of the principal (rather than one of the many) mnemonic locations in democracies and autocratic societies alike.

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Cassandra Secrease-DicksonVisiting Lecturer at Denison University and a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication and Culture, Performance Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her dissertation examines the development and maintenance of meanings associated with place. Specifically, she addresses the performative nature of public memory and tourism as forces informing the symbolic transformation of space and the contested meanings attributed to Alcatraz Island.

Erik Ropers PhD Candidate in the School of Historical Studies at the University of Melbourne. His research focuses on constructions and representations of Koreans in Japanese historical discourses, specifically dealing with the issues of enforced wartime labor and enforced military prostitution.

Cassandra Secrease-Dickson‘Prison Rocks!’: Locking-up Memory at Three Former Sites of Incarceration

Tourist locations such as Alcatraz Island in California, Old Melbourne Gaol in Australia, and Napier Prison in New Zealand, are so thoroughly associated with incarceration that public memory is literally arrested in both time and place. Collective memory of prisons at these places becomes condensed and is distilled into images of infamous inmates, deadly escape attempts, riots, and the psychological impact of isolation. As tourist sites, these locations thrive on their ability to offer visitors a behind-the-scenes look at prison life. These windows into history necessitate the perpetual maintenance of a particular set of memories. Yet, each location contains a variety of vernacular memories suggesting multiple interpretations of the site’s cultural and personal significance. Conflicting memories, such as those of Native American protesters, former guards and their families, and even the tourists themselves, struggle to escape the predominance of the incarceration narrative. Additionally, the tourist experience is crafted such that visitors perform not only the role of tourist, but also inmate. Audio tours mimicking the intake process of inmates and include the sounds of cell doors closing, as well as highly rated overnight experiences, invoke and highlight the prison experience as it exists in our common memories.

This paper investigates the tourist experience at Alcatraz National Park, Old Melbourne Gaol, and Napier Prison/Youth Hostel in conjunction with vernacular memories of these places in order to interrogate the cultural significance of prisons and incarceration. Furthermore, the goal is to explore the nature of tourist sites as containers of public memory.

1.3 Witness

Erik RopersRepresenting Trauma in Kobayashi Masaki’s The Human Condition

In his 2004 work, Joshua Hirsch argues that trauma is “a crisis of representation” where memories of an event refuse to submit to normal processes of memory storage and recall. Japanese film director Kobayashi Masaki’s film trilogy Ningen no jõken (The Human condition), adapted from a novel of the same name, has been widely recognized as one of the most powerful anti-war films since its release from 1959 – 1961. Ningen no jõken depicts Japanese atrocities perpetrated on both foreigners and Japanese and integrates Kobayashi’s own personal experiences of war. This paper examines the multilayered construction and representation of soldiers’ wartime experiences and trauma in this film. Using Hirsch’s argument as a starting point, I take Kobayashi’s trilogy as an example of a site where this crisis of representation is intimately played out. I begin with examples from the films that demonstrate the difficulty in representing the traumas that soldiers like Kobayashi regularly faced and their efforts to confront the past. I demonstrate not only that memory is, as Maurice Halbwachs noted, constituted by social and collective forces, but that many in post-war Japan had a specific need to confront past events and issues evidenced in the films. Finally, the paper considers some of the similarities and differences in the representation of soldiers passively and actively participating in the war, and how this varying level of participatory involvement impacts the representation and memory of soldiers’ trauma.

Rachel Buchanan (Te Ati Awa, Taranaki, Ngati Ruanui) Dr Rachel Buchanan is the author of a history-memoir, The Parihaka album: Lest we forget (Huia, 2009). Her essays, journalism and short stories have been published in Griffith Review, Meanjin, Landfall, Sport and The Age. She has also collaborated with Geoffrey Ricardo on The Anatomy Lesson, an Artist Book. She teaches journalism at La Trobe University, Melbourne.

Catherine De LorenzoDr Catherine De Lorenzo is an art historian and senior lecturer in the Faculty of the Built Environment, University of New South Wales, Sydney. She regularly writes on public art especially those addressing Indigenous themes, and publishes in a wide range of disciplinary journals. She is a contributing editor to History of photography, an editorial advisory board member of Visual Studies, an editorial board member of the Dictionary of Australian art online, and 2009 recipient of the Marian Mahony Griffin Award.

Vivien Chow Research assistant at the Centre for Health Assets Australasia, Faculty of the Built Environment, University of New South Wales, Sydney. Through her professional work across architectural design, planning, development and research, Vivien is interested in exploring the merit of consultation and collaboration in providing a solid platform to enhance our built environment. She also tutors in design, project management and sustainable development.

Rachel BuchananRe-touching History on Matiu-Somes

Stand on the balcony at Te Papa and look out to sea. Matiu (Somes) is there in front of you. Squint and you might also see two smaller islands, Makaro and Mokopuna. Last year these islands were handed back to us claimants who belong to Taranaki Whanui ki Te Upoko o Te Ika, as part of a settlement of our Treaty of Waitangi claim. This paper explores the memories and histories that are contained on Matiu and speculates on how we, its people, can reclaim them. Between 1839 and now, the island has been a lighthouse station, a human and animal quarantine, a prison, a gun emplacement and a home for re-introduced tuatara and giant wetas. I argue that the island is an archive of these post-contact uses but it is also a place where memories of Māori exploration, discovery and occupation are contained, restrained and even quarantined. Moving beyond Matiu, I contend that Māori history and memory is an island separated from the mainland of New Zealand history and memory, quarantined in places such as the hearings and reports produced by the Waitangi Tribunal. This paper explores the productive stories that can unfold when this quarantine or containment ends. By re-touching the archival documents (papers, maps, photos and books) relating to our island, I aim to reclaim the history of this place. I am the landlord now. By standing on my island, I have a different view of the shore, one that contains myself.

Catherine De Lorenzo and Vivien ChowContained Memories or Catalysts?

As Inglis (1998) has shown, the war memorials that constitute a significant presence in the Australian public domain commemorate wars fought off shore. Conversely, the fractious and sometimes violent interactions between Aboriginal and Settler Australians since colonisation are rarely referred to in public memorials, even though the last twenty years has been marked by vehemently contested written histories and memories. The paper investigates selected examples of recent public art, memorials (including massacre memorials), and other installations dealing with Aboriginal history and Aboriginality, in order to understand some of the devices used to capture history and memories and interpret them to a wider audience. Learning from studies of the Myall Creek Massacre Memorial in the remote site of northern tablelands, NSW Australia, a selection of recent memorials, public art and other installations with a particular focus on Sydney and NSW are examined and compared. The selection includes works undertaken by Aboriginal artists and curators, as well as non-Aboriginal artists, all of whom seek to symbolically mark the built environment. This paper examines these works in terms of their use of material culture and symbolism and questions the degree to which specific art works function as contained memories or catalysts for cultural change within the landscape/ urban fabric.

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Mark Pendleton Doctoral candidate in historical studies at the University of Melbourne. He recently completed research fellowships at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies and the ‘Transitions’ Center for International Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences, New York University. Mark’s work on contemporary Japanese history and queer Australian histories has appeared in Asian studies review, Australian feminist law journal, Overland, and Melbourne historical journal. He is co-editor of a recent special issue ofIntersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific on globalisation and performance.

Martine HawkesDr Martine Hawkes is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Institute for Social Research of Swinburne University of Technology. She has worked in the refugee and humanitarian sector in Australia and Switzerland. Most recently, she was Researcher in Residence at the Prague Office of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe. (OSCE). Her research is concerned with the im/possibilities of representation and of memory within archives around genocide.

Mark PendletonThe Subway Gassing and Me: Embodied Memory and Politics in Post-Aum Victim Memoir

Martine HawkesRepresenting Memory: Genocide in the Archives

Remembrance of past pain is often located theoretically in an ambiguous relationship to the subject that experienced it. Past pain is seen as potentially unassimilable in memory, or acting to distort how personal history is remembered. When this is connected to bodily experience, traumatic recall can be read as an external assault imposed on the subject unconsciously. In this paper I examine how victims of the 1995 Tokyo subway gassing, in which 13 died and over 6000 were directly affected, tackle the questions of memory and pain in their writing.

Since 1995, victims of the gassing have struggled largely without formal recognition or permanent sites of commemoration. The experience of subway victims has been, to their eyes, one of marginalisation and social forgetfulness. One means by which victims have sought to counter these processes, has been to collect and publish their stories. Several collected volumes have appeared as well as more informal publications, such as online collections and blogs. In their writing, some victims understand painful memories to be retained within the body, providing enabling tools of subject transformation. Through a discussion of how the bodies of victims, survivors and the bereaved feature in subway gassing victim memoirs, I explore two ‘containers’ of memory in contemporary Japan – the phenomenon of memoir and life-writing, and the body itself.

Witness, I realise that the trip that you made to Zepa was very difficult and very frightening, but I would just like you to simply confirm a number of points to the Judges by simply answering yes or no. Otherwise, I think we’re going to be here a very long time and I know you want to go home to Bosnia tomorrow. So simply answer yes or no. Do you understand?(The Prosecutor v. Radislav Krstić 2000)

This paper examines how representations of genocide are approached through the archive. Following Derrida (2005, 1996), I formulate ‘approach’ as a necessary and unending consideration of the practice of the archive as regards any event of trauma. In considering those archives that follow and attempt to approach, record and respond to acts of genocide and mass atrocity, I will focus on testimonial archives and how certain memories of events fail to be held or admitted’ within the archive. I call for a rethinking of the aims and expectations of those archives that gather testimony, be they legal, court-based archives or more informal story-telling archives.

It is that which is missing in and excluded from such testimonies, that which goes unrepresented, that disrupts the notion that archives might contain, conclude and comprehend an event of trauma. Using Derrida’s notions of the Archive (Derrida, 1996) and of the Cinder (Derrida, 1991) I argue that the very inaccuracy and the subjectivity of relevance within an archive is highlighted by that which is absent or elided.

Donna BrettDoctoral candidate in Art History and Film Studies at the University of Sydney; her research area is Documenting place in post-war German photography 1945-2000. Publications include: ‘The uncanny return: documenting place in post-war German photography’, Photographies, 3, 1, March 2010. Brett is also Manager, Copyright and Curatorial Research Coordination at the Art Gallery of NSW, and board member of the AAANZ and Peloton Gallery, Sydney.

Ann Shelton Visual artist, Director Undergraduate Studies Photography at the School of Fine Arts, Massey University and Chair of the Wellington-based Enjoy Public Art Gallery. Her work is exhibited nationally and internationally and was included in Images Recalled (Bilder auf Abruf), Germany’s largest photographic biennale. Recent presentations include Folie à deux/ Twinly Madness: a perspectival violence at the University of Plymouth, UK She is also 2010 recipient of the CoCA Anthony Harper Award for Contemporary Art.

Leonard BellDr Leonard Bell is an associate professor in the Department of Art History at The University of Auckland. His writings have been published in Great Britain, the US, Australia, Germany and the Czech Republic, besides New Zealand. His books include Colonial constructs: European images of Māori 1840-1914 (1992), In transit: Questions of home and belonging in New Zealand art (2007) and Marti Friedlander (2009).

Donna Brett and Ann SheltonThe Event Horizon: Photography after the Fact

Trauma is a disorder of memory and time. This is why in his early writings Freud used the metaphor of the camera to explain the unconscious as the place where bits of memory are stored until they are developed, like prints from black and white negatives, into consciously accessible recollections. (Baer, 2002, p. 9)

The relationship between the photographic impulse to record events in the landscape and how those events are viewed in ‘the here now’ unfolds across complex layers of meaning that engage with artistic, philosophical and theoretical positions on photography in relation to memory, trauma, time and history. What is the association between trauma and time, between the photographic image, the past and the present? This paper examines how the photographic might relate to concepts of trauma, and how those subjects are expressed in relation to landscape from a contemporary position.

Psychoanalysis advocates remembering (perhaps for the first time) an event as part of therapeutic process and often one visits a site as an aid to memory whether this is an individual or collective memory. Hence this paper will also explore the testimonial potential of the photographic image and will reflect upon how the photographic image can act as an indexical marker of past events.

Leonard BellPhotography/Memory

The association of memory and photography is commonplace, as is the notion that photography is the best medium for visualizing memories. But can photographs remember or contain memories? And, if so, how? Since there can be no memory or remembering without forgetting or amnesia, perhaps photographs produce forgetting as much as remembering. Maybe photographs can lessen the capacity to remember. Because of the millions of photographs manufactured, perhaps photographs are as likely to numb and desensitize minds and sensibilities, and thus dull memory as much as they may enable us to remember. Is the coupling of photography and memory a hollow cliché? This paper considers what photographs can be evidence of and how they (as putative containers of memory) constitute evidence.

The paper will explore these concerns via the scrutiny of one photograph by each of two photographers, both of whom came to New Zealand as refugees from Nazism in Europe. They are Richard Sharell’s photograph of dead flies on sticky flypaper, taken in Wellington during World War II, and Maia Blumenfeld’s of an old man under a fig tree in Auckland, taken during the same period. My investigation of these photographs will address the following questions: what do they have to do with memory, contained or otherwise? In what circumstances could they do memory work? If they ‘contain’ memory, how do they do it? Are they blank screens onto which we project thoughts and memories?

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Rachel Shulman Currently serves as the Community Outreach Services Librarian at the University of California, Irvine. She holds an AB in History from Bryn Mawr College, and an MA History and an MS in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois – Urbana Champaign. This paper is part of a larger project that broadens definitions of “memorial,” analyzing fictional television narratives of war and trauma alongside fictional “artists’ archives” like those of Walid Raad’s “Atlas Group.”

Georgina White Has undergraduate degrees in Anthropology, and Performance and Screen Arts. In 2009 she completed her MA in Museum Studies at New York University with awards from Fulbright, the American Association of University Women and the New Zealand Federation of Graduate Women. Before moving to New York, she curated exhibitions on social dance for the National Library and the Film Archive, and published writing on the same subject. Since June 2009, she has been developing exhibitions at the Auckland Museum.

Rachel ShulmanIllusions of History: Magnum P.I. Remembers Vietnam

Georgina White9000 sharks11,000 baskets of potatoes 4000 people100 wordsExhibition narratives: Containing Public Memory

Contention over how to remember and commemorate American militaryengagement during the Vietnam War (1959-1975) continues to inform present-day discussions of American involvement in the wars in Afghanistan (2001-) and Iraq (2003). This contention stemmed from the ambiguous nature of the war itself; conservative politicians like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan rhetorically divided soldiers from the conflict in which they fought so as to forestall criticism of the war. Constructing soldiers as individuals separated from historically specific experiences and deaths allows for the creation and imposition of a heroic narrative. In the paper I argue that the development of the idea of the soldier as an individual, who should be heroically commemorated as such, emerges from the memorial practices of the late 1970s and early 1980s. These memorial practices are not confined to the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in Washington D.C., designed by Maya Lin and dedicated in late 1982. Rather, the same impulses that gave rise to Lin’s design also engendered the production of popular television narratives like Magnum P.I. First broadcast in December 1980, Magnum P.I. stars Tom Selleck. The pilot tells the story of a Vietnam veteran struggling to overcome post traumatic stress disorder, working to recover the memory of a besmirched fallen comrade. This man serves as a metonym for all fallen soldiers in Vietnam, either remembered as ‘baby-killers’ and potential psychopaths or forgotten and ignored. This paper focuses on the ways that the pilot’s visual narrative individualizes soldiers, erases specifics of their time in Vietnam, ultimately allowing for their commemoration as American heroes, as worthy as those killed during World War I I.

In his essay “Tuning the Museum: the Harmonics of Official Culture” (2006) New Zealand curator and writer Ian Wedde proposes an exhibition seeded by the specific details of two watercolours painted by Captain Richard Aldworth Oliver (Feast at the Bay of Islands, 1849, and Neddy, 1850). He views the detail of these paintings through several lenses, finds connections and disconnections between them, and then relates the detail to other objects and images within Te Papa’s collections until he has grown a web-like network of loosely-coupled narratives. Wedde’s approach to exhibition-making allows for narratives to be intricately or simply linked. It also allows them to stand-alone. His approach seems well-suited to a subject such as the Māori feast held at Remuera, Auckland, in May 1844 – an extraordinary event involving 4000 people, which has been remembered, reported, redrawn and reexamined by different people, from different perspectives, at different points in time.

In my role as an exhibition developer at Auckland Museum, I will present a selection of visual, written and oral accounts of the Remuera feast. I will then review how we displayed the feast within a temporary exhibition on Auckland through stories of food. In this review I will explore the dialogue that occurs throughout exhibition development between the parameters of an exhibition (the container) and the content held within.

Susan Best Dr Susan Best teaches in the Department of Art History, UNSW. Her book, Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the Feminine Avant-garde, is forthcoming in 2011. The book focuses on four well-known and highly respected North and South American artists of the period, showing how their work transforms the avant-garde protocols of the period by introducing an affective dimension to late modern art.

Minette Hillyer Lecturer in the Media Studies programme at Victoria University, Wellington. Her research interests include silent period New Zealand film as well as mid-century American ephemeral films treating home and homeland.

1.4 Public & Private

Susan BestMemory and Oblivion: The Photographic Work of Anne Ferran and Rosângela Rennó

Minette Hillyer‘The Diverse Figures of the True’: Home Movies and the National Archive

This paper examines the tensions between archives and public memory on the one hand, and forgetting and questions of representability on the other. In it I focus on two artists: Brazilian photographer Rosângela Rennó and Australian photographer Anne Ferran. In particular, I examine two series by Rennó, Vulgo (1998-99) and Bodies of Soul (1990-2003), and two series by Ferran, 1-38 (2003) and Lost to Worlds (2008). All of these works deal with forgotten or invisible histories that the artists attempt to salvage from oblivion. Vulgo and 1-38 are based on neglected institutional archives. Vulgo reworks twelve photographs of the backs of prisoners’ heads (taken between 1920 and 1940) that were languishing in the Museum of the São Paulo Penitentiary. 1-38 uses archival images drawn from the records of Gladesville Mental Hospital in Sydney of women who were institutionalised in 1948. These strange and poignant archival depositories contrast with the meagre records of other people and events that the artists also seek to represent. Rennó’s Bodies of Soul tries to give visual form to the ‘disappeared,’ the most invisible people of Brazil (and other countries). In a similar vein, Ferran’s Lost to Worlds explores the meagre records of women convicts in Tasmania. Her photographs of the remains of the female factory at Ross suggest a kind of haunting by the past, rather than something properly remembered. This liminal state, between haunting and memory, is evoked by both photographers. Through a close reading of the artists’ work, I will discuss how this state best serves the kind of historical memory that Rennó and Ferran explore.

A significant proportion of the New Zealand Film Archive’s holdings are home movies. Jonathan Dennis (1993), who championed the establishment of the Film Archive, described our silent film as “local, personal and irregular”: as something like “home movies” (Dennis, 1993, p. 6). His comments suggest a particular and enduring relationship between national archive and personal record in this place. However, the status of home movies in national archives is generally less secure. The Library of Congress moving image collections, for example, favour public people, connected to public events: one finds home movies as marginalia to the business of writing a public history, at the regions of the national story.

In part, this must reflect the national archive’s remit to chronicle what Blanchot (1987) described as “the diverse figures of the True… the great historical transformations” of public life (Blanchot, 1987, p. 12). The home movie, as the privileged representative of the everyday exists in this schema “without a truth proper to itself”. By placing home movies into public, national narratives, does the New Zealand Film Archive then take on the work of “opening the everyday onto history, or even, of reducing its privileged sector: private life”, work which Blanchot describes as revolutionary? And to what extent can this kind of work embrace the home movie’s evident status as a technology of personal and familial memory, of what Jose Van Dijck (2008) calls “future memories”, rather than abandoning it, in favour of the apparently truer narratives of history?

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John C. LehrProfessor of Geography at the University of Winnipeg. He holds a PhD in Geography from the University of Manitoba. His research interests focus on the settlement geography of Ukrainians in Western Canada and Brazil, symbolic landscapes and ethnic identity. He has conducted research on the commemoration of the past in Canada, Israel and Ukraine.

Natalia AponiukAssociate Professor of Slavic Studies at the University of Manitoba. She holds a PhD in Slavics from the University of Toronto. Her research interests focus on Russian and Ukrainian literature, and ethnic identity in western Canada. She is currently editor of the journal Canadian Ethnic Studies.

Kevin AbsilisKevin obtained his PhD in 2008. His published dissertation is entitled Vechten tegen de bierkaai. Over het uitgevershuis van Angèle Manteau (1932-1970) [Fighting a losing battle. On the publishing house of Angèle Manteau (1932-1970]. He has worked as a scientific consultant for the Flemish Literary Museum & Archives and is currently on the staff of the Institute of the Study of Literature in the Low Countries (University of Antwerp) and postdoctoral fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO-Vlaanderen). His research interests encompass book history, cultural theory and nationalism studies.

Vanessa FredericksRemembering Katyn: Mourning, Memory and National Identity

This paper examines the connection between mourning, memory and national identity in Poland after World War II, with specific reference to the Katyn Massacre of 1940. During World War II approximately 22,000 Polish nationals were shot and buried in mass graves throughout Russia. The executions were carried out by Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD, under Stalin’s orders. The first of the mass graves was discovered in 1943 by German soldiers in the Katyn Forest. The German government publicly announced the discovery of the graves and accused the Soviets of mass murder. The Soviet government denied responsibility for the massacre and retaliated by accusing the Germans of committing the crime. Successive Soviet governments continued to deny responsibility for the Katyn massacre until documents that proved Soviet responsibility were released under Mikhail Gorbachev and then Boris Yeltsin in 1990. It was only then that the whereabouts of the other mass graves was disclosed. Mourning and public memory are integral to recreating a national identity after traumatic events. The question of national identity and commemoration in post-totalitarian society is an important one. For Poland, this question has been about recreating a culture of mourning around a national identity that has been silenced. My aim in this paper is to look at the ways in which historical memory has altered national identity in Poland after World War II and the subsequent collapse of Soviet Communism, and the role of commemoration and memorials in this process.

John C. Lehr and Natalia AponiukMemory, Myth and Monuments: The Commemoration of a Contested Past in Western Ukraine

In January 2010 former Ukrainian President Victor Yushchenko’s posthumous award of the title Hero of Ukraine to Stepan Bandera, a founder of the organization of Ukrainian nationalists, ignited a debate that threw memory and history into conflict, not only in Ukraine but also throughout the Ukrainian Diaspora. This declaration brought into focus myth and reality in the construction of the recent past in Western Ukraine. Three conflicting myths of western Ukraine’s history from 1939 to 1991 are now competing for legitimacy. This competition is seen in the construction of landscapes of memory: the placement of memorials to the three military organizations that represented different visions of the path to freedom in Ukraine. The commemorative landscape constructed by the Soviet regime is now challenged as monuments have been removed, added, or altered to embrace public as well as official memory. This paper suggests three variants of contained memory may now be seen in the commemorative landscape of western Ukraine.

Stephanie Cousineau Dr Stephanie Cousineau is an assistant professor (Term) of History at the University of Northern British Columbia in Prince George, Canada. She has published on illegal war, race and war, film and history, and teaches undergraduate courses on Public History and Memory. This paper is part of a broader study on commemoration, national identity and the Battle of Passchendaele (1917).

Vanessa Fredericks PhD candidate in the department of Critical and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University. The focus of her research is Jacques Derrida’s politics of mourning, and Polish history during and after World War I I.

1.5 National Identity

Stephanie CousineauPopular Culture, Public History, and Passchendaele (1917): The Creation of Memory and National Identity in Canada and New Zealand

Controversy breeds curiosity. Wartime controversy, when the stakes are so high, carries even greater weight, which helps to explain why, in both Canada and New Zealand, the Battle of Passchendaele (1917) continues to command an atypical interest, the more time passes since the event in question. The Great War was undoubtedly critical in the histories and national narratives of both dominions, where myths, legends and memories were forged in combat. Canada’s last surviving Great War veteran passed earlier this year (New Zealand’s in 2005), but the passing of the final vestiges of lived memory hardly ripples the waters of remembrance and commemoration: its place had long since been usurped by ‘created’ memory. Indeed, those familiar with the name ‘ Passchendaele’ are most likely to have learned of it through popular history, like Paul Gross’ feature film Passchendaele (2008), or through museum exhibits in Auckland and Ottawa, and memorials in towns and cities across both states. The consumption of popular culture and public history, then, appears to teach what ‘we’ did in that campaign, so important in the construction of national identities, thereby ‘creating’ memory. This paper will examine Passchendaele in popular culture and public history (especially film and museum exhibits), analysing the greatest sources of the created memory that helps shape two nations’ historical identities, and pointing to the contrasts between what history books say we ‘know’ and what we, as national communities, ‘remember’.

Kevin AbsilisRemembering Modernity: On the Function of Print Heritage

In early modern and modern Europe intellectuals such as Francis Bacon and the Marquis de Condorcet hailed the advent of print as a milestone in the progress of the human mind. As a form of ‘advanced literacy’ print went on to become a decisive marker of modern civilizations; orality developed into a signal of various degrees of backwardness. Much more recently scholars have put great effort into demystifying the beliefs, which have prompted the rather triumphant visions of European modernity. In the field of book history one might think of the work of Don McKenzie who in his study of the Treaty of Waitangi and the arrival of print in New Zealand subtly dismissed the classic history of Western civilization as “perhaps misleading”.

At the time of the signing of the Waitangi Treaty, in Belgium, a small spot in the heart of Europe, which almost haphazardly gained independence in 1830, the first signs of a rising Flemish consciousness emerged. Comparable to other nationalistic movements, the Flemish Movement – which strove for a better recognition of Flemish (+/- Dutch) language against the predominance of French among Belgian elites – legitimized their activities and the existence of an age-old Flemish community by ‘inventing’ all sorts of traditions. Print heritage soon was given an important part to play in this collective memory-construction. In my paper I will examine how the Flemish Movement in the 19th and 20th centuries commemorated pioneering printers such as Dirk Martens and Christophe Plantin (by erecting statues, founding museums, etc) in order to establish a distinctly modern Flemish identity. I will connect these findings to current developments in the fields of book history and postcolonial theory.

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10 December 20103:00 pm – 5:00 pm

ABSTRACTS

FRIDAY SESSION 2Katrina Simon Designer and visual artist with a background in architecture and landscape architecture. She is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of the Built Environment, University of New South Wales, and has research interests in cartography and landscape representation, urban landscape architecture and cemetery history and design. She is currently undertaking a PhD by creative practice at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney.

Katrina SimonUplifted Landform and Land as Cultural Form: Interpreting National Atlases of New Zealand

National atlases occupy a distinctive place in cartographic production and in the containment of national memory. National atlases typically start with the given nation’s ‘position in the world’, followed by maps which depict the physical aspects of the country from an earth science perspective, which in turn are followed by maps and diagrams of various manifestations of productive and cultural life, such as landuse, trade and population distribution.

This paper investigates a sequence of New Zealand national atlases produced by the New Zealand Government from the mid 20th century to the present, with particular reference to ways in which they make explicit and implicit reference to changing ideas of land, memory and national identity. Editorial introductions to national atlases frequently make explicit reference to the way in which an atlas can depict an understanding of the nation to the world. Explored longitudinally in relation to one country, these can give an insight into the ways official depictions of the characteristics of a nation deemed noteworthy have changed over time.

As well as paying close attention to the selection, arrangement and design of cartographic material, the discussion will also focus on a comparative analysis of the textual content, design and production. The national atlases of New Zealand thus reveal not just the features and physical characteristics of the land itself, but certain changes ways in which these are imagined and valued. They form a unique record of official memory, one which constructs ideas of land and landscape as it contains them.

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Geoffrey Batchen Professor of Art History at Victoria University of Wellington. His books include Burning with desire: The conception of photography (1997), Forget me not: Photography and remembrance (2004) and Suspending time: Life-photography-death (2010).

Robert M. Bednar Dr Robert Bednar is an associate professor of Communication Studies at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, where he teaches media studies, visual communication, and cultural studies. His work as an analyst, and theorist of critical visual communication focuses on the ways that people perform identities visually, materially, and spatially in public landscapes. The paper presented here is part of his current book project titled Road scars: Trauma, memory, and automobility.

2.1 Memory Forms

Geoffrey BatchenRepetition and Difference: The Dissemination of Photography

Robert M. BednarMaterialising Memory: Space, Memory, and Transference at Roadside Car Crash Shrines

This paper addresses the capacity of photography to suspend its subjects, and itself, between life and death, thereby promising the defeat of an otherwise fatal onset of passing time. Photography’s capacity for this sort of temporal suspension has long been exploited within vernacular photographic practices, from the mid-nineteenth century until today. My paper will focus in particular on late nineteenth-century American albumen memorial cabinet cards that include within them photographs of the deceased taken while they were still alive. These photographs within the photograph are shown surrounded by wreaths of flowers that in and of themselves signify both death and resurrection. This paper’s examination of these complicated commentaries on photography will serve as one more reminder of the need to rethink the way we go about writing this medium’s history. In addition it will offer a meditation on the photographic articulation of memory. Indeed, I will argue that the repetitive nature of these kinds of photographic practices itself has a mnemonic purpose, allowing for the maintenance of certain oral memorial traditions in visual form. In effect, my paper will constitute a defense of the banal and the commonplace.

This is a study of both the containment and effervescence of traumatic memory in roadside car crash shrines, vernacular memorial assemblages built by private individuals at sites where family or friends have died in automotive accidents and where the ongoing production of spaces of mourning not only materializes memory but materializes the limits of memory.

Entering into the vigorous critical and theoretical dialogues within visual culture, material culture, and cultural geography surrounding contemporary discourses of trauma, memory, and space, the paper analyzes a set of shrines I have recursively photographed for the past seven years in the US. These shrines have grown and contracted over time not only because of changes made by those who maintain the shrines, but also because of the specific climate and weather phenomena they encounter as they stand on the roadside. Some objects disperse. Others are replaced. Others fade. Others decay.

I argue that roadside crash shrines transfer the life lost in a car crash to the life lived by the memory objects and spaces contained within the shrines. These spaces and objects then act as a proxy for the absent victim as the shrine takes on a life of its own, alternately reinforcing and eliding discontinuities of time in the production of memory/space. And especially when shrine objects decay, that first transference of body to object is further materialized, revealing that the shrine as memory/space is not only living, but also dying – all over again, there on the roadside.

WE NEED TO FORGET, IN ORDER TO SURVIVE.”A.S. Byatt, Memory: An anthology

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Paulo BernardinoDr Paulo Bernardino is a professor in the Department of Communication and Arts, University of Aveiro, Portugal. He is also Director of Postgraduate study in Contemporary Artistic Creation. His research explores the interface between theory, technology and practice. His published writings include: In the path of image: Representation in art and technology; Invoking the archive; Image, technology and art; The intersection of technology in the process of image creation: The image, the technology and the art amongst others.

Maria Manuela Lopes Visual artist and researcher based in Portugal and the UK, and a doctoral candidate. Her transdisciplinary practice explores issues of memory and self-identity and is informed by life sciences and medical research, and takes the form of time-based installations. She is also Co-Director of two residency programs in Portugal, the Ectopia at Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Institute of Science, and the ecologically oriented residency program Cultivamos Cultura in Alentejo.

Donald Maurice Professor Donald Maurice is Associate Director of the New Zealand School of Music. He has written a book on Béla Bartók (Oxford, New York), edited Alfred Hill’s Leipzig Diary (Wirripang, NSW) and has published editions of scores by George Enescu (Enoch & Cie, Paris) and Douglas Lilburn (Waiteata Press, Wellington). As violist in the Dominion Quartet and NZ Piano Quartet, he has released four CDs through Naxos and has ongoing projects with them.

2.2 Performing Memory

Paulo Bernadino and Maria Manuela Lopes Re-containing Memory: Observing the Process of Unbecoming a Self

Images and sounds produced as a result of the research into Alzheimer’s disease are understood as interacting elements which, when collected, moved and juxtaposed through the process of editing, produce certain effects and affects that aim to account for the nature of memory and the disease itself. This paper focuses on examining the narratives generated in response to an art/ethnographic fieldwork in a neuroscience laboratory researching Azheimer’s disease, and studio-based art practice. Our paper discussion centers on how artworks can contribute to the display of autobiographical memory discourse, via exploring the representational practices circulating on neuroscience research into Alzheimers. Our research seeks to construct connections between visual art practice and neuroscientific study by examining the artistic work of Suzanne Anker, Helen Chadwick and Mark Dion. In addition we will introduce and comment on theories of autobiographical memory, and current neuroscientific research (clinical neurology, neuropsychology, neuroimaging and molecular and cellular studies) relating to Alzheimer’s disease. Our discussion of this material will draw on Foucault’s concepts of Heterotopia and Panopticon as well as Latour’s Actor-network theory.

Donald MauriceCreating Memory of National Identity through Sound: A Case Study of Selected Musical Works by Alfred Hill and Douglas Lilburn

For hundreds of years, composers from many cultures have encapsulated the ‘sounds’ of a nation or ethnic group at particular moments in their history, some of which have remained relevant today and others which have become no more than a memory of the sounds of a past era. Some of those better known composers include Antonín Dvorák and Bedrich Smetana (Czech), Béla Bartók (Hungarian), Ernest Bloch (Swiss-born American Jew), George Enescu (Romanian), Aaron Copland and Charles Ives (American), Ralph Vaughan Williams and Edward Elgar (British) and Peter Sculthorpe (Australian). New Zealand has many amongst its contemporary composers who seek to create sounds that capture national characteristics. Their work, being created now, is for future generations to assess as history through sound. The two most significant composers from our recent and distant past who have consciously attempted to create national identity through sound are Alfred Hill (1869-1960) and Douglas Lilburn (1915-2001), the former by portraying ideas and music based on Māori culture and colonial ideals, the latter primarily by portraying nature and physical landscape through sound. This paper will explore the durability of the two approaches by looking closely at Hill’s Waiata Poi (1904) and Exhibition Ode (1906) and Lilburn’s Aotearoa Overture (1940) and Cicadas, Oscillators and Treefrogs (1967).It will investigate how musical works based on social circumstances become memories and how musical works based on permanent features become timeless. It will also discuss how each approach endures acceptability through the passage of time.

Anne BrennanLest We Forget: Military Myths, Memory and Canberra’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Memorial

On the southern slope of Mount Ainslie behind the Australian War Memorial in Canberra is a small unofficial memorial to the indigenous people who served in the Australian military services. Erected in 1988 during the Australian Bicentennial year by a group of mostly white citizens of Canberra, it is nothing more than a small bronze plaque on a rock. Its position locates it within the complex commemorative matrix of Canberra’s Parliamentary Triangle, which includes Anzac Parade and the Australian War Memorial. This is a precinct saturated in official commemorative narratives of Australian military history, narratives which still largely exclude the contribution of indigenous servicemen and women.

At first the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Memorial remained virtually unknown, except to a small group of Canberra citizens who happened to stumble across it. However, over the years, history and identity politics have caught up with it, and it has become a quasi-official memorial, used strategically by the Australian War Memorial, the Australian Armed Services and indigenous servicemen and women for different purposes. Most interestingly, the original history of the memorial has been lost beneath a palimpsest of different stories, each of which shapes the memorial to the different purposes of its stakeholders.

At the same time, Mount Ainslie has become a de facto extension of the official commemorative precinct, its topography overlaid with memorials to other more mainstream aspects of Australia’s military engagements. This paper explores the way in which the meanings of the ATSI Memorial have shifted over time, and contextualises these shifts within both Canberra’s official commemorative precinct and the topography of Mount Ainslie itself.

Tony WhincupResearch interests are primarily concerned with issues of self-definition and indigenous knowledge systems. For the past 25 years his photo-ethnographic practice has been based primarily in Kiribati. In 2008 he was awarded the ‘Kiribati Order of Merit’, for services to the country. His work emerges at the interface of the disciplines of photography and anthropology. He uses gallery, publication and the conference as sites to communicate his ethnographies.

Anne Brennan Artist and writer. She is the Head of the Art Theory Workshop at the Australian National University School of Art. Her research interests engage with the overlap between individual and collective memory and the ways in which they find expression in artefacts such as memoir, testimony, archives and memorials.

Tony WhincupBridging the Gap: Maintaining Connections with the Dead

The title of this paper, ‘Bridging the Gap’, is intended to suggest the inevitable gulf between the living and the dead. The disjunction imposed by death upon an established and significant relationship is discussed as a threat to an individual’s sense of self-definition and recognition.

The paper is as much a photographic essay as it is a written discourse. The presentation will include a wide range of original photo-ethnographic material which draws upon the little documented burial practices on the remote islands of Kiribati as a case study. In particular, this case study will focus upon the social implications of contemporary and shifting trends in the selection and use of materials for memorialisation on these atolls.

Underpinning this paper is the belief that being able to remember lies at the heart of our survival, our humanity and our individual identity. It is argued that as memory is closely tied to self-definition, the maintenance of memories is of vital concern to social groups and individuals. The fear of losing the memory of significant events and people gives rise to strategies implicating enduring tangible materials in their maintenance.

The paper proposes that the extent to which strategies are developed to maintain a connection with the dead is in direct relationship to the significance of the deceased to a personal or public sense of self. To this extent the mnemonics of memorialisation are argued to hold a profound and significant social role as containers of memory.

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Danielle Drozdzewski Dr Danielle Drozdzewski is a lecturer in Human Geography at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. Her main research areas are cultural geography, geographies of memory and identity, cultural memory, national identities and multiculturalism. Other research interests include qualitative and ethnographic methodologies, heritage and war tourism. She researches in Kraków, Poland, as well as in Australia.

Peter WoodDr Peter Wood is a senior lecturer in Architectural History, Theory and Criticism in the School of Architecture at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. This paper draws upon his current research into the visual culture of New Zealand architectural identity.

2.3 Siting Memory

Danielle DrozdzewskiSites of Memory: Dis(re)membering at Płaszów, Poland

The localisation of collective cultural memories in public spaces occurs most commonly through coordinated rituals of remembrance and at specific memory sites. In most countries, the commemoration of war occurs at specifically designated national lieux des memoire (sites of memory) (Nora, 1992). In this paper, I examine the Płaszów concentration camp as a site of memory positioned within the encroaching everyday urban façade. The power of former concentration camps lies in their ‘materiality’ as commemorative sites of “immutable evidence [and] unmediated testimony of what happened there” (Farmer, 1995, p. 98). Yet, there is little remaining material evidence of Płaszów’s traumatic past at the site. Despite its apparent bareness, remembrance of the macabre events of World War II has not been forsaken at Płaszów.

In this paper, I discuss two processes of remembering: (dis)remembering and dismembering. (Dis)remembering occurs through the processes of attrition of the material markers that once distinguished the site as a concentration camp. Dismembering at Płaszów, on the other hand, is highlighted through the openness and eerie silence of the place, which serves to draw attention to the few commemorative monuments. In this paper, I show that part of the process of remembering at Płaszów is recognising how narratives of memory are framed (and contained) by the apparent emptiness, seclusion and calm at the site. I will argue that not only is the vacuity itself a part of the commemorative process, through its suggestion of nihilism, but it has also served to emphasis the disparate parts of the other material commemorations at the site.

Peter WoodWhiteout: An Examination of the Material Culture of Remembrance Generated Between New Zealand and Antarctica

This paper examines the cultural artefacts of memory that have been produced as a result of New Zealand’s ongoing participation in the exploration of Antarctica. In this research I define two classes of Antarctic memory-making. The first is composed of geographically located artefacts directly associated to New Zealand’s physical participation in Antarctic exploration. The second class posits representational interpretations of Antarctica as sites of cultural ‘meaningfulness’ to New Zealand identity. These two categories are defined chronologically by the Antarctic Treaty (1959) which sought to protect objects of ‘historical interest’ from damage or destruction, while prohibiting the addition of other permanent artefacts. I suggest that one unforeseen outcome of the Antarctic Treaty was the creation of two states of memory: one of authentic history dating from before 1959, and another of documentary history (requiring representational interpretation) which has occurred since 1959. The best example of the former are the rudimentary huts which remain from the so-called Heroic Period of Antarctic exploration. Of the latter an excellent example is found in the Artists to Antarctica programme in which selected New Zealand artists – writers, visual artists and musicians - are extended the opportunity to visit and record their views of the region’s unique qualities. In two parts I give some critical consideration to each memory state using specific examples, and I discuss the implications they present. In the final part of my paper I introduce what I consider an ‘illegitimate’ monumentality in the example of Air New Zealand Flight 901 (which tragically collided with Mount Erebus in 1979) and which now lies uneasily between historical and documentary classifications of memory.

Akira NishimuraBattlefield Pilgrimage and Performative Memory: Contained Souls of Soldiers in Sites, Ashes, and Buddha Statues

Towards the end of the Pacific War (1941-1945), the Japanese Army was engaged in mortal combat with the Allied Forces. For many the outcome was fateful and many serving on these islands would not return home alive. Moreover, despite the Japanese military agency being ordered to retrieve the bodies of those killed, remains were not recovered properly. Hence it has been pointed out by previous study that the greater majority of the funeral urns delivered to bereaving families contained nothing but a small stone or a chunk of wood. Furthermore, the religious explanation given by the chiefs of the armed forces was desperate, claiming that while the soldier’s remains could not return home, their souls would. Consequently it is no surprise that the families and surviving comrades of the fallen regarded this explanation as unsatisfactory. And so they began to try to go to the battlefields to hold memorial services for their relatives, and to re-locate and recover their remains.

This paper focuses on the pilgrimages made by Japanese people to this key site of battle. In it I discuss how these pilgrims regard the places and the materials associated with the fallen soldiers as harbouring the souls of the dead. Finally, I will propose the ‘performative’ aspect of their memories. By applying this linguistic term to discussing this material, I aim to highlight how the active character of memory can instigate the living to perform some act that acknowledges the wishes or status of those who have passed.

Doris McIlwain Dr Doris McIlwain is a senior lecturer in Psychology at Macquarie University. Her research investigates the role of emotion, personality and memory in accessing the past, and in the overgeneralised memory phenomenon associated with depression. Her research interests include the emergence of personality styles and the selective awareness of inner processes in overcoming developmental affordances and constraints. Her recent publications address emotions, memory, masks and morality in psychopathy and Machiavellianism.

Akira NishimuraDr Akira Nishimura is an associate professor of Religious Cultures, Department of Humanities, Kagoshima University, Japan. He is author of Postwar Japan and IREI memorials for war dead: Dynamism of calming and inspiring (Yushisha, 2006). His translated papers include “Symbiosis or Segregation? Dealing with the ‘foreign’ in Nagasaki” in Alexander Henn and Klaus-Peter Köpping (Eds.) Rituals in an unstable world: Embodiment-hybridity-identity (Verlag, 2008).

Doris McIlwainA Nested Sense of Self

Psychopaths lack an integrated sense of self in different contexts, moments in time or in relation to a generalised social other. They have a ‘nested sense of self’– ‘I am the totality of what I appear to a single other in a single moment’. Things can come apart or be kept apart at the level of psychological processes. A nested sense of self arises due to an absence of self-reflection; there is no bridging between different states of awareness - affective, impulsive bundles and associated memories remain encapsulated and disconnected. This paper focuses on examining whether there is a difference between a nested sense of self and dissociation. In it I propose that psychopaths lack the textured access to the past required for planning the future. Imagining the future seems to use much of the same neural machinery as remembering the past (Schachter, Addis & Buckner, 2007). The abilities of projecting oneself into the future, theory of mind, episodic memory and navigation seem to share a common functional anatomy and emerge at the same age (4-6years), (Buckner & Caroll, 2006). All are reliant on autobiographical memory. I will argue that the psychopath’s inability to imagine emotionally compelling possible futures is due to the lack of specific, interlinked, owned personal detail and involuntarily evoked emotional connections from their past. I discuss how these factors limit mental time travel and contribute to a nested sense of self - albeit one that is “recreated in the continual flux of psychophysiological processes” (Lewis, 2005, p. 231).

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Lisa ArmitagePhD candidate in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Western Sydney. Her research into the politics of white family history in Australia is interdisciplinary, with a strong emphasis on arts-based methods of inquiry and the ethical dimensions of autoethnographic research. She is also UWS Medal recipient, 2007.

Belinda CastlesDoctoral candidate with the Writing and Society Research Group at the University of Western Sydney. Her thesis is a novel about the lives of her grandparents and an exegesis exploring the haunted nature of writing. She has completed an MA in Novel Writing at the University of Manchester and published two novels, the most recent of which, The River Baptists, won the Australian/ Vogel Literary Award.

2.4 Autobiography

Lisa ArmitageDeconstructing the Libraried Self: A Personal Story of Social Memory Contained in Australian Childhood History Texts

Family historians advise beginners to ‘start from what they know (themselves) and work backwards’. Many come to unknow themselves, as if by chance finding that their identity was not after all fixed, that it can be questioned and remade with ‘new memories’ from a personal past. What memories from the present are deployed when genealogists construct a past they have had no experience of? What constitutes ‘what they know’? How does a genealogist as a libraried self, a narrated historical subject, mediate new stories told through family history work? These questions are central to my autoethnographic study of doing family history research in colonised Australia. As a feminist and a white settler descendant, I wanted to know whether white family history research work challenged or reconstituted the official colonial narratives I grew up with. In my personal search I hoped to capture the stories of my peers, but one I found that belonged to me stopped me in my tracks. It was about murder and violence, colonial theft and dispossession, imagined cannibalism and justified savagery, my unsurprising inheritance. My research became to be about understanding how this story had been re-remembered, textually, over 185 years in a series of private and public histories that often erased my ancestor’s original crime, and his victims. In imagining their stories, my ethical imperative became to ‘unknow’ my libraried self. I returned to my childhood history texts and analyse images and my memories of them as sources of ‘understanding’ about my historical self and therefore my historical others.

Belinda CastlesWhere We Come From: The Role of Place in Family Memory

In the cellar of the Duisburg metalworkers’ union on 2 May 1933, four trade unionists, one of them my great-grandfather, were beaten to death by Nazis. I am writing a novel that covers this event and others in my family history.

Outside the cellar is a row of square iron chairs, a memorial. For me, this is a place of ghostly presence, a threshold between the violent past and the present. It is a place that contains memory: family memory, collective memory. It contains my history, and the history of my children.

This paper will explore the role of place and memory in informing my creative work, drawing on personal experiences and informed by the writing of Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer. In their memoir of Cernowitz, Ghosts of home (2010), they visit the crossroads where Hirsch’s parents made a decision that saved them from transportation to the Nazi death camps. They write movingly of the role of this place as a nexus between the generations, between past and present and between memory and place.

For those who come after, who inhabit the complexities of what Hirsch has called ‘postmemory’, being in such places can be at once disturbing and enriching, infused as they are with the contingency of survival or death. What do these sites contain? How do they inform what Hirsch and Spitzer call our ‘myths of origin’? And how might such myths feed the new memory I am making, in the form of a novel?

Ewan MorrisRevisiting Boulcott’s Farm: The Public Memory of New Zealand’s Hutt Valley War in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

The Battle of Boulcott’s Farm was an incident in the fighting that took place between Māori and Crown forces in Wellington’s Hutt Valley in 1846. The Boulcott’s Farm engagement was particularly mythologised by Pākehā, and remembered especially for the death of young Bugler Allen at the hands of a Māori attacker. Some 80 years later, a memorial was erected near the site of the battle, which now lay in the heart of the city of Lower Hutt. More recently still, the Battle of Boulcott’s Farm has featured in Lloyd Jones’s satirical novel of Hutt life Splinter (1988), and in Witi Ihimaera’s historical novel The Trowenna Sea (2009). Ihimaera’s novel represents a Māori re-imagining of the war and its aftermath. It tells the story of Hohepa Te Umuroa, who was transported to Tasmania for participating in the fighting, and whose body was returned to his Whanganui people in 1988. This paper considers different forms of public memory and forgetting in relation to the Battle of Boulcott’s Farm and the wider Hutt War. It examines the roles of memorials and of fiction and non-fiction writing, and the place of the Hutt War in Māori and Pākehā memories.

Maria McVarish Architect, artist and visual researcher practicing in San Francisco. Her projects have been published locally and nationally. She has lectured in architecture at UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design and, since 1996, teaches interdisciplinary studies, critical theory and design at the California College of the Arts.

Ewan Morris Wellington historian who is currently researching what debates about memorials and other symbols in Aotearoa New Zealand can tell us about relations between Māori and non-Māori since 1970. He is the author of Our own devices: National symbols and political conflict in twentieth-century Ireland (Irish Academic Press, 2005).

Maria McVarishHazard Figures: Heritage, Memorial and Wasting in Appalachia

At approximately 3.00 p.m. on April 5, 2010, a cloud of methane gas exploded in a mine near Montcoal, West Virginia. Twenty-five miners died instantly, and for the next five days national and international news associations tracked efforts to rescue four miners believed to have sought refuge in a nearby air pocket. It was a story we’d heard before… last year in China, four years ago in Kentucky. Judging from reports of survivors and family members, the miners had understood that where they live, injury, asphyxiation and death are the conditions of employment. In this paper, I explore concepts of value and productivity in close thematic relationship with ideas of ‘wasting’ – literal and metaphoric, human and environmental. Drawing from photographs and news stories, I argue that for Appalachian mining communities the wish for ‘contained memory’ emerges within a context of uncontained toxicity and danger. A discussion of issues connecting cultural Heritage sites in Appalachia with the necessity for mourning and memorial provides the backdrop for my scrutiny of these terms. Efforts to contain cultural memory in Appalachia are complicated by an identity of environmental and cultural degradation – the direct legacy of the coal industry and its decline. Indeed, this wasted identity persists in two of the region’s ‘growth industries’: filling un-reclaimed mine sites with garbage imported from New York and building and managing federal prison facilities. The wasting of the mine region’s society and landscape is thus reified in its use as a receptacle for out-of-state ‘refuse’.

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11 December 201010:30 am – 12:30 pm

ABSTRACTS

SATURDAY SESSION 3

Marcus MooreTwisting Memory for the “fun of it”

Taking the interview format as a transitive by-product of an artist’s life, this paper is one response to the topic of the ‘externalisation of personal memory.’ By citing selected interviews given by the 20th century artist Marcel Duchamp in the 1960s, I wish to propose a fate of memory where autobiographical facts are exposed as unreliable or deliberately misleading. “There is always a deformation,” Duchamp remarked in 1967, “a distortion, and . . . in spite of yourself, [you] change the story as you saw it, because you have not an exact memory or you want to twist it for the fun of it.” Duchamp’s habit was to obfuscate facts; with notable subtlety for art history being the subject of the creative origin of ‘the readymade’ (mass produced objects first selected by Duchamp in 1913-14 and placed in his studio, and in at least one later interview pronounced as a “happy idea”). To evaluate spoken digressions in personal memory and the repercussion of an absence of reliable facts is to further reveal the meta-irony of the artist’s author function. Furthermore, in writing on Duchamp from New Zealand, my contention is linked to one of the most peripatetic artists of the 20th century, when tracing Duchamp’s recollections in interview one regards the disposition of an artist in exile, displaced from, as much resistant to, a single cultural place.

Nina SejaResearch interests include political violence and the media, human rights and social movements, and world cinema. Nina’s dissertation, “Atrocious Images: The Authorship of Suffering,” considers images of the suffering Islamic and Arabic body in recent media and filmic representations, including those from Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, and Afghanistan. She is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Cinema Studies (Tisch School of the Arts), New York University and a Lecturer at Massey University.

Marcus Moore Academic in the fields of art history and visual culture studies, visual histories and theory. Recent essays have appeared on Duchamp in Tout-fait (Art Science Laboratory, New York, 2007), on Adrian Hall in Reading Room (Auckland Art Gallery, 2007), on Martin Mendelsberg and post-object art (ODS, Litmus, 2009), and on Frances Upritchard in Landfall (Otago University Press, 2009). He is currently Lecturer in Visual and Material Culture and Critical Studies at the College of Creative Arts, Massey University, Wellington.

Nina SejaTo Live in the Ruins: An Autobiographical Film of the Exile

The burden of memory is literally to carry the dead within one’s soul.(Sicher, 1998, p. 24)

The autobiographical film has a tendency to convey the dislocated consciousness of its directors. This is even more apparent in the creative works of those for whom exile is produced due to war. I argue that two films, one, an art video piece by a Palestinian exile Mona Hatoum, entitled Measures of distance (1988), and the other, For my children (2002), an experimental documentary by Israeli Michal Aviad, are visual representations of a nation (and the denied nation of Palestine) very much fragmented by history and politics. We can turn to Shohat and Stam’s (1994, p. 318) conception of diasporic cinema in which “fragmented cinematic forms come to homologize cultural disembodiment” as a framework in which to interrogate Measures of distance and For my children.

By comparatively analysing these two works representing different factions of Israel, I will argue that comparable concerns are evident in both films and that issues of displacement, exile, and national “longings for form” are treated using similar strategies (Naficy, 2001, p. 222). The use of competing narratives through layering of different voices and employing multiple visual representations facilitated through archival footage suggests that our body and identity is an embodiment of past political histories from which one cannot escape. In this sense, the fragmentation as articulated by Shohat and Stam means that the filmmakers’ subjecthood and the film text itself produce disembodiment. However, in these slippages lies the ability to transcend fixed notions of identity, specifically as a woman (mother, wife, daughter), whereby formal strategies encourage feminist readings.

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Peter P. Bajer Dr Peter P. Bajer is a Polish scholar who currently lives and works in Australia. He is an Adjunct Research Associate at the School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies, Monash University, Melbourne. His main areas of academic interest are: Scottish migration to Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; history of other ethnic groups (especially processes of naturalisation and ennoblement of foreigners) in Early Modern Poland; and accounts of contemporary British travellers to Central Europe.

Sally J. MorganProfessor Sally Morgan is Pro Vice-Chancellor of the College of Creative Arts, Massey University. Her research investigates the notion that cultural artefacts and processes (including ‘public’ or ‘contextual’ artworks, landscapes, performances, and films) are deliberate constructions of meaning that utilise sophisticated allusion to shared ‘social knowledge’ (context) to establish their effect. It integrates a fine art practice based on painting, performance and installation as well as a scholarly practice geared around social history, cultural studies, art theory and pedagogy.

3.1 Migratory Memory

Peter Paul Bajer‘Noli Me Condemnare’ – Migrant Memories Set in Stone: The Seventeen and the Eighteenth Century Scottish Memorials in Poland

Sally J. Morgan‘To Fill This Void Land’

In the early modern period a large number of Scots migrated to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Some sojourned there for some time, while others stayed permanently and exercised commercial business and crafts. The migration stopped in the late eighteenth century, and the Scots who remained seem to have lost their ethnic identity.

Despite the fact that this once flourishing ethnic group is now long forgotten, we can reconstruct much about its past from external repositories of memory – memoirs, travel diaries, poll-tax records, parish registers and council minutes. This paper focuses on examining artefacts in the form of memories ‘set in stone’, and comprising seventeenth- and eighteenth-century monuments belonging to some of those immigrants.

In this paper I pose the following questions: What type of memories do the monuments personify? What can we learn about the people for whom the memorials were raised and about those who erected them? To what degree do they assist us in finding out who they were and what they did? Could the knowledge contained in the epitaphs reveal the extent to which the Scots remained a distinct ethnic group and how deeply they integrated into the Polish society? By comparatively examining the memories ‘set in stone’ I aim to unlock the mystery of what happened to this diaspora, to the descendants of those for whom the epitaphs were erected.

My discussion will attempt to asses the value of such ‘contained memories’ in recreating the past, especially when cross-referenced with other, more mainstream, primary documents.

The New Zealand landscape has been irrevocably changed and shaped through the intervention of British colonisation. The same stubborn refusal of New Zealand’s 19th century British settlers to wear clothes that suited the climate, to have anything other than a Northern Hemisphere Christmas, or to orient their houses towards the warm North rather than the cold South, produced, for a period in its history, a faux Britain at odds with the reality of Aotearoa and its established Māori occupation and culture. This construction of ‘home’ was a tenuous facsimile, full of dishevelled chrysanthemums struggling to keep their composure in their overheated garden bed, next to the monstrously large lavender and the rampant nasturtiums. This was a consciously invented mimetic landscape, aspiring to Englishness but ultimately failing. In attempting to maintain the myth of the ‘Britain of the South’, these settlers created a fragile collection of embodied nostalgia in the form of introduced flora, fauna, landscapes and practices. This paper argues that in their attempt to ‘fill this void land’, the British ancestors of many modern New Zealanders created a landscape disrupted by the plaintive, domestic familiarity of another place, a distant, lost home. The paper also argues that these intrusions, that were originally wrought in the name of memory, of home, of patriotism, are largely invisible, in those terms, to their descendents; modern New Zealanders. The traces of memory of another home are still there, but can only be read as originally intended by those familiar with the original referents; recent immigrants from the British Isles, exiles who find the unexpected familiarity of elements this foreign landscape an unsettling and poignant ‘container of memory’.

MEMORY IS AN ESSENTIAL ELEMENT OF… INDIVIDUAL OR COLLECTIVE IDENTITY”

Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory

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Sarah BennettArtist and Associate Professor. She is currently Programme Leader for MA Fine Art at the University of Plymouth, UK, and link tutor for MFA Creative Practice at Transart Institute, New York, US. In her practice she explores the historical, social and cultural contexts of institutional sites. She completed a practice-based PhD in 2010.

Julie Leavitt Julie Leavitt MD is a private practice psychiatrist, Medical Director at the San Francisco-based Access Institute for Psychological Services and advanced candidate at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. Her teaching encompasses various psychoanalytic perspectives regarding creativity, sexuality and gender, and interdisciplinary treatment collaboration. Her current writing focuses on the clinical application of creativity theory and draws on the work of Wilfred Bion and Marion Milner.

3.2 Remembering Spaces

Sarah BennettWall-Wounds: The Wall as Memory Archive

My art practice is located at the intersection between human experience, the inhabitation of institutional space, and the effect of the built environment on those who inhabit such sites. It is consequently concerned with subject relationships and interactions, surroundings and discursive networks. In the absence of archival material on patients and staff in a former Victorian lunatic asylum dating from 1845, I investigate physical impressions and traces - with emphasis on the damage occurring behind doors through acts of (en)closure and aperture. These ‘wall-wounds’ are the indices of spatial and temporal control - the building’s own memory trace - the institution as self-archiving archive. This reading draws on Ricoeur’s (2006) hypothesis that through the bodily inhabitation of architectural spaces, the psyche, and the building become indelibly imprinted according to spatial practices and mechanisms. In his investigation into the phenomenology of memory, he emphasizes “what” is being remembered over “who” is remembering thus placing the “egological question” second to the phenomena - the trace - itself (Ricoeur, 2006, p. 3). This privileging of ‘what’ and ‘how’ before ‘who’ echoes my similar emphasis on the trace rather than witness accounts.

Through an embodied methodology I re-enact these ‘wall-wounds’. I collate them using stop frame animation to create projective interventions within a range of institutional settings so that the projected images are experienced in relation to other traces. My aim, in this paper, is not to mediate the memories of others, but to interrogate the conditions of immurement as well as my own experiences of institutional space.

Julie LeavittThinking Inside the Box: Objects of Mental Space in the Psychoanalytic Consulting Room

In his enigmatic appeal to psychoanalysts to work without memory or desire,Wilfred Bion (1970) warned against saturating the mental field of the analytic dyad with past and future elements. Doing so, he said, risks impinging on present sense impressions and infusing the patient’s emerging associations with specific meaning, relegating them to occurrences of knowing rather than experiences of becoming. With an eye to becoming, Bion broadened the clinical uses of projection and projective identification to conceive a model he called ‘container/contained’ in which the analyst’s mind (container) becomes a real-time, designated space for transforming patients’ projected sense impressions and memory traces (contained) into elements that may be consciously thought and felt. In this paper, I extend Bion’s notion of ‘container/contained’ to include physical and spatial aspects of the psychoanalytic environment. Drawing from clinical material, I illustrate how patients associatively link memory fragments and projections to my office; from its concrete boundaries to the objects, sounds and other sensory phenomena it houses. I argue that patients may thus experience my office as part of my mind, which ‘remembers’ facets of their lived experiences. Based on these findings I will demonstrate how, in the present clinical moment, the materiality of my office becomes an extension of the transference field in which patients’ sense impressions and memory traces become cast as contained memories, more accessible for conscious understanding in the therapeutic encounter.

Stephen TurnerContaining Memory of Settlement

This talk focuses on collective memory in a place that has been radically transformed by settlement and where memory itself is part and parcel of the make-over. Remembering isn’t passive or received but active, and forms a process of settlement too. For visitors, says Walter Benjamin, a new country is exotic, and the object of an exoticizing gaze, whilst for natives the place is perceived through layers of collective memory. The problem for settlers is that the place they come to consider their own is originally exotic to them. They now have a memory of a place made over in their own exotic image of it − at first a picturesque landscape occupied by a disappearing indigenous people. Just how an exoticized experience of landscape and its indigenous inhabitants became ‘us’ New Zealanders is forgotten today in declaring settler nature – ‘our’ identity and character − to be of nature, now primordial and pure, and quite organic. Benjamin’s formulation suggests a corrective to cultural organicism and the constructed public memory of popular national identity. The exotic place of settlers’ perception, even when familiarised and domesticated, is the lens though which settlers view history. Their collective remembering makes over the place in terms of the experience of its difference to them, not in terms of Māori experience of European difference to Māori. The gap in perception is foreclosed by the make-over, which itself constitutes national popular memory. The remembering activity of settler culture makes all the more real a made-over place while occluding its making over. An industry of historians, or memory machinery, is needed to support settler place-making, working to shape and contain memory, and to secure it against real knowledge of the making over of place. I will explore how it does so by explaining three components of national popular memory: reenactment, remediation and cultural plagiarism.

Stephen TurnerWriter, Academic; English Department, Auckland University, New Zealand.

Ha Young HwangDr Ha Young Hwang is an assistant professor in Theatre Studies at the National University of Singapore. Her areas of research include embodiment, aesthetics and efficacy of performance in the context of applied theatre. Currently based in Singapore, she is exploring culture-specific perspectives of applied theatre in Singapore and Korea to develop an intercultural consideration of social efficacy of performance in the Southeast and East Asian contexts.

Ha Young HwangForgetting and Remembering: Exploration of Memories with Elders in Singapore

Scholars have paid attention to ‘forgetting to remember’ and ‘remembering to forget’ as equally significant phenomena in the social consciousness of Singapore (Devan and Heng, 1994; Tay and Goh, 2003). The particular fluctuation of remembering and forgetting that takes place in Singapore is not irrelevant to “the relentless march toward modernization since independence in 1965”, to which continuous urbanization is integral (Chang and Huang, 2005, p. 267).

This essay draws upon the delegate’s reflections on facilitating a community performance project through which Singaporean elders remembered and shared their stories and experiences from the past. Paying attention to the specifics of the context in which the landscape keeps little or highly selected traces of history in its constant urban (re)development, she attempts to look at what it means to ‘remember’ to those elders inhabiting such an environment, how their participation in the project creates a resonance with their relationship to the past and the present and, also, how their embodied process of ‘remembering’ sheds light on the relationship between the body and memories. She also discusses practical approaches to exploring the body as an enriching site where the memories are imprinted, resonated and (re)lived within a framework of practice-based research in theatre and performance.

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Harriet Edquist Dr Harriet Edquist is Professor of Architectural History in the School of Architecture & Design, RMIT University, Melbourne and foundation Director of the RMIT Design Archives. Harriet’s practice as a writer encompasses architecture, art, craft, design and literature she has authored, co-authored or edited nine books and numerous book chapters, journal articles and conference papers including Harold Desbrowe-Annear. A life in architecture (2004), Pioneers of Modernism. The Arts and Crafts movement in Australia (2008), George Baldessin. Paradox and persuasion (2009) and Designing place. An archaeology of the Western District (2010).

Mike Evans PhD McMaster 1996. Taught at the University of Northern British Columbia, the University of Alberta, and is now Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia’s (UBC) Okanagan Campus. Together with community partners he has completed a number of publications including What it is to be a Métis (Evans et al, 1999), A brief history, of the short life, of the Island Cache (Evans et al, 2004).

Stephen Foster MFA York University 1994. Video and electronic media artist of mixed Haida and European background. His work tends to deal with issues of indigenous representation in popular culture through personal narrative. Currently an Associate Professor in Creative Studies at UBC Okanagan. He has exhibited both internationally and nationally and is a sought after lecturer and panelist on interactive documentary and Canadian contemporary indigenous art.

3.3 Recovered Memory

Harriet EdquistRemembering Murndal: ‘Home’, Place and Displacement in a Western District Homestead

Focussing on notions of ‘home’, this paper will examine the ways in which the memory of Murndal, a nineteenth-century property on the Wannon River in the Western District of Victoria, was contained, constructed and transmitted by three people who knew it well. The first was its first European owner, Samuel Pratt Winter, who established the run in 1837. The paper will argue that for Winter ‘home’ was a negotiation between the memory of his place of birth, Ireland, and colonial Port Phillip where he made his fortune and this dual allegiance was built into the fabric of the homestead and its surrounding landscaped garden. The memory of ‘home’ for the displaced Gunditjmara people was something else entirely and the existence of two letters from a Gunditjmara man recalling his life on Murndal will be contrasted with Winter’s experience. Finally, the paper will look at the way Ada Cambridge, friend of Winter and his descendents the Winter Cooke’s remembered and recast Murndal in three novels, A girl’s ideal (1883), A woman’s friendship (1889) and Sisters (1904). Writing in the late nineteenth-century when the myths of Australian identity were being forged, it will be argued that Cambridge helped to create a vision of the Australian homestead which is one now embedded in Australia’s cultural memory.

Russell RodrigoDr Russell Rodrigo is an architect and lecturer with the Faculty of the Built Environment, University of New South Wales with an interest in the architecture and philosophy of memory and place. He is designer of a number of memorial projects including the NSW Police Memorial and Gay and Lesbian Memorial in Sydney and has recently completed a research-through-design PhD in the spatialization of memory.

Linda YoungDr Linda Young is a material historian of personal and domestic aspects of the 19th century British world, with a current project on the consumption practice of middle class culture in post-gold rush Melbourne. She is also a curator and interpreter in museums and historic houses, completing a book on the history of the museumisation of houses. Deakin University in Melbourne is her base, where she is Director of the postgraduate Cultural Heritage & Museum Studies program.

Russell RodrigoBetween Remembrance and Recreation: Containing Memory in Urban Landscapes

Linda YoungIntimate Spectacles: House Museums, Heroes and Their Canons

Throughout the world, communities are increasingly concerned with remembering and documenting their histories. Monuments, memorials and interpretive sites are being created at an accelerated pace worldwide, an international phenomenon of memorialization which has developed since the 1980s and is unequalled since the decade after the First World War. In Loose space; Possibility and diversity in urban life, Karen A. Franck and Quentin Stevens explore the ways in which urban landscapes, including sites of memory and reflection, are appropriated by the everyday public for uses not originally intended. Increasingly within the urban landscape, established public spaces are being utilised as sites for the remembrance of collective trauma, producing challenges to existing understandings of the containment of individual and collective memory and public and private uses of space.

Using participant observation techniques, the research explores the relationship between public space, trauma and collective memory in urban landscapes through an examination of the communicative and experiential dynamics of recent memorial spaces in London’s Hyde Park, including the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fountain, the Australian, Canadian and New Zealand War Memorials and the July 4 Bombing Memorial. In the paper I argue that these memorials are spaces that attempt to address, in varying ways the ‘loose’ nature of public space, challenging the way in which designers need to conceive, construct, manage and understand how places of memory can be contained within urban landscapes.

Few rituals of remembering culture heroes are enacted in such an uncanny environment as the historic house museum. It invites intimate invasion to observe a spectacle of private life validated by the power of material culture, in the interest of asserting exemplary national identities. Via this mechanism, the exhibited house functions as a distinctive engine in the economy of cultural display. Thus, as Kirschenblatt-Gimblett’s view suggests, the house museum creates a spectacle that not only presents but instantiates its subject as consensual knowledge for public consumption.

In the English-speaking world, the predominant subjects of museumised houses are writers. They shoulder a burden of formulating the national voice via literary canons whose development can be tracked in the chronology of house museums. This arcane slant on authorial fame points to nationalist agendas, beginning with the houses of Sir Walter Scott in Britain and John Greenleaf Whittier in the United States. The practice of commemorating writers in dwellings they inhabited for greater or lesser periods (sometimes very short) persists today, with houses occupied by Henry David Thoreau and Elizabeth Gaskell currently in the throes of museumisation.

This paper engages with the perceptual oscillation of the house museum between specimen and the frame of specimens, object and subject, a private yet public place, to show how its simultaneously referential and differential characters render the resident hero sustainable in public attention.

Mike Evans and Stephen FosterThe Case of the Island Cache: What Do You Call the Political and Cartographic Erasure of a Community Anyway? – Geographacide?

Nothing could or should diminish our appreciation of the scale and ferocity of events like the levelling of the Warsaw Ghetto by Nazi forces in 1940. Nonetheless ethnocide can occur by far less obvious means. In 1973 the small Aboriginal community at the junction of the Nechako and Fraser Rivers in Northern British Columbia was bulldozed and burnt by authorities. This was accomplished by dint of political domination, and a steadfast denial that the community was a viable or valuable one. Our tale of the erasure of the “Island Cache” is offered carefully, mindful of the contexts for other conversations about ethnocide and genocide. The destruction of this small Island community, a Métis and non-Status Indian ghetto, shares many characteristics with acts of Genocide and Ethnocide. Indeed it occurred in the context of a wider Canadian colonial history that includes acts that fall within many definitions of genocide as, for example, the Indian and Métis Residential School Systems. The erasure of the Island Cache involved the displacement and relocation of the people, and the death of the community, though interestingly not the culture or memory of the peoples involved. Here there are parallels with Métis/Aboriginal history in Canada more generally. In this paper we argue that the story of the Island Cache may be instructive, especially in terms of some of the more subtle elements of the colonial processes implicated in more extreme examples of the elimination of people and their communities.

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Chris Paulin Marine biologist with the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, and has published over 100 scientific papers and popular articles, and several books on New Zealand fishes. His current research focuses on the design and function of traditional Māori fishhooks made of wood, bone, stone and shell.

Ross Hemera (Ngai Tahu)Ross’s practice honours and reflects the cultural and artistic traditions of his iwi. In this respect Ngai Tahu tribe has sought his leadership regarding the development of Ngai Tahu arts. Ross has undertaken several significant public commissions, including the Whakamarama sculpture in the Māori section of the Museum of New Zealand / Te Papa Tongarewa, and the “Tuhituhui Whenua” mural on the new Christchurch Civic Building.

Pamela Gerrish NunnWhose War?

The nation-state has long favoured the commemoration of the major nation-making event of war. It has expected to orchestrate the creation of these memorials, and to shape the elements of the collective memory. To speak, visually or otherwise, about national conflict, is to speak of and for the nation: it is an act of citizenship. In the making of this discourse, the female voice was traditionally deemed downright ineligible, inappropriate or inauthentic. The idea that women must mutely and passively embody what men should be prepared to die for has been key to establishment dogma, and this embraced the making of memories defining the conflicts in which the nation asserted itself. Close examination of British history shows, however, that from the mid 19th century some individual women insisted on contributing to the collective memory of war in the high-level cultural field of painting, long used for the purpose of fixing the national memory. The three cases of Elizabeth Thompson, depicting recent, current and past wars between 1874 and 1885; Lucy Kemp-Welch, making propaganda for the 1914-18 war; and Laura Knight, determined to document the Nuremberg trials that closed the book on the 1939-45 war, show that when women did speak about war they did not do so in a monolithic voice, as a homogenous, undifferentiated Other, but that each disputed in her own way the ownership of war and the right to describe it.

3.4 Collective Memories

Ross HemeraPupuri Pohewa: Collective Memory

Hold onto the ability to imagine, to create, and to dream through the continuum of collective memory.

The cultural practices associated with ancient Māori rock drawings substantiate the Māori worldview about referring to past generations as a means of genealogical belonging and connectedness. The cultural imperative in such a view is echoed in the well-known Māori proverb ‘taonga tuku iho’, gifts handed down. An expanded meaning of this proverb expresses the idea about holding onto the knowledge handed down to us by our ancestors and passing it on to the generations to come. Māori recognise the inferred implication as being a matter of survival. Hence the essence of ‘taonga tuku iho’ is a central part of the creative practice of many of today’s Māori artists.

In this presentation I will talk about my own creative and artistic practice as one that responds to taonga, the drawings left on rock surfaces by my ancestors, the Waitaha people. I will discuss how as Ngai Tahu my artistic practice, related to these taonga, draws on an inherent cultural context. This context provides a genealogical link to ancient drawings and, as such, a connection also to the knowledge surrounding them. Specifically I will introduce the notion that through the recognition of this connectedness comes a responsibility. For the artist tied into this continuum the obligations are to retain and treasure the ability to imagine, to create and to dream.

Elina Liikanen PhD student at the University of Helsinki (Finland) and the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain). Her dissertation discusses representations of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship in the third-generation Spanish novel.

Pamela Gerrish Nunn Dr Pamela Gerrish Nunn is an independent scholar and resident of Christchurch, New Zealand. Until 2009 she was Professor of Art History at the University of Canterbury. She is known internationally for her work on women artists in the 19th and 20th centuries. Her publications include Victorian women artists (1987), Problem pictures (1996) and From Victorian to Modern (2006).

Elina LiikanenThe Spanish Maquis as a Case of Intermedial Construction of Collective Memories

During the Franco dictatorship (1939-1975), the Spanish maquis – the antifrancoist guerrillas – were described in the official media as bandits. Even if the figure of the maquis acquired almost legendary features in the oral memory of some rural communities, the dominant image was that of a bunch of savage criminals.

In Spain, the first ten years after the transition to democracy were characterized by a collective desire to leave aside the troublesome past. However, since the mid-1980s the country has experienced a memory boom, mainly due to the interest of a new generation of social actors”– the grandchildren of the war”– in the atrocities committed by the dictatorship. The attempts of this generation to ‘recover’ the lived memories of the violent past, already on the brink of disappearance, and to fix them in media in order to preserve and transmit them to the future generations, has brought about major changes in the collective imaginary, affecting also the representation of the maquis.

This paper examines the changes in the collective memory of the maquis after the dictatorship, as well as the process of remediation – as Astrid Erll calls the constant retelling of a set of memorable events across a variety of media and genres – brought along by the obsessive memorialization of the past. By sketching out a small genealogy of remediations in literature, film and historiography, I hope to offer an insight into the processes by which a new collective imaginary of maquis has been constructed since the mid-1980s.

Chris Paulin Contained Memory: Using Cross-Disciplinary Analysis of the Traditional Maori Fishhook Design and Function to Recover Knowledge and Identify Cultural Change

It is ironic that present day fisheries consider metal ‘circle hooks’ an advance in hook design, when it is rather a re-discovery of a much older technology, one which can be found within authentic Māori fishhooks (matau). In 1777 William Anderson, ship’s surgeon on board the Resolution during James Cook’s third voyage of discovery, noted that Māori “… live chiefly by fishing, making use ... of wooden fishhooks pointed with bone, but so oddly made that a stranger is at loss to know how they can answer such a purpose…” After the introduction of metals by Europeans for manufacturing fish hooks, traditional hooks made of wood, bone, stone and shell were discarded. Māori continued to make fishhooks following traditional circle hook design, but using new materials, until the overwhelming number of mass produced steel hooks led to the nature of the original design and function of the traditional hook being lost. By using current knowledge of the ecology and feeding strategies of New Zealand fishes we can unlock the knowledge held within the taonga, determine how original or traditional Māori hooks functioned, and identify matau made for fishing. This understanding helps us to determine which hooks may be replicas or forgeries, made for sale to tourists and collectors by both entrepreneurial Māori, and European forgers. Many hooks (and other traditional tools) have been incorrectly interpreted as decorative, ceremonial or even magico-religious objects which has influenced the design of many present day hei matau worn as symbols of Māori cultural revival.

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Rawiri TaonuiDr Rawiri Taonui is the former head of Māori and Indigenous Studies at the University of Canterbury. His research includes oral traditions, postcoloniality and indigenous human rights. Dr Taonui has won six writing awards: the Maharaia Winiata Memorial Prize (University of Auckland 1992, 1993), three Qantas Media Awards (2001, 2007 and 2008) and a New Zealand Montana Book Awards for Best Historical Book (2007) as a contributor to K. Howe (ed) Vaka moana – The settlement of the Pacific.

Rawiri TaonuiNga Tatai Whakapapa: Memory Dynamics in Maori Oral Tradition

This paper examines existing paradigms for understanding Māori oral memory, whakapapa (genealogy) and traditions, including the Myth and Tradition model from Bruce Biggs (1966) The New Zealand encyclopaedia and Ranginui Walker (1990) Ka Whawhai tonu mātou; Margaret Orbell’s philosophical model (1985) A new approach to Māori oral tradition; and Te Maire Tau’s Realms of Myth and History model (2003) Ngā pikitūroa o Ngāi Tahu. These approaches promote a Western linear sequence proceeding from the remote past to the present. While helpful none takes account of how oral traditions and memory shape each other over multiple generations because of tendencies in the literature to over-historicize tradition was with Percy Smith (1921) Hawaiki and David Simmons (1976) The great New Zealand myth, or, over-mythologize orality as with Margaret Orbell (1985). These paradigms are appraised against Jan Vansina Oral tradition as history (1985) whose work in African orality noted a marked narrowing he termed the “Floating Gap” delineating a transition between time indexed and timeless oral traditions. Vansina contends the Floating Gap proceeds forward in time relative to ongoing present time. Drawing on that work, this paper proposes a new analytical approach that historical oral memory is best understood by proceeding from the present back into the past. Three features are highlighted: a three tier shape in collective genealogical memory; narratives that characterise each tier; and key points at which interlocking matrices of genealogy narrow and become more variable and symbolic.

Adeline RemyBrussels, Belgium. Upon receiving a Masters in History and a Masters in Anthropology at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, she was awarded a four-year doctoral grant from the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS) to pursue a PhD in Social Anthropology at the ULB. Adeline is currently in her third year of study and is living in London. She is honorary research associate in the Department of Anthropology, University College, London.

Bryan H. MassamDr Bryan Massam is University Professor Emeritus and Senior Scholar at York University, Toronto and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Bryan has published a number of academic books, articles and reports on the public good, planning of public facilities, environmental assessment, civil society, theory and applications of multi-criteria analysis for decision making. He is author of several short books of poetry, short stories and fictional autobiography.

Brian J. Hracs Brian J. Hracs holds a PhD in Geography and Planning from the University of Toronto, Canada. His doctoral research examined the working lives of independent musicians in Toronto. Brian has published a number of articles about music, and on topics relating to economic development, cultural activities in rural areas, public space and gentrification. Currently Brian is a post-doctoral fellow working with Professor Richard Florida-the director of the Martin Institute of Prosperity, University of Toronto, Canada.

Adeline RemyRituals and Commemorative Performances: The European Memories of an Act of Resistance in World War I I

Bryan H. Massam and Brian J. HracsCultural Facilities and Collective Memories

My PhD research focuses on the creation and sharing of memories between three related European commemorative associations, made up of former resistance members, their descendents and friends, in response to a clandestine organization operating in Belgium, in the Basque Country and in England during World War II. It seeks to analyze comparatively the commemorative practices of those, in order to figure out how descendants remember their parent’s past and how they succeed in transmitting it. Moreover, through the act of remembering, I examine the three organisations, their trans-generational structure, and ongoing interactions, and their positions regarding the national and European memories in an age of Globalization. My argument is based on employing a multi-site perspective to the archival material. This comprises a close reading of the mnemonic discourses and narratives made by the members of these trans-generational associations as well as the observation of their annual commemorations. My research is thus argued as an ethnography of memory, and, in particular, an anthropology of commemoration and transmission of a heroic resistance past within a transnational perspective. My aim is to show how the memory works of these three related associations is based on using similar and different ‘rituals’ to remember and to transmit the practices and emotions of a common past.

The late 20th century has seen a renaissance in cultural facilities such as art centres, museums and theatres that complement libraries, public spaces, public art and monuments in many cities around the world. Each, in its own way, provides an opportunity to store, to display and communicate information about culture and collective memories. We suggest that cultural facilities can raise public consciousness about memories by reflecting values, attitudes and priorities as well as public policies and private initiatives, which impinge on the quality of life of individuals and groups. We argue that the presence of such facilities can encourage a society to engage in civic debates about memories and their significance in the life of a society. We will examine the question: can cultural facilities help us understand memories of the past and prepare us for the future while reflecting the current world? Highlighting selected examples from Toronto, Canada’s largest city, we will discuss the role cultural facilities play in storing and reflecting on memories of the citizenry as the population of this city has grown and diversified over time. Over 40% of the population of Toronto was born outside Canada hence it is not surprising that there are a range of collective memories that may challenge civic harmony. We will consider the ways in which economic, social, political and environmental issues have been interpreted as memories, and current efforts to create new images of the city as it faces the future challenges of reconciling individual rights with obligations to enhance civic pride, as well as collective and personal happiness and prosperity.

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11 December 20103:00 pm – 5:00 pm

ABSTRACTS

SATURDAY SESSION 4

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Jordy SilversteinRemembering and Containing the Holocaust: What is the Use of Chronological Narratives?

Can the Holocaust be contained? Contained, perhaps, within chronological narratives. In this paper I will explore the ways that a sense of the Holocaust as a chronology is put forward in the space of the Jewish high-school classroom as a means of passing onto students a contained idea of what the Holocaust was, and how it should be understood. In this space, chronological narratives are made to do the work of holding together memories of the collective, and thus holding together a diasporic community: a community brought together by memory.

But what if this idea of the Holocaust as known chronology was challenged? What new spaces could be opened up? What new ways of thinking about Holocaust memories and meanings?

In this paper I will describe the ways in which teachers of the Holocaust in Jewish schools in two diaspora spaces – Melbourne and New York – present the Holocaust as a defined and known chronology of events. I will then work towards a deconstruction of what such a chronology entails, and suggest that it works in these particular contexts as a means of providing, in a sense, a safe space. The ability to know, to remember, the Holocaust as a contained event, contained within a chronology, provides a measure of comfort to these traumatised diasporic communities. These chronologies, it will be argued, attempt to work against the unknowability of the Holocaust that has been documented and explored so well by various theoreticians. And this work is undertaken, it can be understood, as a means of providing a safe, contained, memorial space.

Elâ KaçelDr Elâ Kaçel is an assistant professor at the Bahçeşehir University, Istanbul. She received her PhD in the History of Architecture from Cornell University in 2009. Drawing on case studies from postwar Turkish modernism, her research considers the role of intellectuals in the context of social change, taking into regard the role of cultural politics, consumerism and visual culture in the production of knowledge and space.

Jordy Silverstein Completed PhD in History at the University of Melbourne in late 2009. She is currently working as a research assistant at Monash University and Macquarie University, and lecturing in gender history at the University of Melbourne.

4.1 Migratory Memory

Elâ KaçelAfterimages of Migration: A Visual Critique of Sites of Amnesia

Architecture has an ambiguous relationship to migration. It normalizes both the material working and living conditions of the migrant, as well as their alienation from the urban experience. This paper calls for a visual criticism of architecture and urbanism by addressing a series of critiques of modernity in relation to Turkish guest workers by photo-essayists such as John Berger, Jean Mohr, Candida Höfer, and Mehmet Emir. The photographers – who, like ethnographers, migrate each day into the everyday situations of the guest workers – witness in situ the sensory awakening that occurs in the mundane. When photographing themselves, the migrants steer clear of the circumstances of their everyday work and life in their snapshots as they sought to create a visual mise en scène as well as a contrived memory, photographing themselves in front of palaces, parks, and monuments, and sending these carefully composed photos to their families back home. The construed mise en scènes which show up in migrants’ photographs are circumvented in the ‘mental maps’ of the city drawn by Turkish guest workers in Cologne. Through these maps and documentary photographs, it becomes clear that the isolation of early guest workers from urban life was further perpetuated by the postwar housing blocks built in the outskirts of the city which served as sites of amnesia. By contrasting the aspirations and techniques of the photographers with the migrants, I seek to shed light onto the potentialities of a visual critique that becomes evident as the amnesia turns into common sense among migrants.

LIFE WITHOUT MEMORY IS NO LIFE AT ALL … OUR MEMORY IS OUR COHERENCE, OUR REASON, OUR FEELING, EVEN OUR ACTION. WITHOUT IT, WE ARE NOTHING.”Luis Buñuel, Memoirs

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Robert Gassner Studied Architecture and Fine Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen He practised as an architect and has been involved in art and publication projects. He is recipient of a doctoral award from the Royal Academy. He is currently teaching at its Institute for Building Culture and is working on his doctoral thesis.

Nicole Sully Dr Nicole Sully is a lecturer in the School of Architecture at the University of Queensland and a member of the ATCH research centre. Nicole’s research focuses on the interdisciplinary relationship of architecture and memory; pathologies of place and the ethics of heritage.

Bauhaus-trained architect Edvard Heiberg built a house for his young family in 1939. Heiberg’s design experimented with dimishing roles of the nuclear family in a socialist system in Denmark, which he had hoped for, but which never materialised. The scenario of this alternative family home only lasted for a year, before war, exile and personal events dispersed the family members, some of whom never lived in the house again.

Reflecting on these eroded design premises and based on ethnographic interviews with its current inhabitants (members of the architect’s family), the paper builds an understanding of the home as an ongoing process and explores activities of remembrance, which the family involved their house in over time. In addition to the house’s materiality and material culture these concern plans of the house originating in the architectural project and other graphic representations produced by its inhabitants. Through a close examination of this material I will argue that processes of remembrance partly bridge time frames across generations and thereby offer an alternative to temporal chronology. Moreover, by using Alfred Gell’s Models of material as ’extended mind’ (1998) and of works as sets of relational protentions and retentions, I aim to trace the intentionalities of inhabitants and architect into the biographical nodes found in the case study. I will show that these intertwined agencies, partly effective through memories of late family members, are negotiated and contested through specific manners of involving material into intimate transactions between present and absent family members and other people.

4.2 Remembering Spaces

Robert GassnerDwelling as Assembling Memory across Time Frames: The Heiberg house in Vanløse, Denmark

Nicole SullyReversible Metaphors: The Language of Architecture, Space, and Memory

The disciplines of philosophy and psychology frequently discuss the practices of the mind in terms of spatial and architectural metaphors and analogies. The architecture of the brain, the storehouse of memory, the space of knowledge are all frequently employed terms. These metaphors and analogies have also infiltrated more specific understandings of knowledge, with terms such as: foundations, fields, boundaries and zones. These examples reveal a linguistic alliance between space and the very essence of knowledge; an alliance which is fortified in the study of memory. This relationship between architecture, space and memory has further developed in recent decades. The discipline of architecture has seen a veritable explosion of interest in the relationship between space and memory. Concepts of memory have become not only a design tool but also a way of reading architecture, both theoretically and experientially. Drawing on philosophical writings of mind, knowledge and memory by the likes of Locke and Plato, this paper will firstly investigate the longstanding tradition of discussing the processes of the mind in terms of spatial and architectural language. Secondly it will explore the relationship between this tradition and the contemporary interest in the affiliation of architecture and memory in order to critically discuss the relationship between space, culture and memory.

Alan WeberDr Alan Weber has taught English, History and the History of Medicine at the Weill Cornell Medical College Qatar for the last four years. He has published widely on Persian Gulf education and culture. He held previous appointments at Cornell University, Pennsylvania State University and State University of New York-Binghamton. His current research interests include cross-cultural communication in health care, history, and doctor-patient relations.

Suzanne MacAulay Dr Suzanne MacAulay is an associate professor of Art History and Chair of the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. From 1994 to 2003, she was Head of the Quay School of the Arts, Wanganui Polytechnic (now UCOL). Her research interests are performance theory and personal narrative, memory, diaspora, class, globalization, and material culture studies, particularly, Spanish Colonial textile revitalizations and Māori weaving traditions.

Suzanne MacAulayMemory as a Sense of Place: Migration and Narration in Whanganui, New Zealand

I came on what they call an LSD trip, which is Look, See, and Decide.That’s what they call it! I was like her [his wife’s] … her satellite camera because I had to go back to South Africa and memorize everything that I had seen. (Andrew Brown, personal communication, March 15, 2001).

This paper focuses on the process of remembering through narration. Material for this presentation is based on my ethnography of an immigrant sector of global diasporic academic and medical professionals living and working in Whanganui, New Zealand, since the early 1990s. In terms of a new conceptual perspective, I treat these narratives as ‘artefacts’ and performance texts, which evoke meaning from the creative processes and aesthetic practices of the art of storytelling. As sensory artefacts (verbal, aural, emotional), these narratives are analogous to containers of memory such as tangible objects like photographs and journals. The process of narrating memory in terms of multiple perspectives of place is also a major theme of this study. For example, Brown’s statement of creating memories for the future contrasts with the usual practice of recollection of the past. His reconnaissance visit to New Zealand from South Africa anticipates and gathers memories to share with his wife back home. He collects mnemonic information in light of their future emigration while still gauging present realities in both countries. Other expatriate narrative themes pertain to actively creating a temporal sense of place through memory making by conjuring past and present meaning in light of forecasting the future.

Alan S. WeberBedouin Memory Between City and Desert

The discovery of oil in the Persian Gulf region in the 1920s-30s ushered in more change in two generations than the Bedouin tribes had experienced since the founding of Islam. Urban centers rapidly expanded and new national boundaries disrupted the migration routes of hundreds of thousands of stateless nomadic desert dwellers (Bidoon). As Bedouin lifestyle became a memory within living memory after petroleum production began to dominate all areas of Gulf life, Arabs of Bedouin heritage sought to memorialize a romanticized past by constructing heritage villages, adopting the Saudi Nejdi dress of thobe and abaya, and enforcing pre-Islamic social customs. Oral history is still one of the few avenues of memory available to present-day Arabs of Bedouin heritage due to low literacy rates. However, Gulf social structure constitutes a complex hybrid tradition. Gulf Arabs imagine their past selves as either the urbanized, cosmopolitan Arab in the littoral regions growing wealthy from pearl harvesting, date farming, and trade, or they adopt the orientalist image of the fierce, independent and loyal Bedouin peripatetic warrior and his camel. In addition, coastal Arabs make a distinction between tribes like themselves with clear blood lines (nasab) and huwala, Arabs who have settled in neighboring Urdu, Farsi and Baluchi-speaking regions of Persia (Iran) and Baluchistan. Bedouin stereotypes, however, have entered institutional memory as elite Emiri guards throughout the region are now being drawn from traditional Bedouin tribes. Based on field research, oral histories and western travellers’ accounts circa 1820-1940, this paper examines how oral memory in this region both builds and obscures the multilayered past of the Bedouin tribes of the Gulf region.

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Paulo Cesar Endo Dr Paulo Cesar Endo is a psychoanalyst and Professor of Psychology at the Psychology Institute of University of São Paulo, Brazil. His research encompasses Psychoanalysis, Art and Politics. He is a member of an interdisciplinary and independent group struggling for human rights and the abolition of institutional violence and torture. Paulo is also an expert in psychology for the Centre of Justice and International Law.

Simone Drichel Dr Simone Drichel is a senior lecturer in the English Department, Otago University. She is the co-editor (with Jan Cronin) of Frameworks: Contemporary criticism on Janet Frame (Rodopi, 2009) and is currently working on a Marsden-funded project entitled “The Other Other: Postcolonialism and Ethics.” Simone is a founding member of the Postcolonial Studies Research Network at Otago University and is responsible for the Network’s 2010 event “Vulnerability: A Symposium.” She is also a co-editor of borderlands e-journal.

4.3 Recovered Memory

Paulo Cesar EndoMemory, Work of Dreams and the Testimonial Horizon in Brazil’s Post-Dictatorship

Simone DrichelJanet Frame and Ethical Remembrance

Between 1964 and 1985 Brazil lived under the military and coupist’s regime. During this period thousands of people were threatened, harassed, arrested and tortured. In addition to those killed, there are many who are still missing.

Except for the initiative of some human rights groups connected to former political activists or relatives of the dead, the country fell silent to the dramatic crimes occurring during that period. However the last ten years have witnessed resurgence in this issue. Testimonials are being published, debates organised, and research groups formed to bring the topic back on the agenda. These activities culminated in the trial, conducted by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, into the murders and disappearances of the Araguaia Guerillas.

This paper focuses on one of the many facts surrounding the period of the dictatorship in Brazil. In it I discuss what I term the dream production of this period, namely the reports of dream of former political prisoners and their relatives in the post-dictatorship period. My discussion centres on the trauma contained in these dreams and the struggle between memory and psychic oblivion brought on by experiencing atrocity. My paper thus emphasizes the power of dream-work in understanding the personal reports of political prisoners and proposes that dreams play a significant role in testimonial production, the preservation of memory and oblivion avatars.

Never one to shy away from a challenge, Janet Frame reserved for last what is arguably the most ambitious project of her career: the deconstruction of Western conceptions of truth and knowledge. Taking us on an imaginary return to the origin of Western civilisation as we know it - the Biblical Garden of Eden - she introduces us, in her final novel, The Carpathians, to the myth of the Memory Flower and asks what may have been if, “in the beginning,” humans had gained not knowledge but memory. Behind this question, I suggest, stands a desire for an ethical sociality (the likes of which we find fully developed in the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas) to replace the violent sociality that is engendered by the knowing subject. Knowledge, for Frame as much as for Levinas, creates an objectifying relationship that allows the knowing subject to “possess” the known other while remaining unaffected by, and therefore indifferent to, the other’s needs. Memory, by contrast, can found an ethical sociality because it is fundamentally other-directed: memory is not “a comfortable parcel of episodes to carry in one’s mind” but instead is “coded in a code of the world,” thus enabling “a passionately retained deliberate focus on all creatures and their worlds to ensure their survival” (Frame, 2005, p. 244). Ultimately, what is at stake in the novel is the transformation of a subjectivity that knows the world into a subjectivity that takes responsibility for the world by remembering a past it never knew.

Anne-Kathrin Wielgosz Teaches in the interdisciplinary Division of Language and Letters at Walsh University, a small private Liberal Arts College in North Canton, Ohio, US.

Jacqueline Power Completed a Bachelor of Interior Architecture graduating with Honours Class 1. She is currently a member of the Interior Architecture program at the University of New South Wales and a PhD candidate. Her PhD research, for which she is receiving an Australian Postgraduate Award, is investigating Australian Indigenous interiors. Jacqueline also works in the New South Wales Government Architect’s Office (GAO) - Specialist Services Heritage Group.

Anne-Kathrin Wielgosz The Museum Junkerhaus: Monument to an Unhappy Love

From the 1950s to the 1970s the sign, ‘Monument to an Unhappy Love’, hung in front of the Junkerhaus referencing the inhabitant’s unrequited love for his master’s daughter while a carpentry journeyman in Hamburg. Built in 1890 by architect, woodcarver, and painter Karl Junker (1850-1912), the Junkerhaus is a ‘museum-house’ integrating living and creative spaces, and is situated just outside the historic centre of Lemgo. Orphaned as a boy and rejected as architect and artist as a man, Junker earned himself the reputation of a tight-lipped recluse who, at age forty, set out on his last most singular and single-minded project: to design, build, furnish, and decorate his house without concession for artistic tradition. Here he lived and worked for the remainder of his life.

With an enormous marriage bed and a beautifully carved cradle, both of which, as the rest of the furniture, are solid and grounded in stasis for a settled existence, Junker appeared to ready himself for a life that never arrived and that he, a bachelor, never needed. Thus, the space became a repository for a longing infused with such interiority and confinement that at its centre could be nothing but Junker’s most intimate and hidden ‘window-view’ painting of a domestic scene. Arrested in the past, the Junkerhaus contains a memory that belongs to a lost time and inevitably intertwines it with the very materiality of the house. Perhaps it was only a potential one, an ‘it could have happened this way,’ along with the marks of a family life that never existed. If so, the house, like no other, was built on the subjunctive.

Jacqueline PowerArchitectural Myopia: The Contested Authenticity of a Tasmanian Mia-Mia

In December 2009 media reports broke the news that a fragile structure on a traditional Aboriginal hunting ground in western Tasmania had been found. The structure was located on private land under consideration for clear-felling and plantation. After the discovery of the structure, believed to be of Tasmanian Aboriginal origin and between 200 and 400 years old, attempts were made to have the structure and its associated hunting grounds formerly assessed and protected under heritage legislation. The discovery of the structure was publicized through the media in an attempt to have it assessed prior to commencement of clear-felling, however the mia-mia (as it was termed in media reports) was all but destroyed by several acts of vandalism after knowledge of its existence entered the public domain. The structure is now nothing more than a memory, its tangible presence erased and its authenticity unlikely to ever be sufficiently determined. The events reveal the existence of myopia of memory and cultural expression, in the denial to recognize the authenticity of the building until proved otherwise, and appreciate the important story it might tell of its inhabitants and society. By providing a description of the building and its setting, including valuable photographs taken of the site (both prior to and after the acts of vandalism), the discussion will reveal that memory in contemporary society is limited to what is culturally tolerable and perhaps convenient. What does not fit the prevailing orthodoxy is ignored, lost, or as in this case, subject to vandalism.

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Stephanie PrattContaining and Accessing Memories of Blackfoot Life at the Time of Treaty Seven,1877: The Case of Crowfoot’s Shirt and Exeter’s museum

My paper examines a historically significant item of Blackfoot material culture that is held within the World Cultures collections at Exeter’s Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery since the signing of Treaty Seven in 1877 with the Blackfoot in Southern Alberta, Canada. The handing over of or possible trading for this highly personal and historic set of clothes by one of the most important Blackfoot leaders of that era occurred at a time of change and adaptation to Reservation life by the Blackfoot. Its entry into Exeter Museum’s collections happened at what was a founding moment for the museum and is still seen as one of its greatest treasures. In focussing on this ceremonial item, I will explore the ways that these treasured objects, shirt, leggings, eagle feathers, and bear claw necklace have functioned to contain Blackfoot, British and Canadian memories regarding Canada’s foundation as a nation and also those of a leader who attempted to protect and support his people through a difficult time in their history. I will argue that further memories are held in suspension from that time that can only be unlocked by the knowledge-holders of the Blackfoot people as well as by trained professional Blackfoot curators who have not as yet been able to examine the items in person. Using recent museum projects that have brought indigenous scholars, curators and knowledge-holders to the UK to view items held in collections in this country as an example, and by following the dialogue between the newly established Siksika Nation Museum and Exeter’s Museum curators, I propose that it is possible to assess and unlock the deeper, hidden memories contained in these treasured artefacts.

Stephanie PrattDr Stephanie Pratt is an art historian of Dakota (Sioux) ancestry working in the UK as a lecturer and researcher. At present I am researching the painted Indian Gallery of the artist, George Catlin, who also collected objects of material culture from the peoples who he painted which he then exhibited, and took abroad to Britain and the continent in the mid-19th century. I have published widely in the field of the visual representation of Native American/First Nations peoples in European and American art and have produced one monograph, American Indians in British Art, 1700 - 1840 (Oklahoma University Press, 2005).

Sophie Johnson Masters student in Media Studies at Victoria University of Wellington.

4.4 Mediated Memory

Sophie JohnsonRemembering the Family: Photograph Albums in the Digital Age

The family photograph album represents collective memory by gathering together images which speak of the family and its identity. In On photography (1977), Sontag describes photographs as fragments of reality which are collected and organised in albums to create narratives. Through the collective narratives of the family album, the identities of both individuals and groups are constructed. As a material object, the family album is subject to rituals and protocols relating to its creation, display and discussion. Its audience is the family itself, who share the memories it contains and participate in their creation.

As many people adopt digital means for capturing and storing images, the family photograph album as a material object is, in some ways, becoming a relic of the past. Yet some of its characteristics are being integrated into the software and hardware of digital photography. Picasa, free photograph editing software from Google, and Shutterfly, a photograph-sharing website and printing service, draw on the family album but also interact with ideas of connectivity and collaboration. In this paper I examine how these digital objects claim to replicate or replace the family photograph album as a material object. I speculate that by analyzing their traditional role as a container for memory, an understanding can be gained of their performative function in mediating family structures, narratives, and rituals.

Hokimate Pamela Harwood MSc from the University of Auckland on the ecology of urban kererū on Auckland’s North Shore. She is currently Mātauranga Māori researcher at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington, New Zealand. Her interests and research background includes the use of birds by Māori, and is at present identifying the birds in the Museum’s taonga Māori collection. Future research opportunities aim to use her findings to assist in provenancing Māori feather cloaks in national and international Museum collections.

Abbas Yazdani Dr Abbas Yazdani is an assistant professor of Philosophy at Zanjan University, and editor-in -chief of Philosophical meditations. He is author of The secret of eternity and a contributing author to Classic issues in Islamic philosophy and theology today. He is responsible for the translation into Persian of Return to reason: A critique of Enlightenment Evidentialism and a defense of reason and belief in God and Speak peace in a world of conflict, and is a frequent journal contributor.

Hokimate Pamela HarwoodNga Tohu o Nga Kairaranga: The Signs of the Weavers

The whakapapa (genealogy) and histories of iwi Māori are continued within our oral histories; and they are represented in our taonga (Māori treasures) such as toi whakairo (carving), tā moko (tattoo) and whatu raranga (weaving). This paper explores findings from the feather identification of Te Papa’s Māori cloaks (kākahu). By examining the techniques and materials used in the making of selected cloaks, I reflect on how this information can potentially tell us about the weaver, the intended wearer, events, and the time and environment in which they were living. I argue that the discovery of possible feather ‘signatures’ in kākahu means that cloaks are a tangible form of retaining histories and memories. Finally I propose that museums play an important role in unlocking and interpreting the knowledge needed to reconnect these taonga to their origins.

Abbas YazdaniThe Phenomenonology of Memory and its Relation to Belief

This paper focuses on the phenomenology of the memory faculty as one of the sources of human knowledge, and its relation to belief. What is the phenomenology of memory knowledge? Does remembering necessarily require belief? Is memory belief properly basic? Memory knowledge is to revive a mental form of something which we perceived in the past. According to Locke, memory faculty is the store-house of our mental ideas and is necessary to human knowledge.

Philosophers like Locke and Hume speculate that if a person remembers something, he ought to believe that it happened before he can be said to remember. Reid argues that memory is always accompanied by belief. “Memory is always accompanied with the belief of that which we remember, as perception is accompanied with the belief of that which we perceive, and consciousness with the belief of that whereof we are conscious” (Woozley, 1941, p.195). In infancy, or in a disorder of mind, things remembered may be confounded with those which are merely imagined. In contrast, Benjamin (1956) and Saunders (1956) criticise the view that one must believe if one remembers, and assert that memory is possible for a person without belief. I will argue that the notion of remembrance requires belief in what happened in the past; otherwise we arrive at a self-contradictory position. I will show that the doctrine of basicality of memory beliefs is untenable, because we have inferential evidence for the warrant of memory beliefs. Although our knowledge of the faculty of memory is immediate knowledge; our memory beliefs are not immediate, because mental ideas are the mediation between knower and the past objects. So, memory beliefs have ultimately inferential evidence.

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Daniel MilletteDr Daniel Millette teaches history and theory at the University of British Columbia. His primary focus is on exploring the ways through which architectural theory and knowledge are produced. He questions ‘standards’ such as Vitruvius’ De architectura, and examines the ways theoreticians and practitioners turn to unquestioned theoretic and in turn apply the same theories to discourse around memory, historic preservation and architectural conservation.

Daniel M. MilletteDe Architectura as Architectural Time Capsule: On Inventing a New Classical Memory

It is well established that archaeologists, architectural historians, heritage planners and design theorists are linked within a disciplinary gaze towards the architectural past. The link is one which is founded in the classical tradition that in turn is bounded by Vitruvius’ Ten Books on architecture: De architectura. The treatise and its dozens of translations, transcriptions and eventual transformations, form the topic of discussion in the paper. In it I focus on how the same written script has become the memory container for classical architecture. In addition the paper will explore the significance of De architectura as vessel of classical architectural knowledge extending from Antiquity to the present. Key to this discussion is the fact that versions of the treatise continue to be used as classical pattern books, or ‘proof’ of accuracy in understanding the function of ruins in informing the reconstruction of monuments, the restoration of historically significant spaces, and the contextual intactness of their contents. The paper will challenge the unquestioned use of De architectura as keeper of classical architecture memory.

Mary Celeste Kearney Associate Professor of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin. She is author of Girls make media (Routledge, 2006) and editor of the Gender and media reader (Routledge, forthcoming). She is currently at work on her second monograph, Making their debut, which explores the rise of teenage girlhood and the development of teen-girl media in the US during the mid twentieth century. Kearney’s essays have appeared in Camera obscura, Cultural studies, Feminist media studies, and Wide angle.

Tanya MarriottDigital Media Lecturer at the Institute of Communication Design, Massey University, Wellington. Her recent Masters thesis entitled Storytelling Memories focused on developing innovative ways to access museum artefact archives within an interactive and immersive context. Tanya has a background in Industrial Design and Animation, and has worked in the film and toy design industry in New Zealand and internationally.

Mary Celeste KearneyBoxed Set History: Facilitating and Containing Public Memory through DVD Special Features

Tanya MarriottLost and Found within New Media Design

Released July 2009, Mad Men’s season two DVD set includes three special features, each of which provides some historical backdrop for the series. One is entitled Birth of an independent woman, a forty-minute documentary about the rise of the US women’s liberation movement. Although this history is well known to anyone who participated in, or has studied, US feminism, the material presented in Birth of an independent woman is not part of most Americans’ knowledge about the 1960s. In fact, it’s a subject largely avoided in secondary history classes. Given that several million viewers have access to this text via Mad Men’s DVDs, it’s fascinating to consider its possible effects on public memory about feminist activism.

Expanding on Alison Trope’s theory that DVD features offer a form of popular education, as well as entertainment, this paper explores the memory work at play in Birth of an independent woman. With attention to the intercutting of archival footage and scenes from Mad Men, I argue that the film constructs an archive of feminist memory. Additionally, Birth of an independent woman flirts with performative historiography, drawing on viewers’ investments in this fictional series to facilitate their knowledge about feminist activism as well as their ethical concerns about gender oppression. Chief among the questions grounding this paper are: How do commercial entertainment media serve as repositories and facilitators of public memory? Whose memories are contained in such texts? And what’s at stake socially and politically in consumers’ reliance on such texts for knowledge about the past?

The new museum is an interactive museum. It is one that entertains. It is also one that informs the public about the past and thus reconnects museum visitors with their heritage. New-media interactive installations are not new to the museological environment. Simulated scenarios have been traditionally implemented in museum learning zones aimed at educating children. With digital technology now a part of our everyday interactions, museum visitors of all ages are now seeking the same level of augmentation from their museum installations.

Moreover new media technology has afforded a substantial development to the way museums attribute memory testimony to collections of tangible artefacts. The digital environment enables a multi-layered platform for memory testimony exploration, which connects contextually displaced artifacts to environments, individuals and society. Modern museums now have the difficult task of re-viewing their archives and translating the rich history of that archival material through an interactive narrative. The successful employment of new-media technology is hence an ever-evolving paradigm with some museums implementing this technology more effectively than others.

This paper focuses on how new-media technology is currently implemented within museum exhibition design. The paper discussion examines various projects currently installed within a museum context from the perspective of experience design generation practice, and user driven interactive development. The discussion seeks to detect good practice and formulate key areas in which to engage the audience through the development new media design.

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NAVIGATION

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RANGIMARIE 1

ANGUS ROOM 1

MAIN ENTRANCE

ALLEN STTORY ST

BLAIR ST

VICTORIA ST

CUBA ST

JERVOIS KEYCABLE ST

WAKEFIELD ST

WAITANGI PARK

CIVIC

SQ

TE PAPA

FRANK KITTS PARK

WELLINGTON HARBOUR

CITY GALLERY

RECEPTION

ANGUS ROOM 2

RANGIMARIE 2

RANGIMARIE 3

MUSEUM OF NEW ZEALAND TE PAPA TONGAREWATELSTRA CENTRE: CONFERENCE SESSIONS VENUE

MUSEUM OF NEW ZEALAND TE PAPA TONGAREWACITY GALLERY WELLINGTON

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CREDITS NOTES

CoCACollege of Creative ArtsCVPACollege of Visual and Performing ArtsMUMassey UniversitySoFASchool of Fine ArtsSU Syracuse UniversitySVMCSchool of Visual and Material Culture

PartnershipMassey University, New Zealand: School of Visual and Material Culture, College of Creative Arts.

Syracuse University, United States of America: Department of Communications and Rhetorical Studies, College of Visual and Performing Arts.

Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

Conference Organising Committee

Co-ConvenorsAssociate Professor Kingsley Baird (SVMC, CoCA, MU)Professor Kendall Phillips (Associate Dean of Research and Graduate Studies, CVPA, SU)

MembersAssociate Professor Tony Whincup (HOS, SVMC, CoCA, MU)Associate Professor Ross Hemera (SVMC, CoCA, MU)Associate Professor David Cross (SoFA, CoCA, MU)Professor Anne Noble ONZ (Director of Research, CoCA, MU)Dr. Claudia Orange DCNZM OBE (Collections and Research Group Director, Te Papa Tongarewa)Dr. Anne Demo (Professor, CRS, School of Art and Design, Department of Transmedia, SU)Associate Professor Joanna Spitzner (Chair, Art and Design, SU)

Dr. Caroline Campbell (Lecturer, School of Design, CoCA, MU)Mark Bradford (Senior Lecturer, School of Design, CoCA, MU)Heike Ulrich (Executive Administrator, SVMC, CoCA, MU)Marcus Moore (Lecturer, SVMC, CoCA, MU)Matthijs Siljee (Lecturer, School of Design, CoCA, MU)Tanya Marriot (Lecturer, School of Design, CoCA, MU)Euan Robertson (Lecturer, School of Design, CoCA, MU)

Supported byWellington City Council. United States Embassy, Wellington.

Photography page 20.Tony Whincup.

DesignMark Bradford, Joshua Noon.

ThanksPhilip Tan, Sophie Tricker, Thomas Le Bas, Tara Fowler, Vanessa Fowler Kendall.

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NOTES