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Abstract
The Displacement of Ghosts is a practice-led research project interpreting stories of people and places through vernacular and archival documentation.
It seeks to translate histories, which expand and evolve through the processes of memory and recall, into visual narrative representations as retold, reinterpreted and/or imagined by the artist as historian, archivist and/or archaeologist — exploring the concept of an open and non-linear history which remains unlocked, allowing for the feasibility of editing and reinterpretation.
The notion of a non-linear narrative was explored by Walter Benjamin in his 1940 essay, ‘Theses in the Philosophy of History’ also referred to as ‘On the Concept of History’. These non-linear narratives alongside the dialectical images found within the text, play pivotal roles in the research and practice of this project, alongside that of memory studies and archival investigation.
The research connects Pierre Nora’s writing on ‘Les Lieux de Memoire’ (Realms of Memory) and Marianne Hirsch’s theory of postmemory, to Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology – creating a triptych of ideas that when put together may aid in the understanding of the challenges of identity felt by those who have been physically removed, by choice or force, from their place of origin, and their attempts to recuperate what has been lost or displaced.
Migrants, it can be suggested, are always already connected to numerous places at once, but not entirely present in any. The ghosts from the past become tangled in a nostalgic present, disrupting our idea of history as a linear progression. The irreducibility of hauntology as a concept makes it difficult for it to exist outside the idea of it being other than an entrapment in an amalgamation of temporalities — the beginning is the coming back, and consequently, one is in a continuous cycle of an amnesic return.