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Places Remember Events

The three installations (2008-12) that made up the series Places Remember Events (a phrase that Joyce scribbled in the margin of his notes for Ulysses), examined how creative engagement with the concept of a site as an entity that can ‘remember’ may provide new insights into creative and ethical forms of engagement and documentation. Using, for instance, collections of found objects I invited the viewer to do more than register the site, rather I sought to reanimate the histories of different sites by offering a momentary sense of the dramatic possibilities of each, bringing into the present a fragmentary, ghosted version of the strands of historical presence, emergence and decay.

My intervention in the field of site-specific work comes from my deployment of inter-disciplinary connections between the philosophies of Walter Benjamin and Emmanuel Levinas and the architectural site writings of Jane Rendell and Doreen Massey. My development of these authors’ ideas towards a methodology of sited creative practice was also explored in two published articles, which together with the installations outlined an ethics of responsible encounter, not least with those places that we pass through every day.

The three installations were Hampstead Road, an immersive installation with sound at the Camden People’s Theatre, London, March 2008; A Patina of Antique Filth, at the Shunt Vaults, London Bridge in October 2009; and In Mercy for a Trespass, June 2012, Ruislip Manor Farm, Greater London.

The portfolio of contextual materials includes a CD with photographic, testimonial and other documentation of the installations, as well as the publications:

‘Places Remember Events: Towards an Ethics of Encounter’ in Liminal Landscapes: Travel, Experience and Spaces In-between, ed. Hazel Andrews and Les Roberts, London: Routledge, 2012

‘Performing place, recalling space: a site-specific installation/constellation in London’, Body, Space, Technology, 9.2, 2010.