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At the edge: Balnakiel, a video and sound installation by artist Shona Illingworth

This 7,000-word article draws upon Albano’s on-going dialogues with the artist Shona Illingworth to consider the analogy between film and memory through an analysis of her video and sound installation ‘Balnakiel’ (2009). Balnakiel, in the north of Scotland, was a nuclear early warning station during the Cold War and it is currently a British/NATO training base. The artwork is informed by current models of memory and features place as a contested site of individual and collective recollection.

Albano contextualizes Illingworth’s work and analyses its key formal motifs through theories of memory and recent critical writing on the politics of memory, history and space. Using psychological theories of ‘memory as a spatial construct’ and of the role of the ‘point of view’ in memory retrieval, Albano examines the visual and sound structure of ‘Balnakiel’.

‘Memory Studies’ is an international double-blind peer reviewed journal.