Placing Voices - Voicing Places: Project Blog

Material Culture Mission Statement: Subjects not objects

I am interested in encountering and documenting the material culture (things) of the contemporary Monto as subjects of inspiration/inquiry rather than as scientific objects of interrogation/data.

The modern construction of a ‘material culture’ as something distinct from the embodied experience of the contemporary – as something separate or ‘other’ – I feel is an impediment to the articulation of the complex, constellated stories of places such as the Monto and Clanbrassil Street.

Rather than attempting to document and create typologies or evidenced based argumentation for the existence of specific identities, my work will focus on things as inspiration for storytelling.

The appearance of things and the story of their encounter and their subsequent ability to act as mnemonic devices, triggering old and new stories (both ‘true’ and ‘false’ and a mixture between) will the subject of study.

It is intended that this ‘show and tell’ approach will allow for a rich synergy with the digital storytelling aspects of the project as well as the sociological interviews.
The strategy for the study will include:

-Walks of the area (as a flaneur) with frenetic and iterative encounter with things of the streetscapes

-Show and tell sessions where members of the community will have the opportunity to bring forward things which they feel are significant

-To be conducted in collaboration with Alice and Darcy’s work

-Case-studies of specific residences/addresses

-These will be determined through the identification of study areas by Tadhg and Paddy’s research and Cormac and Alice’s ability to arrange access to premises

-These will incorporate both conversations with the residents in some instances as well as personal explorations of the items of the house

-Ideally it will be possible to discover how things are utilized in different ways to create stories (Stories with things)

-Some will be representative (e.g. mantlepieces) – supporting identifications with places/peoples/memories

-Some will be hidden (e.g. piles of things or bottoms of boxes) – unintended memories, forgotten traces, obscured identifiations

-Some will be incidental/accidental residue (e.g. rubbish)

All things will be photographed digitally, with the intention of uploading them either into a weblog or into a storytelling engine or photo-spatial engine (e.g. Photosynth).

The deliverable will be a Story with Things – showing how both ‘old’ and ‘new’ things interact creating complex environments for memory activation, identification maintenance and ideological representation. In this way, it should provide a process-based time-slice of the lived negotiation of contemporary space.

Labels: archaeology, material culture, theory

posted by Ian Alden Russell @ Friday, September 19, 2008