The Ties That Bind

This site specific multi-channel sound work was made in collaboration with Tessa Brown. It was commissioned by Calvert 22 for the show ‘…how is it towards the east?’ which critically examined modes of self-organisation and the traces of Eastern European and Russian immigration in the East End.

Using the words of family members, this work explores how histories – individual and global – personal history and the great events of our times - manifest through the memories and testimony (or lack) of successive generations. It traces unacknowledged and acknowledged convergences, similarities, and dilutions through oral history interviews conducted with four generations of the White family whose the small family business, trading in wholesale underwear, occupied the Calvert 22 premises in the 1980s and early 90s. Listening to accounts of the evolution of the business through wartime London and pre-war Berlin to its roots in the Jewish garment industry in Poland in the early part of the 20th century reveals aspects of the process of cultural assimilation and how family memory is preserved and transmitted through stories and photographs….and lost.