Territories of Remembrance

'Territories of Remembrance' is a visual essay which addresses the methodologies of practice involved in exploring a territory of memorialization.

The essay arises from the film "UNFOUND' (see http://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/11836/), developing the themes of the film through the relationships between photographic image, engraved text and written text as a new approach to the subject.

Expanding upon the ideas arising from the original research, the configuration of visual and textual material acknowledges that language and memory are always in a questionable relationship to historical event and that processes of memorialization are continually subject to interruption, flux and transformation. The memorial as institutionalized object of remembrance, the visual production of place as a framed territory of cultural significance, and the act of inscription as a memorializing process subject to the erasure of time, are refracted through this assembly of text and image. The essay draws a parallel between the development of photography and technologies of war as constitutive of a specific immobilizing and ‘deathly’ relation to time, arguing that there is another engagement with the visual image possible, which re-creates the past as an enlivening, always multiplying present opening onto a future. The essay concludes that it is through the material act of re-inscription, the force of the ‘cut’ as the opening up of language to continuous re-interpretation, that another kind of understanding of memorialization might operate.