Hotel Minerva

Converging on two major ports - Hull and Marseille - this work reaches out to past events and specific sites that are marked in history: the condition of the modern exile and migrant made up from retrieved fragments of still and moving images drawn from personal and public archives and new material generated in Hull and Marseille. Each image gives way to an apparition destabilising the appearance of solidity and permanence. Aged distressed paper is an object that holds the image. It is like the skin of a person, it is the product of wear and tear of time itself, as is the body, and is akin to a parallel history. They retain the musty smell of airless time as if spectres that are brought temporarily back to life; as images suggesting transitional forms of mobility to which the exilic experience is linked: to arrivals and departures, docks, ships and trains.

Hotel Minerva continues Skelton’s creative research into the archive as a mechanism of state surveillance and control within periods of conflict and repression. The two channel video installation 22'05'' interweaves fragments from Skelton’s personal collection of discarded video rushes and family memorabilia shot in Ukraine, Poland, England and France with newly shot footage and material collected from archives in the port cities of Marseille and Hull (the Bibliothèque du Musée d'Histoire de Marseille and Hull City Archives). These two locations are sites marked by diaspora, migrations and genocide.

The work references the mass migrations to Hull and other UK ports at the end of the nineteenth century, the towns and the aftermath of genocide in East Europe and the escape of stateless refugees from Marseille in the early 1940s. The image sequences are processed to suggest a visual apparition in order to dissolve and destabilise the appearance of solidity and permanence, and invoke instead the transitional forms of mobility with which the exilic experience is linked.

Hotel Minerva was created as part of the AHRC Speculative Research project ‘Archive of Exile’ which brought together two seemingly contrasting entities into a creative meeting. The archive is sedentary, attached to a particular place and time; a protected trove of knowledge. The exile, by contrast, has lost the place or nation they call home. Where the archive is safe, the exile is exposed. Where the archive is at rest, the exile is mobile.

• http://www.archiveofexile.org/