Nicholas Hedges

Art, Writing and Research

Weft and Warp

by

In Tim Ingold’s Being Alive, Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description, he writes the following:

“Recall Hägerstrand’s idea that everything there is, launched in the current of time, has a trajectory of becoming. The entwining of these ever-extending trajectories comprises the texture of the world.”

This reminded me of something I wrote some time ago about history and the relationship between history and objects:

“…what we have is not a series of horizontal strata representing stacked moments in time (days, months, years, centuries etc.), but concurrent vertical lines, or what I have called ‘durations’ where each duration is an object, building or landscape feature and where the present is our simultaneous perception of those that are extant (of course, in the case of buildings, individual objects can also contain many separate durations).

It was Bill Viola who said that ‘we have been living this same moment ever since we were conceived. It is memory, and to some extent sleep, that gives the impression of a life of discrete parts, periods or sections, of certain times or highlights’. Similarly we can say that every object, building or landscape feature has existed in one continuous moment and that it is to some extent the passing generations which gives the impression of the past as being a series of ‘discrete parts, periods or sections…”

This is very similar to what Hägerstrand – via Ingold – describes above and in many ways, the second diagram (above), illustrating the idea of vertical durations, is like a loom, where the durations are the warp threads and our perception of simultaneous durations are the weft, leading to an entwining of what Hägerstrand calls ever-extended trajectories making up the texture of the world.

In this analogy we are both the weft and the warp; both a duration and the perceiver of durations. We find something similar to this, again in Ingold’s writing:

“…since the living body is primordially and irrevocably stitched into the fabric of the world, our perception of the world is no more, and no less, than the world’s perception of itself – in and through us. This is just another way of saying that the inhabited world is sentient.”

Archaeological Dig – Roman Coin 2

by

Since carrying out the observation of the Roman Coin discovered during a dig on 11th June I’ve been thinking about the coin in greater detail. One of the things which interests me about it are the vivid colours formed during its time in the ground; in particular those on the reverse side of the head, as can be seen in the image below:

Colours on a Roman Coin

It’s easy to think of the coin as having occupied two distinct periods (i.e. the 3rd century and today) and that it’s almost two distinct entities; the ‘new’ coin of some 1700 years ago, and the clipped and rather decayed coin it is now.  But of course this coin is a singular entity which has occupied a span of time covering a range of years difficult for us to imagine. To borrow from Bill Viola, this coin has ‘lived’ this same continuous moment ever since it was ‘conceived’ – or in this case minted – and for much of its existence, it’s been laying out of sight, in silence, underground.

At some point 1700 years ago,  the coin (we might assume) was lost and during the dig a week or so ago it was found. I find it easier however, to conceive of the coin’s entire existence if I forget these two ‘divisions’ and think instead of the coin as always existing – not lost or found, just always there – somewhere. Stating that it was first lost and then found creates a kind of void in between, in which the coin just sits – not really existing at all. Of course the coin was in existence for hundreds of years; before the city of Oxford was even established, and throughout the time during which it was made ancient. And in that time, beneath the ground, things were acting upon it, slowly changing its shape and colour; to make the beautiful colours we see today. The colours therefore can be linked to the passing of time – to the coin’s continuous existence. There’s a correlation between the passing of time and the formation of the various colours.

There is also something rather poetic about this as regards the way we imagine the past. For me, the distant past is often a dark and silent place (in the sense that it’s largely unknowable – not that it really was dark and silent) but one in which there was movement and colour – just as with the coin beneath the ground. Although out of sight to us today, we know that that things moved, that things were formed, that entities acted upon or influenced other entities. That there was of course colour.

Thinking about the coin a little more, I realised how else it’s changed from the 3rd century AD. Back then it wouldn’t have been valued as an object in its own right per se, but rather in regards to what it represented, i.e. a monetary unit. If I have a pound coin in my hand, I don’t value the object (the coin) so much as what it represents (a pound sterling). Now of course, the Roman coin’s original monetary value has been lost and it’s the coin as an object which has become important.

Reading Roads

by

Introduction

In Wales in 2008 I walked a path along which my great grandfather had walked every day from his home to the mines in which he worked. He died in 1929 (as a consequence of his work) and all I knew of him, before my visit, were what he looked like (from two photographs) and things my grandmother had told me. But on that path I felt I found him on a much deeper level. The feel of the wind, the way the clouds moved, the sound of the trees and the line of the horizon were all things he would have experienced in much the same way. It was as if these elements had combined to ‘remember’ him to me.

Hafodyrynys and Surrounds

As a consequence of my walk, the line which linked us on my genealogical chart changed to become instead a path, for when I follow lines in my family tree from one ancestor to the next and find myself at the end, so that path in Wales had led to my being born. That path on which I walked for the very first time, was as much a part of who I was as my great grandfather: “places belong to our bodies and our bodies belong to these places.” [i]
Roads (paths, tracks and traces) have become an important part of my research and it was whilst reading Edward Thomas’ poem Roads that I found connections between what he had written and what I was thinking. I’ve reproduced the poem below, and where necessary added my thoughts.

Roads by Edward Thomas (1878-1917)
I love roads:
The goddesses that dwell
Far along invisible
Are my favourite gods.
Roads go on
While we forget, and are
Forgotten like a star
That shoots and is gone.
The reference to stars (or a star) in this verse, reminds me of a quote (to which I often refer) from Roland Barthes’ book Camera Lucida, in which he writes:

“From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star. A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze – light though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed.”

The star shoots its light and is gone and similarly we walk and are gone. But what is left behind is the road, a version of the light left by the disappeared star; a ‘delayed’ ray which allows us to ‘see’ those who went before us. I use the word ‘see’, but we ‘see’ with our bodies. We see the light from the star, but we feel the road. This in turn brings me to the idea of empathy as something which is tactile and kinaesthetic.  Roads and paths become ‘a sort of umbilical cord… a carnal medium, a skin I share’ with those who’ve walked that road or path before – precisely what I’d felt in Wales.

On this earth ’tis sure
We men have not made
Anything that doth fade
So soon, so long endure:

In the third verse we might interpret the lines as a description of the difference between the act of walking and the road itself. We walk in the moment – a moment which fades in an instant (‘so soon’) and yet, behind us a record of the sum of all those moments is lined up along the road behind us – one which endures for centuries. It’s the same difference as that between speaking and writing; one is fleeting, the other endures. Christopher Tilley writes that “…if writing solidifies or objectifies speech into a material medium, a text which can be read and interpreted, an analogy can be drawn between a pedestrian speech act and its inscription or writing on the ground in the form of the path or track.” [ii] Paths and roads ‘record’ our movements, they are texts which we can read with our feet. 
The idea of the ‘moment’ is also discussed by artist Bill Viola who writes that:
“We have been living this same moment ever since we were conceived. It is memory, and to some extent sleep, that gives the impression of a life of discrete parts, periods or sections, of certain times or highlights. [iii]
This ‘same moment’ is in many respects like the act of walking and the road rolled into one; it fades and yet endures at one and the same time. There is an echo of this idea in Camera Lucida when Barthes writes:
“In the photograph, Time’s immobilisation assumes only an excessive, monstrous mode: Time is engorged…” [iv]
I described earlier, how the path on which I walked in Wales was as much a part of me as my great grandfather; it was the first time I’d ever walked it and yet I was a part of it long before I was born. There is then a continuous moment running along all paths and roads, and it’s memory and to some extent birth and death that gives the impression of discrete parts. This ‘universal’ moment is the ‘nowness’ of the present and it was this ‘nowness’ which I experienced on that path in Wales and which I’ve since been exploring in my work as regards empathy.
“The feel of the wind, the way the clouds moved, the sound of the trees and the line of the horizon were all things he would have experienced in much the same way.”
The third verse in Thomas’ poem seems to me to allude to the idea of experiencing the moment:

The hill road wet with rain
In the sun would not gleam
Like a winding stream
If we trod it not again.

The ‘we’ in the last line refers to us as individuals, whether ‘we’ were walking that path in 1915 or today in 2011; if ‘we’ weren’t there to see it, it wouldn’t be seen at all. 
In the fourth verse we read the following:

They are lonely
While we sleep, lonelier
For lack of the traveller
Who is now a dream only.

Before I look at this verse, I want to look at another quote; this time from the catalogue of a Paul Nash exhibition in which David Fraser Jenkins writes how Nash:
“…did not often show people in the landscape, even walking about in his lanes and paths, and as a result his pictures look deserted… Despite this absence, there is in his pictures a remarkable sense of drama, and it is this reaction between things – the trees or the buildings… that these pictures are about.” [v]
Looking at the fourth verse above, we can say that the ‘lack of the traveller’ alludes to the passing of that traveller, whether from the immediate scene, or perhaps life itself. Either way, all that’s left of what Sontag called ‘the missing being’ is the trace of the road on which they walked, the text written as they travelled. That traveller is now a dream, dreamt by the road and the elements by which it’s surrounded, a dream which I see expressed by David Fraser Jenkins as a ‘remarkable sense of drama’. The road might be lonely, but it’s never empty; the trees, the buildings, the feel of the wind and the way the clouds move all dream of the traveller – the missing being. There’s also a parallel to be found here in Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies, where in the second elegy we read:
Look – trees exist.
The houses we live in continue to stand. Only we
pass away like air traded for air and everything
conspires to maintain silence about us, perhaps
half out of shame, half out of unspeakable hope. [vi]
This ‘silence’ alludes I think to what Jenkins describes as a ‘remarkable sense of drama’ and what I have called a ‘dream’. But how can we connect with these? In his book The Materiality of Stone,  Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology, Christopher Tilley writes:
“The painter sees the tree and the trees see the painter, not because the trees have eyes, but because the trees affect, move the painter, become part of the painting that would be impossible without their presence. In this sense the trees have agency and are not merely passive objects. [Martin] Dillon comments: “The trees ‘see’ the painter in a manner comparable to that in which the mirror ‘sees’ the painter: that is, the trees, like the mirror, let him become visible: they define a point of view on him which renders visible for him something that otherwise would remain invisible – his outside, his physiognomy, his carnal presence… The trees and mirror function as Other.” [vii]
Just as the trees function as what Dillon calls ‘Other’, so does everything else. It’s as if the shapes of disappeared travellers are somehow retained, like the people-shaped holes in the ash of Pompeii, which when filled with plaster, revealed the presence of people lost for almost 2000 years. Similarly, people-shaped holes exist along every road or path; gaps which can only be filled with our own bodies, by our own presence; by our experience of the nowness of the present.
In a definition of the Metaphysical poets, Georg Lukács described their common trait of ‘looking beyond the palpable’ whilst ‘attempting to erase one’s own image from the mirror in front so that it should reflect the not-now and not-here.’ [viii] For me, the road is the mirror which Lukács describes, and as I walk along it, I try to look beyond the palpable, to erase my own image so that the road reflects the not-­now and not-here. The palpable is the present (as opposed to the nowness of the past); the not-now and not-here is the nowness of that continuous moment in its entirety. To erase one’s image is to imagine one’s own non-existence, to see a part of that continuous moment when one did not exist, when that part was nonetheless now. It is about seeing the presentness of past events.  

From dawn’s twilight
And all the clouds like sheep
On the mountains of sleep
They wind into the night.

The next turn may reveal
Heaven: upon the crest
The close pine clump, at rest
And black, may Hell conceal.

Often footsore, never
Yet of the road I weary,
Though long and steep and dreary,
As it winds on for ever.

Helen of the roads,
The mountain ways of Wales
And the Mabinogion* tales
Is one of the true gods,

(*In the tale of Lludd and Lleuelys from the Mabinogion, you will find the following text: “Some time after that, Lludd had the island measured in length and breadth; the middle point was found to be in Oxford. There he had the earth dug up, and in that hole he put a vat full of the best mead that could be made, with a silk veil over the surface. He himself stood watch that night.” I discovered this passage whilst researching my Welsh ancestry, and being as I am from Oxford, found it rather appealing.)

Abiding in the trees,
The threes and fours so wise,
The larger companies,
That by the roadside be,

And beneath the rafter
Else uninhabited
Excepting by the dead;
And it is her laughter

At morn and night I hear
When the thrush cock sings
Bright irrelevant things,
And when the chanticleer

Calls back to their own night
Troops that make loneliness
With their light footsteps’ press,
As Helen’s own are light.

Now all roads lead to France
And heavy is the tread
Of the living; but the dead
Returning lightly dance:

Whatever the road bring
To me or take from me,
They keep me company
With their pattering,

Crowding the solitude
Of the loops over the downs,
Hushing the roar of towns
And their brief multitude.

The line ‘Now all roads lead to France’ reminds us that those who fell and are buried in France (and indeed other countries) were men with lives beyond the theatre of war – that the theatre of war extends well beyond the boundaries of any trench map. To know them and to know the missing, we have to follow the roads from France back to the towns and villages where they lived, just as to know ourselves we should follow the roads and paths from our own hometowns to those of our ancestors. To walk those streets, paths and tracks, is to turn them back into ‘consanguineal lines’; to restore lost connections in forgotten family trees; to remind us that those who fought and died were each part of a family as well as a wider community of friends and acquaintances.
The road brings and takes away and the dead keep us company at every step ‘with their pattering’. Again this could refer to the idea of the moment as being both fleeting and enduring. The moment is like a looped recording which plays and records at the same time, creating a kind of palimpsest, where all that’s gone before is contained in a moment, like light, tens of thousands of years old seen in a single second.
The line ‘Crowding the solitude,’ echoes what I wrote earlier, that roads might be lonely, but they’re never empty. And finally in the last two lines, Thomas reminds us of our own mortality; where the multitudes that make the towns roar are themselves brief. 

i Christopher Tilley, 1994, A Phenomenology of Landscape, Oxford, England, Berg
ii Christopher Tilley, 2004, The Materiality of Stone – Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology, Oxford, England, Berg
iii Bill Viola, 2005, Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House, Writings 1973-1994, Thames & Hudson
iv Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes, Vintage, 2000
v David Fraser Jenkins, 2010, Paul Nash – The Elements, London, Scala Publishers Ltd.
vi Rainer Maria Rilke, Tr. Martyn Crucefix, 2006, Duino Elegies, London, Enitharmon Press
vii Christopher Tilley, 2004, The Materiality of Stone – Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology, Oxford, England, Berg
viii http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysical_poets

Natural Born Psychogeographer

by

It seems amazing to me that given the way I perceive the world around me – and the way I have since I was a child – and looking the work I’ve made over the course of the last few years, that I haven’t before delved into the world of Psychogeography, for having started to read Merlin Coverley’s book Psychogeography I seem to be a natural psychogeographer. I recall that when I studied for my degree back in the early 90s, I was fascinated by the writings of Andre Breton and Louis Aragon (‘Nadja’ and ‘Paris Peasant’) which today sit on my bookshelves along with the works of J.-K. Husymans, Blake and Peter Ackroyd, writers who are all discussed in Coverley’s book.Why they intrigued me so much I never really understood, until now.

This morning, in Coverley’s book, I read the following quote form a 19 year old member of Lettrist International who went by the name of Chtcheglov (his real name was Gilles Ivain, and he was later incarcerated in an asylum…). Within that quote, a few lines in particular interested me. The full quote however is as follows:

All cities are geological; you cannot take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends. We move within a closed landscape whose landmarks constantly draw us to the past. Certain shifting angles, certain receding perspectives, allow us to glimpse original conceptions of space, but this vision remains fragmentary. It must be sought in the magical locales of fairy tales and surreralist writings: castles, endless walls, little forgotten bars, mammoth caves, casino mirrors.

The following line in particular brought me up short: ‘…Certain shifting angles, certain receding perspectives, allow us to glimpse original conceptions of space, but this vision remains fragmentary…’ for this exactly describes how I think when I walk through a city, or in fact any particular place. The remains comprising our present-day landscapes are overlaid with a weave of unremembered lives, narratives and events, which, Coverely explains, can, in a moment be revealed through even the most mundane objects and surroundings. It’s as if, whilst walking down the street, one can see something which opens up a ‘receding perspective’ just as Chtcheglov writes, allowing us for a second to glimpse those ‘original conceptions of space.’ The vision is fragmentary and lasts just a moment, but everywhere these possibilities exist.

I’ve often  used the idea of mundane (or everyday) objects and surroundings in my work as a means of accessing the past – as revealing the past through the lens of the present, and before beginning my MA in 2006, I wrote about what I called ‘memory spaces’; spaces which opened up when looking at old buildings or objects. For me, these spaces, were – or rather are – memories of a particular object or building held by people who lived  generations before us. I was trying to find a way of describing how when I look at an old building, it’s as if I gain access, in some fragmentary way, to the memories of those who beheld it years before – as if I could then walk from one of their memories to another.

In another piece of writing (What is History?), I tried to find another way of describing how we access these spaces. Instead of perceiving history as a series of horizontal layers, built up one on top of the other, I suggested that it was more accurate to see the past as comprising a vast number of durations, where every object, every building, every part of a building etc., was a duration, extending vertically down the page. (This idea was inspired by the writings of Bill Viola, who wrote how ‘we have been living this same moment ever since we were conceived. It is memory, he says, ‘and to some extent sleep, that gives the impression of a life of discrete parts, periods or sections, of certain times or highlights’. Similarly we can say that every object, building or landscape feature has existed in one continuous moment and that it is to some extent the passing generations which gives the impression of the past as being a series of ‘discrete parts, periods or sections.)

As I wrote:

Access to the past therefore comes not via a kind of mental gymnastics where we straddle the horizontal strata of different moments in time, accessing a part [an object] via the whole (the entire epoch of that particular layer e.g. 1900), but through the careful observation of a part in which the whole can be observed. As Henri Bortoft writes in The Wholeness of Nature – Goethe’s Way of Seeing; ‘…thus the whole emerges simultaneously with the accumulation of the parts, not because it is the sum of the parts, but because it is immanent within them’. In other words, from an object [for example, one made in 1900] we can extrapolate its wider context (the ‘epoch of 1900’). Instead of drilling down through many periods [of horizontal] time in order to get from one time to another some distance below (or behind), we simply have to observe an object we know that links the two. In this… model , there are no horizontal barriers, just vertical, navigable channels.

Therefore, when looking at an object in a museum, or glimpsing something whilst walking in the street, angles are shifted as Chtcheglov explains, and receding perspectives revealed, precisely because of the way the present comprises these continuous durations. Of course it doesn’t happen all the time, but depends on any number of things, not least the way we perceive that object at the moment of our encounter. History in this sense is kinaesthetic.

Windows 1

by

This image was part of a collection I bought a few years ago. I had no idea what I was buying at the time and was intrigued by the image reproduced below.

A young woman and a car

In the photograph, a young woman poses beside a car. The awkwardness of her pose and the uncertainty in her face suggests that she is attending a special occasion of some kind. In the second image below, she is joined moments later (or perhaps it was before) by a young man (her partner?) who also looks a little uncertain, not necessarily because of what he’s about to do, but rather because of what he’s doing at that exact moment, i.e. having his photo taken. Perhaps they are young lovers about to get married? Of course we’ll never know.

A young couple and a car

What intrigues me about these pictures are the details. Looking again at the second photo – which might of course, in the course of time, have come before the one above it (“…if things are perceived as discrete parts or elements they can be rearranged…” as Bill Viola writes) – a car has appeared on the left, moving into shot just as the shutter is released. Even though the young man has also ‘appeared,’ it’s nevertheless the car which gives us the sense of time passing; it is a vehicle for what Sontag describes in her book, ‘On Photography’ as “time’s relentless melt.”

Who was in the car as it drove past? Where was it going? Where had it come from?

History often comes to us ‘top ‘n’ tailed’, where all that went before the period in question, and all that came thereafter is removed, leaving us with an event which reads like a novel; conveniently packaged with a beginning, a middle and an end. To some extent, regarding this, the first image serves as an illustration, whereas with the second, the car tells us that something came before the ‘beginning’, and that something will follow ‘the end’. As a painter, Degas was inspired by photography, and used this device to give his works a greater sense of movement. It’s not so much a means of accentuating movement with regards to that which is shown, but moving the viewer into the world that’s hidden beyond its edges. 

Just as in the first photograph I looked at, my viewpoint shifts as I become aware of the image’s other protagonists. From in front of the couple, and in the guise of the person who took the photo, I glimpse the couple as if I can see them out the window of the car. It doesn’t last for long, but it shows how an image can be opened up by such small details.  

Windows in photographs have always interested me for much the same reason. Within the context of an image, like those above, they provide a means of escape, or again, as in the case of the first photograph I discussed, a means of concealment. They act as eyes, reflecting – literally – the world around them; the world beyond the limits of the picture’s edge. Spatially and temporally, there’s always more to a photograph that that contained within its borders; and for me, a photograph’s appeal, often resides in how it allows access to these spaces.

In the detail below, we can see in some of the windows, the sky and the trees reflected from beyond the frame of the camera; another way in which a camera can capture that beyond its reach.

Windows are also evidence (or perhaps reminders) of ordinary people living their everyday lives without a thought for the subject or subjects below – in this case the couple on the pavement. They conceal those who are perfectly oblivious to the chemical annexation of whatever inconsequential moment in time is being captured. And as a result, this invisible population can often breathe life into a photograph well beyond the stage upon which the action is taking place.

In his book ‘Camera Obscura,’  Roland Barthes describes a portrait by James van der Zee, of a Black American family taken in 1926. Barthes writes:

“On account of her necklace, the black woman in her Sunday best has had, for me, a whole life external to her portrait.”

What Barthes perhaps means, is that the necklace has a provenance, and therefore seems to speak more about the woman’s life than anything else in the photograph. It is a cherished object, worn perhaps for the occasion of the picture (just as the necklace has perhaps been worn by the young lady in the images above). For me, this is, in a way, analogous to the windows in the first picture and the car in the second, for they are small details compared with the picture’s subjects, but details which, nonetheless, build for us a bigger picture of the world the subjects inhabit.
 
The closed windows in the building then, reflect the world beyond the edges of the photograph, they provide evidence of a world beyond the stage. Furthermore, they are windows onto the stage, through which those sitting, standing or passing behind might, just like the driver in the car, catch a glimpse of the actors.
The open windows however provide us with something a little different. Open a window and the outside world pours in; sounds, smells, the noise of the traffic and passing conversations. In other words – life. They serve to animate the scene, again just like the car, and through them we can let our imaginations wander, to discover for themselves, more of this world long since vanished.

Landscape DNA: The Simultaneity of Stories-So-Far

by

The Past is Time without a ticking clock. A place where paths and roads are measured in years. The Present is a place where the clock ticks but always only for a second. Where, upon those same paths and roads we continue, for that second, with our existence.

In 2006 I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau and since then have visited camps at Bełżec, Majdanek and Natzweiler-Struthof, as well as the battlefields of Ypres, Verdun and more recently, The Somme. All these sites present the visitor with numbers: 1.1 million dead at Auschwitz-Birkenau, 500,000 at Bełżec, 79,000 in Majdanek. At the start of the Battle of the Somme, on 1st July 1916, British and Commonwealth forces sustained 57,000 casualties, with almost 20,000 men killed in action on that day alone. These are all horrific statistics, but numbers rather than people and over the course of the last few years, I’ve looked for ways of identifying with the individuals behind the grim tolls. The tolls are only estimates, and the individuals to whom they allude have become themselves ‘estimates of existence’. Most have left nothing behind; no name, possessions, or photographs. Photographs, where they exist, are often nameless, names on graves are faceless, so how can we know them at all?

One of the most difficult things about my visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau was walking out the gate, performing an action that more than a million people could only ever dream about – if they had the time; most were killed within hours of their arrival. At Bełżec, the memorial to the dead is – in the main – a walk around the perimeter of where the camp once stood. During my visit in 2007, I recorded the walk using a GPS receiver and the fact that I, as an individual, one of several billion people on the planet, could be tracked in this place where half a million people perished, proved particularly resonant. The concept of walking as a means of remembering began to take hold in my work, evolving over time to become a means of empathising – in some small way – with those who’d perished.

In the book Walking, Writing and Performance by Deirdre Heddon, Carl Lavery and Phil Smith, artist Carl Lavery states the following:

“…pedestrian performance is a mode of resistance against the acceleration of the world, a desire, on the part of performance makers, to re-humanise space by encouraging spectators to experience the environment at a properly human pace, the bodily beat of three miles per hour. Implicit in this argument is the belief that walking is conducive to the production of place, a perfect technique for merging landscape, memory and imagination in a dynamic dialogue. Or as Michel de Certeau would have it: ‘The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language…’.”

In the passage quoted above, I was struck by the idea, as Lavery puts it, of “encouraging spectators to experience the environment at a properly human pace.” Merging landscape, memory and imagination (for which purpose, according to Lavery, walking is the perfect technique) has become central to my work. It’s also something I’ve done quite naturally since I was a child. For me, places have always been a conflation of these things, and as such, quite unique to me.

When I visit historic sites, landscape, memory and imagination merge to create something akin to what others have termed post-memories; ‘memories’ of events of which we can have no real recollection – in particular events that happened before we were even born. How this happens is something which has interested me throughout my research. A kinaesthetic engagement with a place, and our sense of the present are, it seems, both important in this regard.

Finally in the paragraph quoted above, I was struck by the words of Michel de Certeau; the idea that ‘the act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language,’ reminded me very much of what I’ve read before in the work of Christopher Tilley, who in his book The Materiality of Stone – Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology, writes that ‘If writing solidifies or objectifies speech into a material medium, a text which can be read and interpreted, an analogy can be drawn between a pedestrian speech act and its inscription or writing on the ground in the form of the path or track.”

The idea of a path as ‘text’ is something which appeals to me; the notion that as we walk we ‘write’ ourselves in the landscape has a particularly poetic resonance. In his book Lines, a Brief History, Tim Ingold writes that “human beings leave reductive traces in the landscape, through frequent movement along the same route…”. The Old English word writan he tells us, meant to ‘incise runic letters in stone,’ and a  correlation can therefore be drawn between the act of walking and writing; a path is something written over years by many different people, incised into the landscape.

Just as when we speak we re-use the same words spoken over centuries – for example fragments of long forgotten conversations – so when we walk, we re-use fragments of other people’s ‘texts’, ‘written’ into the landscape. In this sense, we speak with our bodies words that other bodies have spoken or written before us. As Ingold notes: “retracing the lines of past lives is how we proceed along our own.”

In 2007, the year before she died, my grandmother told me about her childhood in Wales. The following is an extract from that conversation in which she describes her father, Elias Jones, who died in 1929, aged 47, as a result of working in the mines:

‘I can see him now because he went up our garden over the road and the mountain started from there up… and he’d go so far up and he’d turn back and wave to us…’

On visiting Hafodyrynys, the village where my grandmother grew up, I walked up the ‘mountain’ she’d described and followed the path my great grandfather would have taken to work in the mines at Llanhilleth. On top of the hill I turned and looked back down at the garden, imagining my grandmother and her siblings waving back at me from the past. Further on, I stood and looked at the view, rolled out all around me. A hundred years ago I thought, when I did not exist, he would have seen the very same thing. A hundred years later, long after his death, I found myself – through being in that place – identifying with him: I’d found him on the path – one which would in time lead to my being born.

Elias Jones, through frequent movement along that path had written himself into the landscape. A hundred years later, I was – through articulating my own presence through walking –  reading part of that text; speaking with my own body his simultaneous presence and absence. In many ways, I was speaking my own presence and absence too.

During that visit, I realised that as well as being a product of the ‘genetic text’ passed down the generations through a myriad number of genealogical lines, we are as much the consequence of pathways walked by every one of our ancestors. DNA is text – a kind of narrative sequence – and the paths which have led to our individual births are a vast text written across the landscape: self and environment, to borrow from Lavery, are umbilically connected.

People are therefore, in a sense, places, and in his book, Lavery quotes Mike Pearson, a performance maker and theorist who states that: “just as landscapes are constructed out of the imbricated actions and experiences of people, so people are constructed in and dispersed through their habituated landscape: each individual, significantly, has a particular set of possibilities in presenting an account of their own landscape: stories.”

Another passage in the book which interested me was that regarding the geographer Doreen Massey. Lavery writes how she offers a ‘conception of space that is interrelational, multiple and always under construction. In her book, For Space, she describes it [space] as ‘the dimension of multiple trajectories, a simultaneity of stories-so-far’.”

I like the idea of space being a ‘simultaneity of stories-so-far’, and it interested me insofar as it rang a bell with some thoughts I’d had previously regarding our own perception of the past. The following is taken from a piece I wrote on the nature of history:

The past is often perceived much like the strata of a rock-face, wherein successive layers of geological time can be seen. We see the past as being built from the ‘ground up’ day upon day, year upon year, century upon century, like bricks in a wall. The problem with this ‘model’ however is that it makes the past difficult to access, the lines dividing each and every moment become like barriers inhibiting our movement between one and the other, particularly where one part is stacked so far below our own in what we perceive as being the present day. Another problem with this way of perceiving the past is that the layers necessarily contain objects, buildings and landscape features which, because of their age, appear in several different layers almost as if they were different things. For example, an object made a 100 years ago, would appear in each of the layers in the diagram below (see Figure 1). It’s rather like someone creating an animation, who draws the same scene a thousand times because it appears in a thousand frames, rather than using the same picture throughout them all.

Figure 1

Whilst thinking about this and while considering the fact that any extant object, building or landscape feature, no matter what its age is always present, I realised that a better model for perceiving the past is one which turns the model above on its side – if not quite its head. Subsequently (see Figure 2), what we have is not a series of horizontal strata representing stacked moments in time (days, months, years, centuries etc.), but concurrent vertical lines, or what I have called ‘durations’ where each duration is an object, building or landscape feature and where the present is our simultaneous perception of those that are extant (of course, in the case of buildings, individual ‘objects’ can also contain many separate durations).

It was Bill Viola who said that ‘we have been living this same moment ever since we were conceived. It is memory, and to some extent sleep, that gives the impression of a life of discrete parts, periods or sections, of certain times or highlights’. Similarly we can say that every object, building or landscape feature has existed in one continuous moment and that it is to some extent the passing generations which gives the impression of the past as being a series of ‘discrete parts, periods or sections, i.e., the perceived layers or strata of our previous – first – model.

Figure 2

These ‘durations’ as I have described them, are indeed ‘stories so far,’ which move, as if they are being told, at the speed of walking – at a ‘properly human pace’ as Lavery puts it.

Returning to the idea of walking as writing, it’s true to say that we don’t always leave a physical trace of our presence when we walk – or at least a visible, physical trace. But, poetically speaking at least, we do leave something behind and this something is often augmented by objects, buildings or landscape features which are contemporaneous with past individuals.

Whenever I visit sites of historic trauma (death camps and the battlefields of World War One), even if they’re empty, I feel as if they’re full; not in a spiritual or pseudo-spiritual sense, but physically, as if they’re full of sculptures. Sculptor Antony Gormley describes his work as ‘confronting existence’ and that, in part, is what we do in places such as Auschwitz; death is, after all, another kind of existence. Walking itself is a means of confronting existence, being as it is a line drawn between absence and presence – just as I’d found in Wales.

“Part of my work,” Gormley writes, is to “give back immanence to both the body and art.” For archaeologist, Colin Renfrew, Gormley is “speaking of the existence of the individual, and the coming into being and self-awareness of the individual as the inhabitant of his or her body.” In reading these quotes, I began to see that the sites of trauma I’d visited, as well as those places relevant to my own family history, were full of what I can only describe as invisible sculptures – sculptures of absence, the physical presence/immanence of all who’ve gone before.

Gormley’s work comprises, in part, casts of his own body which reminds Renfrew of the bodies found in Pompeii; men, women and children frozen at the moment of their death almost 2000 years ago. Buried in ash, the spaces which had once contained their bodies remained after the bodies had decomposed, allowing archaeologists, to use them as moulds by pouring plaster into the cavities.

In light of this, I was reminded of the work of Christopher Tilley, who in his book, ‘The Materiality of Stone, Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology’ writes: “The painter sees the tree and the trees see the painter… in a manner comparable to that in which the mirror ‘sees’ the painter: that is, the trees, like the mirror, let him become visible: they define a point of view on him which renders visible for him something that otherwise would remain invisible – his outside, his physiognomy, his carnal presence… The trees and mirror function as Other.”

Just as the trees function as ‘Other’ therefore, so must the sun, the stars, the clouds, hills, mountains, the sea, rivers, the wind, the rain and so on. And in a sense, what Tilley is describing as Other, which ‘renders visible for him… his carnal presence,’ is a sense of being present in the present-day world.

In the book Walking, Writing and Performance, Lavery writes:

“…during… Mourning Walk I was aware of living more in the past than in the present. However at no time did this immersion in memory result in psychic saturation or disintegration. The natural world – the world of trees and stones – was stubbornly present and insisted on maintaining its autonomy and distance.”

When trying to access the past through walking, an awareness of the present – of being present in the world – is vital, and the natural world – the world of trees and stones – does that for us. Understanding the fact that the past was once the present, helps us in some small way to empathise with those lost to the past.

The present moment is a space, one which lasts only for a second – a space comprising the simultaneity of what Doreen Massey calls ‘stories so far’ or what I have called ‘durations’. And it’s in that space that life happens. Behind us and in front, beyond the physical boundaries of that second we are absent. The text is written, or yet to be written – the present being the moment of writing. Gormley’s sculptures then articulate this line between presence and absence, past and present.

In that space, in which we continue with our existence, we hear the birds, we see the sun, feel the wind and rain. In that space, all our hopes are held, all our fears and regrets. Into the space we carry our past in the form of memories. It’s the space of the everyday – one which we often take for granted. But it’s a space we share with everyone who’s ever gone before us.

Again, in his book, Lines. A Brief History, Tim Ingold tell us that:

‘…from late Antiquity right through to the Renaissance writing was valued above all as an instrument of memory. Its purpose was not to close off the past by providing a complete and objective account of what was said and done, but rather to provide the pathways along which the voices of the past could be retrieved and brought back into the immediacy of present experience, allowing readers to engage directly in dialogue with them and to connect what they have to say to the circumstances of their own lives. In short, writing was read not as a record but as a means of recovery.’

This paragraph has something in common with what I described earlier, the idea that just as when we speak we re-use the same words spoken over centuries – fragments of long forgotten conversations – so when we walk, we re-use fragments of other people’s ‘texts’, ‘written’ into the landscape. Walking becomes a means of recovery, where the past can be retrieved and ‘brought back into the immediacy of present experience’. As on the ‘mountain’ in Hafodyrynys, it’s  a means of engaging in a dialogue with those who’ve gone before us, and nowhere is this more keenly felt that in places of historic trauma.

It’s as if when walking through these places, we pick up – at random – the threads of other people’s texts. We tie them together, filling in the gaps with our own story. It’s rather like the film Jurassic Park, where dinosaurs are cloned using DNA extracted from mosquitoes frozen in amber. The gaps in the code are filled with modern frog DNA, creating a ‘modern’ dinosaur. Earlier, I stated that people were as much the product of places, and it figures therefore that places are as much the product of people; that the ‘DNA’ of any place comprises narrative lines laid down by everyone who’s ever been there. When we walk, we create new places based on the present day landscape. Our memory and memories, history and of course our imaginations all have a part to play. Within our imagination, we take with fragmentary strands of the landscape’s own ‘DNA’ (or history) and fill the gaps with our own presence and memory. These constantly created spaces (created then destroyed every second) are unique to us, and yet we share them, in that single moment, with all who’ve gone before us, not as part of a crowd, but as one body and mind.

The ‘stubborn’ presentness which Lavery describes is therefore vital to our empathising with the past, and in many ways the most terrifying thing at Auschwitz was the way the trees moved in Birkenau (Auschwitz II), simply because they would have moved that way during the Holocaust.

The writer Georges Perec once wrote that “the desire to find roots, the determination to work from memories or from the memory, is the will above all to stand out against death, against silence.”

I work from memories and the memory and I’m actively engaged in searching for my roots. Is this then a will to stand out ‘against death, against silence?’

Again, in Walking, Writing and Performance, Lavery writes:

“Is not all writing, all art, a response to a loss of some kind, an imaginative way of dealing with lack? …As I use it, the word recovery has nothing to do with re-experiencing the lost object in its original pristine state; rather, it designates a poetic or an enchanted process in which the subject negotiates the past from the standpoint of the present.”

This act of recovery is just the same as that which Ingold describes, where writing (in ancient times) was read not as a record but as a means of recovery. Walking as a means of ‘reading’ or ‘speaking’ the text of other people’s lives is a way of recovering a moment in the past; an ‘enchanted process’ to borrow from Lavery, where we ‘negotiate the past from the standpoint of the present.’

Empathy with the past therefore and in particular with individuals can be achieved, coming via a kinaesthetic response to the present mediated through memory and our embodied imaginations.

An Archaeology of the Moment

by

I’m currently reading an excellent book by Colin Renfrew, Senior Fellow of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, entitled ‘Figuring it Out’, in which the author examines what he describes as ‘the parallel visions of artists and archaeologists,’ with an emphasis on contemporary art practice. As an artist with a deep interest in archaeology, I had to buy the book, and I’m very glad I did, for it’s helped me pull together numerous strands of thinking which have emerged from my research over the course of the last four years; in particular, the idea of the physical or ‘sensed’ present as a lens through which to ‘see’ the past. Professor Renfrew writes: “The past reality too was made up of a complex of experiences and feelings, and it also was experienced by human beings similar in some ways to ourselves.” The way we experience the present then, tells us a great deal about how people experienced the past when it too was the present.

I’ve written before how one of the problems we have in considering past events is the temporal distance which separates us. Reading a history book, although we know its content is‘ factual’, is nonetheless an interpretation of events; an outline at best no matter how well researched and well written it is. There may be a structure, just as in a novel, with a beginning, a middle and an end. But of course reality isn’t really like that – the boundaries are much more fluid. Necessarily therefore, a history of any event will be full of holes and it’s these holes which interest me.

In October 2006, I stood on the Ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau and my experience there is something with which I’ve been working ever since, even whilst researching different places – whether other camps such as Bełżec or the battlefields of World War One – it’s that particular moment which I have been researching, peeling back the layers comprising the moment, much as an archaeologist digs through layers of stratified soil to uncover a whole range of times.

History is, in some respects, like fiction. What is known and written about can only be surmised from surviving evidence and what we ‘see’ as receivers of that knowledge, can only be imagined. What’s always missing is a sense of the present, as if what happened in the past always followed a script, one in which the main protagonists took their cues and delivered their lines accordingly. Hindsight, which one can hardly escape, joins all the dots, but leaves many gaps between the lines.

In the foreword to Peter Weiss’ book The Aesthetics of Resistance, Frederic Jameson writes how for the critic Georges Lukács, the world historical individual should never be the novel’s main protagonist, but rather seen from afar by the average or mediocre witness. We could say the same for history; that events described in history books are ‘best’ when seen through the eyes of those ‘average’ or ‘mediocre’ witnesses; people which history labels as ‘the mob’ or the ‘masses’; who are often buried beneath unimaginable numbers – mass graves within which, their names and individual identities are forgotten.

I’ve produced numerous works which examine this idea of the anonymous individual in history, but there’s another element I try to show, and that’s the ‘everydayness’ of any historic event. This is, I believe, key to our understanding of the past, for not only is history best seen by the ‘average’ or ‘mediocre’ witness, but – for me at least – when the main event is glimpsed as a backdrop to an individual’s own life experience. That’s not to say the event should always be viewed through the eyes of someone far away from the scene, but that it should always be seen behind the individual, rather than the individual being buried somewhere beneath.

In the time after my visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau, I wanted to find a way of identifying with those who died there. That’s not to say that I can identify with what they went through, no-one who wasn’t there can ever claim to understand what it was like to suffer, but we can seek to separate the individual from the grim statistics and site the camp in the landscape of the everyday world. Again, that’s not to say that Auschwitz-Birkenau was an everyday place, but what’s important for me, in understanding the past, in filling in the gaps which history inevitably leaves behind, is an understanding that the everyday world was happening at the time. Whatever event in whatever period we’re researching, the world was happening around it. The wind blew in the trees; the birds sang and the rain fell. The sun rose in the morning; the sky was just as blue or grey as it is today. There were clouds with their shadows, and during the night, the moon might be reflected in small pools of water, like that described by Auschwitz survivor, Filip Muller – in a pit soon to be filled with bodies. The events like the place were not everyday, but they took place regardless in an everyday world and understanding this ‘everydayness’ can help us understand and picture much more clearly events of the past.

For example, we can read hundreds of titles about the Holocaust and World War One, but when we read in the Diary of Adam Czerniakow – the ‘mayor’ of the Warsaw Ghetto – what the weather was like on a particular day, suddenly, in words like ‘beautiful weather,’ the full horror of the Holocaust is revealed, because, with these words at least, we can identify and – albeit in a very small way – empathise with someone who suffered; the past in effect becomes very much present.

In Birkenau, it wasn’t so much the sight of the gas chambers which was so horrific, or even the gaze of the infamous gatetower, but rather the way the trees moved, just as they’ve always moved, right throughout history.

Similarly, on the battlefields of the Somme, just as we cannot comprehend the horrors faced by the soldiers – the incessant shelling and machine gun fire – we can nonetheless see and feel the ground beneath our feet; we can see the sun in the sky, and feel the wind on our faces, and it’s these everyday details which take us, albeit just a little, into the midst of a battle. Of course we still need history to draw in the outlines, but it’s these other details which prevent history being a script. Events in history were not preordained, people made choices and choices can only be made and acted upon in a moment – in the present. Understanding the present therefore – that space wherein reside all our hopes and fears, our dreams and ambitions, and into which we bring our memories – is key to our understanding of the past.

In a passage written by Tadeusz Borowski, another Auschwitz survivor, we read the following: “do you really think,” he asks, that without hope such a world is possible, that the rights of man will be restored again, we could stand the concentration camp even for a day? It is that very hope that makes people go without a murmur to the gas chambers, keeps them from risking a revolt, paralyses them into numb inactivity.” People often ask why, when faced with certain death people didn’t revolt or even attempt to escape? If we read history as a script we might well feel obliged to ask that question, but when one’s alive in a moment, that in which we continue to exist, we will do anything to maintain that existence, and second by second that was achieved by doing nothing, right up to the end, for up to the end there was always the hope that something would change. Again, it’s through understanding what it means to live in the present that we can understand the past a little better.

In his book ‘The Materiality of Stone, Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology,’ Christopher Tilley writes: ‘The painter sees the tree and the trees see the painter, not because the trees have eyes, but because the trees affect, move the painter, become part of the painting that would be impossible without their presence. In this sense the trees have agency and are not merely passive objects. Dillon comments: “The trees ‘see’ the painter in a manner comparable to that in which the mirror ‘sees’ the painter: that is, the trees, like the mirror, let him become visible: they define a point of view on him which renders visible for him something that otherwise would remain invisible – his outside, his physiognomy, his carnal presence… The trees and mirror function as Other.”’ Just as the trees function as Other therefore, so must the sun, the stars, the clouds, hills, mountains, the sea, rivers, the wind, the rain and so on. Objects too, excavated during digs or on display in museums, act in much the same way.

Through archaeology, we excavate moments. We might come to better understand epochs and eras, but revealing a stone beneath a field which once belonged to part of a road reveals the movement of individuals and thereby an individual. And as we in the present stand on that stone and sense the world around us, we can bridge the gap between the past and present, even if that gap is one, two or three thousands years. If we walk along the line of the road, what we know of any relevant history becomes animated. With the aid of the ‘everydayness’ of the world we can position ourselves within an event – even if that event took place many miles away. We can become the ‘average’ or ‘mediocre’ witness, and rather than seeing a past event as one sandwiched between two pasts (those more and those less distant) we can instead bring to that past, the concept of the present and consequently the unknown future.

At the beginning of his book, ‘Figuring it Out’, Professor Renfrew looks at Paul Gauguin’s painting ‘Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going to?’ (1897) a title, and a question, which many artists and archaeologists alike have tried to answer. The questions posed in the title of are of course about the past, the present and the future and in reading this book I could see how these questions have always been there behind my work. After visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau and in an attempt to find anonymous individuals in history to whom I was related I began to investigate my own family tree, and, over the course of the last few years I’ve found several hundred ancestors going back on some lines as far as 1550. A year before she died, my grandmother told me about her childhood in Wales and in particular about my great grandfather who died in 1929 after years working in the mines. The following is an extract from that conversation:

‘I can see him now because he went up our garden over the road and the mountain started from there up… and he’d go so far up and he’d turn back and wave to us, and if we went out to play, our Mam would say, ‘you can go up the mountain to play…’ but every now and then our Mam would come out in the garden and we had to wave to her to know that we were alright you know… always remember going up the mountain…’

On visiting Hafodyrynys, the small town where my grandmother grew up, I walked up the ‘mountain’ she’d described and followed the path my great grandfather would have taken to work in the mines at Llanhilleth. On top of the hill I stood and looked at the view. One hundred years ago, when I did not exist, he would have seen the very same thing. One hundred years later, long after his death, I found myself – through being in that place – identifying with him, not because I know what it was like to work in the mines (of course I don’t), but because I saw the same horizon, felt the same wind, saw the same sun and so on. I’d found him there on the path (one which would in time lead to my being born).

I realised too in Hafodyrynys, that I’m not only who I am because of the genes passed down by my ancestors, but because of the things they did throughout their lives, not least because of the roads and paths they travelled, such as that upon the ‘mountain’. Anything different, no matter how seemingly irrelevant and I would not be here, and in a sense, that which I described earlier in relation to my standing on the Ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the way the trees moved seemed pregnant with the horrors of the Holocaust, is relevant here, albeit for different reasons; the everyday, insignificant details which make up a moment, are key to our existences. Until the time of our conceptions, we were always one step away (many times over) from never existing and again this refers back to what I described at the beginning of this piece; the idea of my own non-existence in relation to past events.

For the catalogue to the third in my series of exhibitions entitled ‘Mine the Mountain’ I wrote the following, in an attempt to summarise my thinking: ‘The Past is Time without a ticking clock. A place where paths and roads are measured in years. The Present is a place where the clock ticks but always only for a second. Where, upon those same paths and roads we continue, for that second, with our existence.’

The last line resonates when considered alongside what I described earlier regarding hope – that emotion which Borowski describes as ‘paralysing’ those who died in the camp.

I wrote earlier too, that through archaeology we excavate moments, that although we might come to better understand epochs and eras, revealing a stone beneath a field which once belonged to part of a road reveals the movement of individuals and thereby an individual, one continuing his or her existence for a second along the way. Artist Bill Viola wrote: ‘We have been living this same moment ever since we were conceived. It is memory, and to some extent sleep, that gives the impression of a life of discrete parts, periods or sections, of certain times or highlights.’ If we take what he says regarding this ‘same moment’ – that which we’ve been living continuously – along with what I’ve written above regarding pathways taken by our ancestors, we can see that that ‘same moment’ extends beyond the limits of our own existence and that moments and epochs are in the end, one and the same thing. The gap between the past and present – however big or small the temporal divide – is removed.

To conclude…

An ancient road, uncovered beneath a field, may be thousands of years old but nonetheless it will have been ‘written’ in terms of moments, where one individual amongst many others has carried his or her existence from one moment to the next. And as we walk ahead towards the future, along the line of the road, carrying our own existence with us; as we feel the ground beneath our feet and watch the wind blowing through the trees. As we listen to the birds and smell the scent of the grass, we’ll find ourselves in empathy with every individual who’s gone that way before us. Somewhere, beyond the horizon, Stonehenge is being built; the Romans have landed in England and the Mary Rose is sinking beneath the waves.

The Somme

by

“Frontiers are lines. Millions of men are dead because of these lines.”
Georges Perec

The name Somme is, in the minds of many, synonymous with death, a byword for futile and indiscriminate slaughter. Think of the Somme and the image of men walking towards their deaths comes to mind. Think of the Somme and one date stands out above all others; 1st July 1916, the day the battle began. The battle itself lasted over four months, up until November 18th, but the 1st July is as infamous a date as any, being as it is the blackest day in British Military History. By the end of the first day’s fighting, British and Commonwealth forces had lost almost 60,000 men, with 20,000 of those killed or missing in action – a number which is almost impossible to comprehend. The exact number of casualties over the entire course of the battle (1st July – 18th November 1916) is unknown, but Allied forces lost some 620,000 men with over 145,000 killed or missing in action. Germany suffered around 465,000 casualties with almost 165,000 of those killed or missing.

These numbers are of course horrendous, but there’s always a danger that statistics such as these will only ever be numbers, rather than a single death multiplied several thousand times. Every one of those over 300,000 killed or missing in action was a son, husband or brother; an individual whose life was cut short for a small patch of ground. And we mustn’t forget the wounded whose injuries were often appalling – the result of a new type of warfare, where bodies were mauled and mangled by artillery shells, machine gun fire and shrapnel. Disfigurements and mental illness meant that even if they were lucky enough to return, many would never again lead a normal life.

Before visiting the battlefields, I recorded my thoughts on how I imagined the Somme. Drawing on old photographs, books I’ve read and contemporaneous records, I’d built up a picture – a collage of sorts – of devastated fields, cut through with trenches; craters and mud, machine gun fire and shells. I’d imagined woods reduced to spent matchsticks occupying a space on the horizon and the terrain as I saw it in my mind’s eye was almost always flat. The images themselves were silent, equivocal and without any weight or real sense of place. There was colour but like any specific detail the colours were always vague. Any imagined scene was removed from my senses. I could try to imagine the war, but of course any idea as to what it was like would – to say the very least – be well wide of the mark. I could imagine the rain, the blue sky, the smell of the grass, but still it was all divorced from my senses; an indeterminate collection of images wherein there was little sense of direction. I could try and imagine movement, but any progression derived only from a series of stills as if I was looking down a length of film found on a cutting-room floor.

Having arrived in the Somme, we drove towards our B&B, down the narrow roads which cut across the fields. The sun was setting, casting long shadows which lay down across the landscape like discarded coats and clothes. I couldn’t help but think of those who’d stood in the trenches on the morning of 1st July 1916, knowing they might never see another sunset again. For a moment, this sunset became the one they wouldn’t to see. The sunset of that terrible day.

On arriving at the B&B we found our first cemetery.

We had just over a day to explore the Somme battlefields and therefore took the ‘Circuit of Remembrance’ a route signposted with poppies which takes in the major sites of the battle. Starting at Beaumont Hamel, we travelled to Thiepval, Pozières, Longueval, Rancourt, Peronne and La Boiselle. The following morning, we travelled to Serre to see the place where, among others, the Accrington Pals suffered horrific losses on that first terrible day.

Travelling through the countryside and seeing signposts pointing the way to villages and towns such as Arras, Pozières and Thiepval, I felt a strange sensation, in that prior to visiting the Somme, these legendary names were almost fictions – places connected with a distant past found only in the pages of history. Temporal distance in some way then correlates with geographic distance, where places one has never been are like those times to which one can never go. It’s as if they are names of moments in time rather than places in another country; the past is indeed a foreign country, and yet one it seems can go there.

Of all the places we visited along the ‘Circuit of Remembrance,’ two stand out in particular; the site of the attack on Serre at what is now The Sheffield Memorial Park, and the Newfoundland Memorial Park at Beaumont-Hamel. Of course all other sites were extremely poignant, not least the Memorial to the Missing at Thiepval and the many cemeteries, all immaculately kept, which are found throughout the Somme countryside.

The first place we visited was the Newfoundland Memorial Park at Beaumont Hamel.

 It’s one of the few sites in the Somme region where the ground has remained largely untouched since the end of the First World War. The trenches are still visible, for example, St. John’s Road and Uxbridge Road which once led to Hyde Park Corner and Constitution Hill; trenches now filled in beneath a field of Rape (the line of the Uxbridge Road trench has been marked in white in the car park).

 The naming of the trenches has always interested me. It’s almost as if in the midst of the ruined landscape, whose pre-war character had all but been effaced, a new place was brought into being; not simply a ruin of that pre-existing world, but a new world entirely; a labyrinth of lines cut into the ground, named after streets or towns back home. It’s as if these ‘streets’, ‘lanes’ and ‘alleys’ were each a piece of the collective memory of those who fought and died there; fragments of a place called ‘home’ to which many would never return. Now of course the trenches have all but disappeared along with the men who made them, along with their individual memories. And yet they remain on maps and in books, and although the ruined towns and villages have been rebuilt, their own much older names seem to belong more to this other lost world than that before or after.

 

It was at Beaumont Hamel that the Newfoundland Regiment attacked on 1st July 1916, suffering as they did appalling losses. The following description is taken from the ‘Newfoundland and the Great War’ website:

“Thus it was that the Newfoundlanders moved off on their own at 9:15 a.m., their objective the first and second line of enemy trenches, some 650 to 900 metres away. In magnificent order, practiced many times before, they moved down the exposed slope towards No Man’s Land, the rear sections waiting until those forward reached the required 40-metre distance ahead…

 …No friendly artillery fire covered the advance. A murderous cross-fire cut across the advancing columns and men began to drop, at first not many but then in large numbers as they approached the first gaps in their own wire. Private Anthony Stacey, who watched the carnage from a forward trench with Lieutenant-Colonel Hadow, stated that “men were mown down in waves,” and the gaps cut the night before were “a proper trap for our boys as the enemy just set the sights of the machine guns on the gaps in the barbed wire and fired”. Doggedly, the survivors continued on towards The Danger Tree.”

The ‘Danger Tree’ still stands, and standing there today, looking at the sheep laying around its base, it’s hard to imagine the scene at that same place 96 years ago.

Like many who’ve read about the Somme, I was aware how close the opposing armies were to one another – at least in terms of stats – separated as they were by the void of No Man’s Land, but it was only in this place that the distance was made startlingly apparent; it was hardly any distance at all. Entering the memorial, one can see the British front lines. A leaflet guides you around and suddenly, you find yourself looking back from the German front line towards where you entered, a distance which is all but a few minutes’ walk away. And in between is a patch of ground, much like any other you might have seen before but upon which thousands lost their lives.

The following images show the Caribou Monument to the Newfoundland Regiment (shown on the map above) which stood at the British Front Line. The Danger Tree is that shown above which marked the furthest many men managed to get. The Y-Ravine is behind the German Front Line, the trenches of which are also shown below.

Of course it goes without saying that in 1916, the ground would have looked very different. Pockmarked by shells, cut through with trenches running on for miles and covered with swathes of barbed wire it would have presented advancing troops with considerable difficulties even without the horrors of enfilading machine gun fire and pounding artillery. 

As far as can be ascertained, 22 officers and 758 other ranks were directly involved in the advance that day. Of these, all the officers and around 650 other ranks became casualties.  Of the 780 men who went forward about 110 survived unscathed, of whom only 68 were available for roll call the following day. To all intents and purposes the Newfoundland Regiment had been wiped out, the unit as a whole having suffered a casualty rate of approximately 90%.

It goes without saying that as tourists today we can never imagine what it was like to be a part of this battle, not that we should be deterred from trying. Even so, one can appreciate things which sharpen the focus of any prior knowledge of the war and in particular any images which one might have imagined beforehand. I’d read about the attack on Beaumont Hamel in a book by Peter Hart and had imagined a vague collection of ‘ambiguous stills’ with which I did my best to appreciate the experiences of those who suffered the appalling violence of that first day. But standing in the middle of what had been No Man’s Land, with the British Front Line to my left, beside the Newfoundland Caribou Memorial, and the German Front Line to my right – just behind the memorial to the 51st Highland Division – I was struck by how small the battlefield, at that position,  was. As I’ve said, if this was any place in the countryside, it would constitute nothing more than a small part of a short walk, but in 1916 it was a great advance, in the pursuit of which, many thousands lost their lives.

There is a tendency at sites such as this, or rather in associated museums (for example that in Ypres) to create recreations of battles with sounds effects, waxworks, lighting effects and so on. For me, such recreations do nothing other than turn history into fantasy. They push history – which already borders on fiction (in that it can only be imagined)  – deeper into the world of make-believe. Recreations serve no other purpose than to ‘entertain’ and certainly do little by way of justice to memory of the men who fought there. It’s much better to be in a place, to hear the birds and see the trees… they might not be shells or machine guns, but they are real all the same.

I must admit I could have stood there in ‘No Man’s Land’ for hours, collecting together what I knew of the war and what I could glean from the guide and anchoring it to the reality of the world by which I was surrounded. What I could really appreciate here was the terrain, not only the pock-marked surface, but the level of the ground which,  superficially at least, appeared quite ‘flat’. Certainly, if one was out walking, one wouldn’t think it was particularly steep or hilly. However, from the point of view of those who left the British Front Line to attack the Germans, one could see what they were up against. The ground rose just enough to leave them exposed, while at the same time affording the German army at least a degree of shelter. Indeed, something which I found myself coming to understand in the Somme, were the subtle shifts of the terrain and how such changes, visible to the individual eye, shaped the war as a whole and determined the fates of so many hundreds of thousands of men.

The image below is taken in what was No Man’s Land. The Y Ravine Cemetery is on the right. Over the ridge in the distance is the German Front Line.

Over the course of the last few years, ever since my visit to Auschwitz, I’ve tried to understand what it is about being in a particular place that makes knowledge of a past associated with that place so much more compelling. It seems obvious that it should be the case, but why? I can watch countless DVDs about the Somme for example, view masses of photographs, read the testimonies of those who fought and look at the lists of the names of the dead. But only by standing there, in the middle of a field (upon which sheep were grazing) did the full horror make itself known.

I felt exactly the same thing at the Sheffield Memorial Park, situated on what was once the British Front Line between ‘Matthew Copse’ and ‘Mark Copse’ near the village of Serre. It was from here that an attack was made on what was then a fortified village by, amongst others, the Accrington Pals and Sheffield City Battalions, again on that infamous day, 1st July, 1916.

Again, staring ahead towards the Queens Cemetery, behind which the German Front Line would have run, one could see just how close the two sides were to one another. One could also read the terrain and see the advantage the Germans had when facing the approaching army. As a result therefore, one could also see just what the soldiers of the Pals Battalions were up against, even without the horrors of machine guns and artillery.

Again I have to stress, that we can never fully appreciate what the men who climbed from their trenches faced that fateful day. But as with my experience at the Newfoundland Memorial, I found that in looking towards where the German lines would have run, across the field over which the soldiers would have walked, the horrors of which I’d read became much clearer. I couldn’t see the guns of course, or the artillery and barbed-wire. I wasn’t walking into a hail of bullets with shrapnel flying from shells bursting all around me. But there in the tranquility of the present day, where one could hear the birds, I’d brought with me to that place, the whole of my existence – my past – and that was something at least I had in common with the brave men who fought there.

In La Boiselle, one can find the Lochnagar Crater, caused by a huge mine detonated at 7.28am on 1st July 1916. Containing 24 tons of explosives, it was at the time the largest ever man-made explosion.

 At 300 feet in diameter and 70 feet deep, the crater is still the largest caused by man in anger. Again, like the various battlefield sites, it’s a tranquil place, in stark contrast to the violence from which it was created. And yet, although one can’t hear the noise, one can see it in the vast space left in the ground. The sound has left a footprint; it’s become physical, just as sounds remain in the pock-marked battlefields found across the Somme.

In some respects, this idea of a ‘sonic footprint’ is akin to that of people leaving a trace on paths, roads, tracks and other lines found in the landscape. The trenches for example – those which one can see today – are not as they were in 1916 (i.e. they’re not as deep and are grown over with grass) but they are lines created by people many years ago. They might not call to mind a sound in quite the same way as the Lochnagar crater, but they’re nonetheless records of actions and movements.

In his book, ‘Lines, A Brief History’, anthropologist Tim Ingold writes that human beings, ‘leave reductive traces in the landscape, through frequent movement along the same route’. He considers this in light of the etymology of the word writing (derived from the Old English term writan – meaning to incise runic letters in stone) and surmises that human beings somehow ‘write’ themselves in the landscape. Henri Bergson wrote that our whole psychical existence was something just like a single sentence. I believe,’ he said, ‘that our whole past still exists.’ The whole past could be said to exist, upon and within these trenches, as ‘sentences’, ‘written’ in the landscape by men almost 100 years ago.

These lines can also – metaphorically speaking – be thought of as magnetic tapes, where as we walk, we record our presence; where what we see, hear, touch etc. at any given moment, is analogous to the recording head of a tape-player arranging the magnetic particles so as to record the sound or video image. Equally, when we walk down a particular street, path or track, we simultaneously play-back previous recordings, those laid down by people long since lost to the past and the battlefields of the Somme are a perfect place to illustrate this point.

At the battle for Serre on that fateful day – 1st July 1916, hundreds of men lost their lives on the ground between the village and the memorial where we were standing. The weather on the day of our visit was mixed, but mostly dry (the battle took place on a beautiful summer’s day). There were patches of blue sky and the odd cloud. Looking ahead, I could see the lie of the land. I could see the distance, the village of Serre and behind me the trees of the copse. I could hear the birds and feel the ground beneath my feet. Imagine then, that as I walked, the things I saw were somehow recorded in the ground upon which I was walking: the position of the sun, the colour of the sky, the sound of the birds and the distance. As a record-head receives information and translates it onto tape, so metaphorically, my body was doing the same.

Of course, recording-heads don’t just record, but play-back all that’s previously been recorded. Again we can think of the ground as being crossed by many lines and that along every one of those lines are hundreds of ‘recordings’ left by those who went before us. We can imagine that what they saw, what they heard and what they thought were all translated into the ground upon which they walked.

It was Bill Viola who said that ‘we have been living this same moment ever since we were conceived. It is memory, and to some extent sleep, that gives the impression of a life of discrete parts, periods or sections, of certain times or highlights’. If we think of the lines the soldiers left behind, lines which stopped abruptly in No Man’s Land, we can imagine them leading all the way back to the time they were born.

These long, individual lines are of course impossible for us to imagine in their entirety, but on sites such as the battlefields at Serre and Beaumont Hamel, where the lines of trenches can still be seen and where No Man’s Land stretches out ahead, we can be sure at least of seeing a small part. By following these fragmentary lines, our bodies in a very small way mirror that of the soldiers. Again I have to stress the words very small way and again make it clear that we can never know what it was like to experience what they did.

When we walk down the line of a trench, the gestures of our bodies are bound in some very small way to mirror those of people caught in the midst of war. When we look at the sky, down at our feet, turn our heads left or right, we can assume that an aspect of the way our bodies move is almost a mirror-image of those who went before us. We can imagine then, that when we plant a footstep, the way our body moves, what we see around us is akin to the idea of our bodies playing back that which has been recorded in the ground; the ground determines how we move – determines the shape of our body; thus we empathise kinaesthetically with those lost to the past.

These lines, as I’ve said, are only fractions of the total line carried by men into battle, i.e. the total span comprising the entire geography of their lives. But history is full of holes, and the gaps have holes of their own.
History tells us only a little about the past. It gives us the outline whereas the rest is all but missing. The history of an event, as told in a book, has a beginning, a middle and an end, but of course in reality the past is never like that. Historic events are about the people involved, many of whom are missed out altogether. For George Lukács, ‘the “world-historical individual” must never be the protagonist of the historical novel, but only viewed from afar, by the average or mediocre witness.’ In other words, those historic events written about in books, are best discovered through the eyes of those who are missing from the text, people who at best are either given the epithet ‘mob’ or ‘masses’ or are bundled into numbers and tables of statistics. It’s through the eyes of these people that I want to see the past.

 
To consider this a little further; in the film Jurassic Park, the visitors to the Park are shown an animated film, which explains how the Park’s scientists created the dinosaurs. DNA, they explain, is extracted from mosquitoes trapped in amber and where there are gaps in the code sequence, so the gaps are filled with the DNA of frogs; the past is in effect brought back to life with fragments of the past and parts of the modern, living world. This ‘filling in the gaps’ is exactly what I have done throughout my life when trying to imagine the past and it’s just what we do in terms of the fragments of lines upon which we can kinaesthetically engage with people lost to the past. Where there are gaps we use our own lives to fill the holes and thereby understand that those who died in places like the Somme, were people just the same as ourselves.

Something else which plays a key role in interpreting landscapes such as those at the Somme is something which we might describe as ‘Embodied Imagination.’ We all at some point in our lives try to imagine the past whether through photographs, paintings or literature, but what we imagine always comprises snapshots, static images animated to some degree by our imaginations. It’s exactly how I described my thoughts on the Somme before my visit.

“Before visiting the battlefields, I wanted to record how I imagined the Somme. Old photographs, books and contemporaneous records all made a picture – a collage of sorts, comprising devastated fields, cut through with networks of trenches. Craters and mud; machine gun fire and shells. Woods reduced to spent matchsticks occupying a space on the horizon. The terrain as I’d imagined it was always flat and the images themselves silent, equivocal, without any weight or sense of place. There was colour but like any specific detail it was always vague. Any imagined scene was removed from my senses.  I could try to imagine the war, but of course any idea as to what it was like would be well wide of the mark to say the very least. I could imagine the rain, the blue sky, the smell of the grass, but still it was all divorced from my senses; an indeterminate collection of images wherein there was little sense of direction. I could try and imagine movement, but any progression derived from a series of stills as if I was looking down a length of film found on a cutting-room floor.”

 
In his book ‘The Materiality of Stone: Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology,’ Christopher Tilley writes:
“At the basis of all, even the most abstract knowledge is the sensuous, sensing and sensed body in which all experience is embodied: subjectivity is physical… The body carries time into the experience of place and landscape. Any moment of lived experience is thus orientated by and toward the past, a fusion of the two. Past and present fold in upon each other. The past influences the present and the present rearticulates the past.”

In a ‘Phenomenology of Landscape,’ he writes: “Knowledge of place stems from human experiences, feeling and thought.”

We could say therefore that knowledge of the Serre battlefield, for example, stems from ‘human experiences’ (the experiences of those who fought in 1916), ‘feeling’ (my own kinaesthetic experience of the battlefield in the present day) and ‘thought’ (my embodied imagination where my knowledge of past human experience is animated by my own kinaesthetic experience). Knowledge of a place is both geography and biography, of both the place and the individual.
 
Again, Christopher Tilley’s work is useful here. In his book, ‘Body and Image,’ he writes:

“What the body does in relation to imagery [landscape], its motions, its postures, how that imagery [landscape] is sensed through the fingers or the ear or the nose, as much as through the organ of the eye, actively constitutes the mute significance of imagery [landscape] which to have its kinaesthetic impact does not automatically require translation into either thoughts or meanings. The kinaesthetic significance of imagery [landscape] is thus visceral. It works through the muscles and ligaments, through physical actions and postures which provide affordances for the perceptual apparatus of the body in relation to which meaning may be grafted on, or attached. Meaning is derived from and through the flesh, not a cognitive precipitate of the mind without a body, or a body without organs.”

 
The ‘perceptual apparatus of the body’ as described by Tilley is akin to what I’ve described as my kinaesthetic experience of the battlefield. ‘Meaning’ can then be ‘grafted on’ or ‘attached’, where that meaning is my knowledge of past human experience. The whole is what I’ve described as ‘embodied imagination.’ But we must be careful not to reduce experience down to a mind/body dualism. The mind is not divorced from the body, neither is the body separate from the mind. ‘Consciousness is corporeal.’

I mentioned earlier the names of the trenches; the fact that for four years, a strange, new and violent place was imposed upon a peaceful agricultural landscape; how it’s almost as if the names of the trenches were fragments of the collective memory of those who dug and occupied them. Today, when we walk along what remains, we engage kinaesthetically with those who knew them during the war and we carry with us the entire geography of our existence, stretching back in a line to the day we were born. In effect, we impose – just as we’ve done throughout our lives – our own world upon that which already exists. “In a fundamental way,” writes Christopher Tilley, “names create landscapes”  and in a sense, the names of those we have known, whether throughout our lives or for a few minutes are mixed with the names of streets, cities and buildings, to make a landscape unique to us as individuals. The landscape of the Somme, in the physical present or in books and maps has been created not only by the names which existed prior to the war, but by the names of the trenches, fortifications and not least the names of everyone who fell here.

 Inevitably in a place such as the battlefield at Serre where so may men fell on that small patch of ground, one’s thoughts will turn to death – the literal end of the line. In an interview in 1979 with Frank Venaille, writer Georges Perec was asked: “…don’t you think that… the determination to work from memories or from the memory, is the will above all to stand out against death, against silence?”

If we can empathise kinaesthetically with the lives of the men who fought, it’s almost inevitable that we will somehow engage with their deaths which inevitably means a contemplation of our own, and in that sense, the fact that we can then walk away means that to some extent we do indeed stand out against death and silence.

Death is at its most visible in the cemeteries and monuments of the Somme. The landscape is covered with hundreds. Immaculate and maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, they are strangely beautiful places wherein one’s breath is always taken away by the row upon row of white headstones. It’s only here the scale of the slaughter becomes apparent. Some headstones have names, many – where names are unknown – have just the words A Solider of the Great War. Often the date is familiar, coinciding with the start of a phase in the battle, July 1st 1916 for example. But many men too vanished altogether and over 72,000 of these men are commemorated on the Thiepval memorial to the missing.

In some respects, by being in the places where they fell, by walking the lines of the trenches and through ‘reading’ or ‘playing-back’ ‘recordings’ in the lines which cover the Somme as I’ve described above, we are, kinaesthetically, remembering the missing and all who never returned home. People are places and places are people. Remembrance is not an act solely of the mind, but of an embodied imagination.

Feedback

by

Continuing in my research into the murder (or manslaughter as it transpired in the Assizes) of Charlotte Noon by her husband Elijah, I looked – in the Oxfordshire Record Office – at the original burial records for the Parish of St. Paul’s which includes Jericho where the Noons lived in Portland Place, Cardigan Street. I had my suspicions that Charlotte Noon would have been laid to rest in St. Sepulchre’s cemetery off Walton Street and in the records I found this to indeed be the case. I could even see the original plot number ‘G7’ which unfortunately today, won’t help in the identifying of her grave.

Despite this, yesterday I went a second time to St. Sepulchre’s and began to look again for the grave of Charlotte Noon. Maybe, just maybe, it would be one of those which had defied the passage of time and which could still be read – even if with fingers, but I knew this was unlikely to be the case; for one thing, I assume, as they were not a wealthy family, that the grave stone would be have been rather modest and less likely to survive the last 153 years; indeed this seems to be the case. Many of the graves have melted into the ground and only their outlines in the depressed turf indicate their presence. Nevertheless, there was something very poignant about walking around the cemetery knowing that I was in the immediate vicinity of her last resting place – there was, for those moemnts – a physical link between us.

I have walked around the cemetery on several occasions before, but was always oblivious to what it contained; now, as I walk, the whole place feels very different, as indeed does Jericho as a whole.

St. Sepulchre Cemetery

St. Sepulchre Cemetery

St. Sepulchre Cemetery

The cemetery along with streets Jericho are a part of my ‘geographic biography’. Writing about the piece of work I’m showing at the Botanic Gardens – 100 Mirrors (Dolls), I borrowed a quote from the artist Bill Viola, who wrote:

“Looking closely into the eye, the first thing to be seen, indeed the only thing to be seen, is one’s own self-image. This leads to the awareness of two curious properties of pupil gazing. The first is the condition of infinite reflection, the first visual feedback.”

This ‘feedback’ is precisely what I experience when I walk in these places – indeed any places where I know named ancestors of mine once walked – as if we are for that moment, both walking at the same time.
St. Sepulchre Cemetery

Black Mirrors

by

The black and white veils in question are those with which the 100 mirrors I will exhibit at The Botanic Gardens will be covered. At the moment I’m still unsure as to which to go for. The black veils are the most obvious in terms of the meaning they generate, black being the traditional colour of mourning in this country. White however is the traditional colour of mourning in Jewish culture (so I understand) and a 100 mirrors veiled in white and placed in a grid formation would have the resemblance of a military cemetery which would tie in with the work I’ve done on World War 1 in that they would look a little like a military cemetery. However, having recently read a ‘chapter’ in Bill Viola’s book, ‘Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House,’ there seems to be a case for looking at the black veils again.
In the following passage, Viola discusses the eye and the black mirror of the pupil:

“In many countries throughout the world, black is the colour of mourning. Echoing this ineffable finality, in European culture black is considered to be outside colour, the condition of the “absence of light.” The focal point for black in our lives is the pupil of the eye, portal to the tiny chamber in the centre of the eyeball, where darkness is necessary to resolve the original parent of the artificial image.

Since the means of the artistic creation of images are now the laws of optics and the properties of light, and the focus is the human eye, it was only a matter of time before someone thought to hold up a mirror. The ideal mirror, around since the beginning of humankind, is the black background of the pupil of the eye. There is a natural human propensity to want to stare into the eye of another or, by extension of oneself, a desire to see seeing itself, as if the straining to see inside the little black centre of the eye will reveal not only the secrets of the other, but of the totality of human vision. After all, the pupil is the boundary, and veil, to both internal and external vision.

Looking closely into the eye, the first thing to be seen, indeed the only thing to be seen, is one’s own self-image. This leads to the awareness of’ two curious properties of pupil gazing. The first is the condition of infinite reflection, the first visual feedback. The tiny person I see on the black field of the pupil also has an eye within which is reflected the tiny image of a person … and so on. The second is the physical fact that the closer I get to have a better view into the eye, the larger my own image becomes, thus blocking my view within. These two phenomena have each inspired ancient avenues of philosophical investigation and, in addition to the palpable ontological power of looking directly into the organs of sight, were considered proof of the uniqueness and special power of the eyes and the sense of sight.

Staring into the eye is an ancient form of autohypnosis and meditation. In the Alcibiades of’ Plato, Socrates describes the process of acquiring self-knowledge from the contemplation of’ the self’ in the pupil of another’s eye, or in the reflection of one’s own.
Socrates (describing the Delphic inscription ‘gnothi seauton’): I will tell you what I think is the real advice this inscription offers. The only example I find to explain it has to do with seeing. … Suppose we spoke to our eye as if it were a man and told it: “See thyself” . . . would it not mean that the eye should look at, something in which it could recognise itself?
Alcibiades: Mirrors and things of that, sort?
Socrates: Quite right. And is there not something of’ that sort in the eye we see with? … Haven’t you noticed that, when one looks someone in the eye, he sees his own face in the center of the other eye, as if in a mirror:’ This is why we call the centre of the eye the “pupil” (puppet): because it reflects a sort of miniature image of’ the person looking into it… So when one eye looks at another and gazes into that inmost part by virtue of which that eye sees, then it sees itself.
Alcibiades: That’s true.
Socrates: And if the soul too wants to know itself, must it not look at a soul, especially at that inmost part of it where reason and wisdom dwell? …This part of the soul resembles God. So whoever looks at this and comes to know all that is divine – God and insight through reason – will thereby gain a deep knowledge of himself.
The medieval Neoplatonists practiced meditating on the pupil of the eye, or speculation, a word that literally means “mirror gazing.” The word contemplation is derived from the ancient practice of divination, where a templum is marked off in the sky by the crook of an auger to observe the passage of crows through the square. Meditation and concentration both refer to the centring process of focusing on the self.

The black pupil also represents the ground of nothingness, the place before and after the image, the basis of the “void” described in all systems of spiritual training. It is what Meister Eckhart described as “the stripping away of, everything, not only that which is other, but even one’s own being.”
In ancient Persian cosmology, black exists as a color and is considered to be “higher” than white in the universal color scheme. This idea is derived in part as well from the color of the pupil. The black disc of the pupil is the inverse of the white circle of the Sun. The tiny image in “the apple of the eye” was traditionally believed to be a person’s self, his or her soul, existing in complementary relationship to the sun, the world-eye.

There is nothing brighter than the sun, for through it, all things become manifest. Yet if the sun did not go down at night, or if it were not veiled by the shade, no one would realise that there is such a thing as light on the face of the earth… They have apprehended light through its opposite… The difficulty in knowing God is therefore due to brightness; He is so bright that men’s hearts have not the strength to perceive it… He is hidden by His very brightness.
Al-Ghazzali (1058-1111)

So, black becomes a bright light on a dark day, the intense light bringing on the protective darkness of the closed eye; the black of the annihilation of the self.
Fade to black…
[Silence]”

Through reading this passage, my question as to whether to choose black or white veils for the mirrors was answered and a title suggested for the piece. These mirrors have always served to represent the individuals of the past and our reflections ourselves in the present. They are an attempt to see ourselves as those in the past once saw themselves, a real as we are today. When Viola writes how the closer he gets to have a better view into the eye, the larger his own image becomes, thus blocking my view within, I can take this as being analogous with the difficulties faced by my attempt at seeing individuals in the past where my view, the closer I look is necessarily blocked by my own self (although of course the theme of my work has been to know past individuals through knowing oneself).

This passage also reminded me of a passage from Rilke’s ‘Duino Elegies’ where in the Eight Elegy he writes:

“Lovers – were it not for their loved ones
obstructing their view – they come near it
and are amazed… As if by some mistake,
it opens to them, there, beyond the other…
But neither can slip past the beloved
and World rushes back before them…”

Music and Text

by

As part of a new project, I’ve been looking at ways of creating musical scores. As someone who composes music but cannot read it, I find this particularly interesting inasmuch as I’m looking to write a piece of music but want to do so, not by ‘feeling’ the music as I’m playing it (as is how I normally do it), but rather, through a process of ‘writing’ it down first. The scoring should, furthermore, be linked with the theme of the piece. For example, for the music I want to write as part of my Tour Stories: Oxford Destroyed project, I’ve tried drawing remembered images of the city, blind on a piece of manuscript paper.

Oxford Music Drawings

Oxford Music Drawings

It was whilst making work for a project “The Ordinary Language of Freedom” that I became aware of how what I was doing (writing on a window) reminded me of the look of music – a link made manifest perhaps by dint of the fact I cannot read it.

Dark Tourism

And prior to this, music – and in particular, musical scores – surfaced towards the end of my work on the Dreamcatcher project, where I began to see the piles of string as unsung/unwritten notes and the net as an attempt to piece them together – to write, in effect, a score of unwritten music.

Dreamcatcher X

Yesterday, I made some work which incorporated the text style of ‘The Ordinary Language of Freedom’ project and my works with manuscript paper. I was interested to see how it would look, and, what it would mean, if I wrote directly onto the staves in this way.

Text on Staves
I began by considering what what one can derive from a blank sheet of manuscript paper. Comparing it with an ordinary blank sheet of paper there is clearly a difference. The staves somehow resonate, they make a sound even when there is nothing on them, and remind me of the silence one encounters in churches; pregnant with echoes (one thinks here again of Bill Viola’s discussion of sound in Chartres catherdral). When the text is written upon the staves (as above), the text becomes music, but of a different kind. The words are not words to be sung (that would be the case if the words were written beneath the staves and notes upon them) neither are they to be spoken. If the words are written beneath the staves without notation then they become neither words to be sung or spoken. They are not music. They are not simply text. They become lost.
12-03-08
Looking at some past text work I made as part of my OVADA residency (‘Wound’), I thought of repeating the work using manuscript paper.
Wound
The results were particularly interesting.
Music and Text
There is something about this piece which I find particularly resonant. The text is taken from a piece of writing I made following my visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau in which I describe the silence of the place; one, which like that in churches, I remember as being pregnant with the past. Looking at it closely, I was in fact reminded of mediaeval manucripts.

I need to explore these ideas more throughly, which in part I will do through a new project (6 Yards 0 Feet 6 Inches) and then, with a few ‘scores’ in hand, I will start to create some music based upon them.

Dreamcatcher IX

by

Thinking about the backdrop for the Dreamcatcher I have decided that it would be best to stick with just empty sheets of manuscript paper rather than bits of everything else. The trouble is I haven’t collected enough different types of paper and having just three things (manuscript paper, postcards and lined paper) makes it as a whole look a bit ‘cobbled together’ and rather contrived. Having just the manuscript paper however helps me to avoid this. Furthermore it makes for a stronger piece. With just the empty manuscript paper as a backdrop, the cut string would become just the unwritten notes, unsung music; and they would I believe be more pertinent to the theme of lost voices, silenced voices. There is something more human about these pieces of string being unplayed or unsung music.
One particularly interesting contrast is the idea of music (sung music in particular) filling a space. One can imagine the sound waves with the potential of filling a vast area and then the pile of unsung notes (unheard voices) piled in just a corner. There is the difference too in the quality of the two; the sound being light and the string being dense and heavy.

I am reminded here of something I read in Bill Viola’s collection of writing: ‘Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House. Writings 1973-1994’.

“Chartres and other edifices like it have been described as ‘music frozen in stone’. References to sound and acoustics here are twofold. Not only are there the actual sonic characteristics of the cavernous interior, but the form and structure of the building itself reflects the principles of sacred harmony – a sort of ‘acoustics within acoustics’. When one enters a Gothic sanctuary, it is immediately noticeable that sound commands the space. This is not just a simple echo effect at work, but rather all sounds, no matter how near, far or loud appear to be originating at the same place. They seem to be detracted from the immediate scene, floating somewhere where the point of view has become the entire space.”

I’m particularly interested in the idea of the net being a score of sorts, one that can be sung or played (I like the idea of the cello being used in this context, as this instrument, a mournful one in many ways, has often been described as being the closest sounding instrument (in terms of its timbre) to the human voice. If one was using the net as a score, what would one be playing? The lines of the string, the intersections (knots) or the spaces between?

Dreamcatcher VIII

In many ways, this takes me back to a research project I started, but on which I never worked that much called Pathways Project. And already a title has come to mind. Dead Light: Unsung.

Lists and Bill Viola

by

Whilst writing up some notes on making lists as a strategy, I thought again of the Bill Viola quote I mentioned in the last entry. The following is taken from what I wrote concerning lists, starting with an extract from one of the first lists I made during my residency at OVADA:

engine purrs
yellow clothes
hiss
reverse warning sounds
food
pie ‘n’ pint
Leffe
thumbs up
zebra crossing
fat stomach
boarded windows

This I then turned into a ‘prose’ version:

An engine purrs. A woman with yellow clothes walks towards me. The hiss of a bus’s brakes, and then its reverse warning sounds, telling of its departure. Outside the pub on a blackboard food is advertised; a pie ‘n’ pint. Leffe is also served here. A man gives a thumbs up as I cross the zebra crossing. A man with a fat stomach walks towards and then past me. Ahead, on the opposite side of the street, a shop and a restaurant stand empty with boarded windows.

The idea of single words, or ‘hightlights’ reminds me of Bill Viola’s quote regarding our lives as a single moment.

“We have been living this same moment ever since we were conceived. It is memory, and to some extent sleep, that gives the impression of a life of discrete parts, periods or sections, of certain times or ‘highlights’.”

The individual words are highlights, extrapolated from (or in this instance built into) a piece of prose (the ‘same moment’).

Clotho. Lachesis. Atropos.

by

Thinking about the Three Fates project, I was considering how the individual fates, Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos, might somehow reflect the work I’ve been doing over the past year. As I thought about their roles, I realised that there were some interesting connections. Clotho for example, through her spinning yarn and creating life, reflects much of the work I’ve been doing regarding pathways and the coming-into-being (the unliklely, almost impossible coming-into-being) of the individual human. It is interesting that in much of my work and thoughts this year, I have been considering the pathways of our ancestors and visualising those pathways with, amongst other things, string (a tangle of string might represent the impossible pathways of ancestors). Lachesis of course represents the lifespan of the individual, and in the case of my work, the lives of individuals is a recurrent theme, particularly as regards my work on the Holocaust and World War One. Everything to do with life, our physical acts (such as walking) and the everyday, mundane objects which we encounter and which shape it, are represented by her. Atropos, who cuts the thread, is of course death, and I needn’t say how she fits in.

Of course, much of my work deals with memory and Bill Viola’s quote regarding how we have been “living this same moment ever since we were conceived,” and how “it is memory, and to some extent sleep, that gives the impression of a life of discrete parts, periods or sections, of certain times or ‘highlights'”, fits in with the ‘action’ of the three fates, who could be said to be dividing a single life into its component memories as well as Life with a capital ‘L’ into its separate lives.

Bill Viola and Highlights

by

“We have been living this same moment ever since we were conceived. It is memory, and to some extent sleep, that gives the impression of a life of discrete parts, periods or sections, of certain times or ‘highlights’.”

I was thinking about the above quote from Bill Viola in relation to the myth of the Three Fates; Clotho, Lachesis and Atropo. I had imagined creating a work involving string being drawn, measured and cut as signifying life being measured and cut. This was to have been created in relation to my ongoing work on the Holocaust.

However, it could be that the lengths of string represent not only individual lives, but these discrete moments (memories) which Viola describes, i.e. moments of a single life. This could be very interesting as regards work which aims to find the individual amongst the millions who died in the Holocaust. A pile of cut strings could represent a pile of bodies, or, a pile of one person’s memories.

19-10-07

19-10-07-ii

Canaletto

by

Yesterday, prior to meeting a friend, I paid a quick visit to the National Gallery, a place of which I can never tire (just the fact one can enter as freely as one enters a shop never ceases to amaze me). I had little time, around 15-20 minutes and so I headed towards the 18th century, and as I walked I saw a sign pointing the way to Venice. Having not long returned from the city, I made my way in that direction, checking my watch to keep an eye on the time and quickly found myself there again, in the mind of a certain Canaletto. Of course, I am familiar with Canaletto and his great views of the Grand Canal, but it was, as always a pleasure to see them again. And with Venice still fresh in my memory, wet like paint, I found the canvases teaming with life; the blue two centuries old sky which I had seen just two weeks ago, the turquoise canals and the buildings, which always put me in mind of old yet elegant widows. Yet, it was two smaller works which I found the most appealing. Firstly, ‘Venice: Piazza San Marco and the Colonnade of the Procuratie Nuove’ painted in about 1756, and secondly ‘Venice: Piazza San Marco,’ painted again around 1756.

I paid little attention to the dates (I didn’t have much time as I said), but recognised there was something melancholic about these works when compared with others I could see (such as the Regatta on the Grand Canal).

In my mind, I can still hear Venice, I can hear the sounds of these very colonades, I can feel the lapping shadows, and when I look at the paintings above, those sounds (the murmuring voices, the footsteps chipping at the ground) become those of the people in the paintings, of men, women and children who have been dead for two centuries. One can almost imagine, the man in the green cape holding his coffee (‘Venice: Piazza San Marco’) still standing there now, listening in on the conversations of the living, quite unaware of the passing of time, of the passing of his own life.

Venice

And it is interesting, and indeed appropriate, that not far from the place painted by Canaletto in these two late works, Bill Viola’s meditation on life and death was installed in the Chiesa di San Gallo. This work, with its use of water as a ‘dividing line’ between life and death has no more appropriate place to he shown than Venice, and the more I think about the city, the more I see it as a place where life and death coexist; indeed, the very symbol of Venice, the Gondolier has a role to play. Amongst the crowds thronging the Riva Degli Schiavoni, who’s to say the dead don’t stand amidst the tourists – the man with his coffee cup – awaiting the Gondoliers who will ferry them to the next place. Perhaps it is the city’s almost supernatural existence, which lends the place this other-worldly air. As Paul Morand writes in somewhat unconventional biography, ‘Venices’:

” Venice did not withstand Attila, Bonaparte, the Hapsburgs, or Eisenhower; she had something more important to do: survive; they believed they were building upon rock; she sided with the poets and decided to be built on water… Within her restricted space, Venice, situated as she is in the middle of nowhere, between the foetal waters and those of the Styx encapsulates my journey on earth…”

Venice – The Biennale

by

For some time I have wanted to visit the Biennale, and, finally this year, I went. To be honest, I had little idea what to expect, or what – from a ‘professional’ perspective – I would gain, but my hopes were raised when, having left our hotel, we saw the following poster:

Venice

Admittedly this was a fringe event, but it promised much. I last saw Bill Viola’s work in May this year, in Warsaw, and was blown away by it. He’s an artist who interests me a great deal, not just through his exhibited works, but also through his writing. So, on a hot and glorious day, we made our way to the Chiesa di San Gallo, a small and somewhat unassuming fifteenth century church, a stone’s throw from St. Mark’s Square.

Venice

Inside it was dark. On three altars, three large, flat screens were placed, one in front and two either side of those who stood or sat watching near the entrance. There was a stillness inside, emphasised by the sonic aspect of the work as well as by the coolness of the interior, a quietude augmented by the contrast with the heat and the light outside.

At first I thought there was something wrong with two of the screens, as the pictures shown on both of them were monochrome, blurred and rather grainy, much like an image one might see through an infrared camera. The screen directly in front however, showed a figure, beautifully lit and filmed as one would expect from Viola. Of course the point soon became clear.

Venice

Before the monochrome figures was a wall of water which one could not quite discern except for the occasional highlights at the bottom of the screen where the water caught the lights. Slowly, again in Viola’s inimitable style, the figures behind the water (always shown in isolation) walked toward us, towards the mysterious screen of water. Then at last they broke through, their limbs shrouded in a halo-like light as the water became visible around them.

Venice

The figures (of which there were several) then stood for a moment, before – after varying periods of time – they walked back through the screen of water to become monochrome, fuliginous shadows; versions of what they had just that second been.

Venice

This was a work, whose meaning was emphasised and expounded by its location. It could quite easily work in isolation, in a gallery (as was the case in Warsaw) for example, but here, in the church, it became a different piece altogether; the church was as much a part of the piece as the images played on the screens; indeed, the work’s meaning came as much through it’s ancient interior, (through which countless generations have passed in consideration of life and death and life after death and who are now themselves memories held by the church) its stones and its statues, as through the power of technology. As one looked at the ghosts behind the invisible walls of water, one could imagine the ghosts of all those who’d once sat where we were sitting. And when the figures emerged and returned to the depths, thoughts of one’s own mortality could not be ignored. More can be seen at the official website, www.oceanwithoutashore.com.

The next day we made our way to the Giardini to see the pavillions of the various participating countries and to see what, along with Bill Viola, was on offer. It says something about the art that we soon had a leaderboard (as if this was a Eurovision event) and even more, that for much of the trawl through the Giardini we had only a first and second place. Nothing warranted a third, although the battle for the wooden spoon was intense (won jointly in the end by Canada and the quite appalling German contingent).

For me, the best piece by some way was to be found in the Polish Pavillion, represented by Monika Sosnowska.

Venice

Venice

This was one of the few pieces in the whole exhibition which (like Viola’s fringe work) considered the space in which it was displayed. The architectural form, a sort of prefabricated structure had been bent and twisted so as to fit into the space in which it was shown. It had it seemed been brought to its knees and brought to mind an exhibition we had seen in Poland a few months back concerning the housing developments of the communist era, in which it wasn’t so much the structures themselves which were crushed and forced to fit a space, but humans themselves. The structure also reminded me of my own work as regards my drawings, and so I saw this almost as a physical, three dimensional drawing.
Spain came second and Russia third with the USA in fourth. I know it cheapens the whole event to reduce art to winners and losers, but then, such was the overall standard of the work it was hard not to see it that way. As for the British Pavillion… the less said the better.

Later that afternoon we took in the Arsenale, the quarter mile interior beneath which, art is reduced even further by casual and indifferent glances, to side shows and decoration. Admittedly the space is very impressive (how often is that phrase used as a means of justifying an otherwise mediocre exhinition) and there were moments when one felt glad to be there.

Venice

Oscar Munoz’s Memorial was particularly poignant, and Yang Fudong’s series of films (parts 1 to 5 of ‘Seven Intellectuals on the Yellow Mountain’) especially beautiful.

Venice

But aside from these there was little else to get excited about. The question, fundamentally, is this: how should art be seen? Or to put it another way, how best is it viewed? With Viola, the work was in its own space and its power was enhanced by the content within the church and the light and life outside. With the Biennale, in the Pavillions and the interminable Arsenale, art became like any word repeated over and over again; in the end (actually some time before the end) it lost its meaning completely.

The Tower of London

by

During my degree in the early 1990s, I did a lot of work on the Tower of London, and in particular on the inscriptions made by prisoners incarcerated in the Beauchamp Tower. I worked with video at the time, mixing text taken from Dante’s journey through Hell with images of my own walk through the Tower. This weekend, while visiting the Tower, I relished the chance, in light of the work I’ve been doing on both my MA and this residency, of seeing them again, and, just as they did almost 15 years ago, these inscriptions once again captured my imagination.

Having visited Auschwitz and Ypres, I became aware, in this small room, of the nature of memorials. In Ypres, the main memorials are the graves and the names on the Menin Gate. At Auschwitz it is the possessions left by the victims. In this small room, prisoners who knew they would die, or at least feared for their lives, made their own memorials, sometimes carving very elaborate testaments to their own existence in the most difficult of conditions. Some would memorialise the long hours they endured and the torment which they suffered, such as that by William Tyrell. Carved in 1541 it is particularly poignant:

“Since Fortune has chosen that my hope should go to the wind to complain,
I wish the time were destroyed; my planet being ever sad and ungracious.”

In wishing ‘the time were destroyed,’ William Tyrell through carving the fact into the wall, has made not only time, but that particular moment, endure for as long as the walls remain standing, a moment which we can share some 465 years later. It’s strange how the moment remains yet his suffering has for centuries been at an end. He speaks to us directly and by hearing him in our own voices we can share more directly in his pain. Would the carving be so powerful if it was a fragment in a museum? No, I don’t think it would. The fact we are seeing it in situ, standing in the exact place he stood helps us to fill in the gaps more easily. We get a sense of his confinement, his life and the impossible sense of freedom as glimpsed through the window – the freedom which for us is not only possible, but certain. It is this same sensation which I felt in Auschwitz-Birkenau, the knowledge that I could at any time just walk out the gate. Here, I could simply turn and walk out the door. It is this rather uncomfortable contrast which makes the plight of William Tyrell, among many others all the more tragic.

The objects in Auschwitz, in particular the suitcases, were in many respects, memorials in their own time, unwitting memorials perhaps to a place (a home, a normal life) from which the victims had been driven. The names inscribed on the walls of the Beauchamp Tower however memorialise the place of confinement, the period of incarceration.

“We have been living this same moment ever since we were conceived. It is memory, and to some extent sleep, that gives the impression of a life of discrete parts, periods or sections, of certain times or ‘highlights’.”

This quote from Bill Viola is particularly pertinent when one imagines what it was like to be incarcerated in a space such as was William Tyrell. No doubt during his captivity, Tyrell spent time remembering, casting his mind back over periods in his life, over ‘discrete parts’ and ‘highlights’. And if ever a person is aware of living the same moment, then it must be the prisoner confined in his cell.
There is something else about this quote which is also pertinent to the room in the Beauchamp Tower. The myriad number of inscriptions covering the walls were carved over a period of almost two centuries and give us impressions of not only a single life as consisting of discrete parts, but of lives as being discrete parts of a greater whole or single moment of existence, an existence (the room) in which we are playing as much a part as the men once held prisoner within.

“If things are perceived as discrete parts or elements they can be rearranged. Gaps become more interesting as places of shadow.”

Using the example of the Beauchamp Tower, one can see how this rearrangement of which Bill Viola speaks takes place in the mind of the visitor. Time is collapsed into a moment, a period of almost two centuries is visible to us in one look around the room. Years and decades separate many of these carvings, yet we are aware of only the blur of the past. We are in effect rearranging these discreet periods, creating gaps – interesting (and ambiguous) places of shadow – which we fill with our own experience.

Gaps

by

“Possibly the most startling thing about our individual existence is that it is continuous… We have been living this same moment ever since we were conceived. It is memory, and to some extent sleep, that gives the impression of a life of discrete parts, periods or sections, of certain times or ‘highlights’…

If things are perceived as discrete parts or elements they can be rearranged. Gaps become more interesting as places of shadow…”

Bill Viola, ‘Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House‘

Whilst flicking though my research journal this evening, I happened upon the above quote which I first read several months ago. I was startled by what I read, particularly in light of what I wrote yesterday (‘From Dinosaurs to Human Beings’). This continuous existence which Viola speaks of, could be said to be that same existence of which we and all our ancestors are a part, and to memory and sleep as creators of ‘discrete parts’ or ‘highlights’ we might add ‘death’.

These discrete elements can be rearranged, and in doing so, gaps will inevitably appear (I’ve discovered as much through the process of walking and making notes of objects etc.) and it is these gaps, these shadows which I have been working with and in which I am most interested.

Maps and Walking

by

The main theme of much of my work has so far been the Holocaust and in particular its sites, such as those at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec and Babi Yar. I’ve also been studying memory and how memories within objects and buildings might allow us a glimpse of the past; a theme which has fascinated me ever since I was a child. It was through reading Bill Viola’s writings a few months back that I was reminded of the mnemonic techniques practiced by the ancient Greeks:

“The idea of art as a kind of diagram has for the most part not made it down from the Middle Ages into modern European Consciousness. The Renaissance was the turning point… The structural aspect of art, and the idea of a ‘data-space’ was preserved through the Renaissance however in the continued relations between image and architecture. Painting became an architectural, spatial form which the viewer experienced by physically walking through it. The older concept of an idea and an image architecture, a memory ‘place’ like the mnemonic temples of the Greeks is carried through in the great European cathedrals and palaces, as is the relation between memory, spatial movement and storage (recording) of ideas.”

When I first read this quote, I was at the time researching The University Parks in Oxford, and in particular examining the plaques on the benches. I realised then, that my act of walking and ‘remembering’ those who have passed away, was in a broad and rather loose sense, like walking through one of those ‘mnemonic temples’ albeit in a physical sense. I was constructing a bigger picture of the place.

More recently, walking has started to play an important role in my work on the Holocaust (one of the themes which has struck me through my research has been that of walking. Many photos of the Holocaust show people walking, usually, and tragically, to their deaths). I’ve started to look at the Operation Reinhard camps and in particular Belzec. Laurence Rees, in his book, ‘Auschwitz’, describes the unimaginable scale of death and contrasts it with the disproportionately tiny size of Belzec Death Camp, which measured less less than 300m x 300m. I knew this was a small size, but it wasn’t until I walked around some familiar spaces in Oxford – including the University Parks – that I realised just how small it was.

Since then I’ve started looking for more evidence of the size of Belzec (and other camps) so that I might walk specific distances around the city, and have since discovered a number of maps drawn by survivors, SS men and archaeologists. These roughly sketched maps, these ‘memories,’ are a poignant reminder of the camp’s existence and might help me in my attempts to bring people closer to the Holocaust, which should never be forgotten.

“All things fade away in time, but time itself is made fadeless and undying by recollection.” Apollonius of Tyana
“We have to describe and to explain a building the upper story of which was erected in the nineteenth century; the ground-floor dates from the sixteenth century, and a careful examination of the masonry discloses the fact that it was reconstructed from a dwelling-tower of the eleventh century. In the cellar we discover Roman foundation walls, and under the cellar a filled-in cave, in the floor of which stone tool are found and remnants of glacial fauna is the layers below… Not only our memories, but the things we have forgotten are ‘housed’.” C.G. Jung
“Memory, whether individual or generational, political or public is always more than the prison house of the past.” Andreas Huyssen

Here I must return to the ancient Greeks and their mnenomic temples. With a place or loci, such as a house, fixed in the mind, the person remembering would place various objects in its rooms (“…what I have spoken of as being done in a house can also be done in public buildings, or on a long journey, or going through a city…”), objects which by association would remind them of part of the whole thing – such as a speech – to be remembered. Here I saw at once a correlation with my work on Belzec. The ancient Greeks were walking as a means of remembering, of not forgetting; their memory loci were in effect maps which one could sketch, maps of the mind. Therefore, the maps drawn by survivors, are in effect maps of their minds and bring us closer to the horrors of the time – closer to the individuals who suffered.

The fact that objects were used to create associations, and therefore build (through ‘walking’) a bigger ‘picture’ of something also fits in with the recent work I’ve been doing on Auschwitz, looking at the possessions left by the victims and trying to build a picture of the individuals before the Holocaust, to see them not only as victims, but people who lived lives before its horror.

Through walking distances which I’ve taken from descriptions of the camp, I have found myself walking back into my own past and the past of the city in general; for example, walking the route of Cuckoo Lane and the Old London Road at Shotover. My own past confirms my individuality and the past of the city confirms my place as a small part in the mass of memories associated with this place (this also correlates with my work on Auschwitz, trying to find the individuals amongst the huge number of dead, individual possessions from amongst the mountains, names rather than inconceivable numbers). The fact these walks have been derived from a map or a description of Belzec, helps me to identify further with the individuals who suffered there; not because I can in anyway conceive of their suffering – no-one could ever imagine the horrors they endured – but because I can imagine their own pasts and that of the places they knew so well, places from which they were taken to their deaths.

© Nicholas Hedges 2006-20

Subscribe