#memory studies

Architectures of Absence (Where the Heart Used to Step)

Collective memories

You may have come across Semioticapocalypse, a blog I started—frightening to consider how long ago it was, — that became essentially the origin of the «Collective Memories» (CM). Both Semioticapocalypse and the CM project emerged primarily from my longstanding love for black-and-white photography, which later evolved into an interest in its history and theory. Secondly, thу new enterprise owes much to the staggering and mesmerizing impact that the Cambrian explosion in the world of generative models has had (and continues to have) on me, particularly when it comes to diffusion models, generating images visual or textual inputs as well as from various combinations of thereof.

The term "collective memory" denotes the aggregate of memories, knowledge, and data that a social group holds, which is intrinsically linked to the group's identity. The term "collective memory" in English and its French counterpart "la mémoire collective" emerged in the latter half of the 19th century. Maurice Halbwachs, a philosopher and sociologist, further developed this concept in his 1925 work, «Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire» (eng. text). Both expansive and intimate social collectives can create, disseminate, and inherit collective memory.

Contrary to the term "collective memory," which is somewhat ambiguously defined yet generally accepted, the notion of "collective memories" is inherently problematic. Memories are the results of the individual acts of recollection, making the idea of "collective memories" paradoxical. Сontemporary diffusion models utilize vast amounts of often unidentified data, including historical and personal old photographs, vintage postcards, and other kinds of publicly circulating images. These models may be seen as involved in the prompts-driven singular acts of remembrance, producing images that paradoxically represent "collective memories," something otherwise unfeasible and ultimately, non-existent.

21.11.18

Svetlana Alexievich, The Unwomanly Face of War, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Random House, 2017), xxi.

By Niamh McConnell

INTRODUCTION.

To live in a human society, I believe, is to live on the foundations of the past and of memory. But to what extent do we interact with memory in both our public and our private spheres? How do we memorialise events and people within our collective and personal histories? When Kenny discusses how Renaissance scholars made up the idea of a ‘mind palace’ to help them remember their material, he describes a palace filled with rooms and furniture, each filled with a memory, what he ends writing as “a theatre of memory” (Kenny 1999, pp. 422) – which may just be another word for a museum. From there, based on that logic, is the museum is a theatre for memories, than what stories do those memories tell? In that way, the museum is not the only place where memories are preserved, but where narratives about our history are presented – one article noting how museums can be responsible for placing meaning onto simple objects and events, where “a museum object is imbued with multiple meanings and can be used as material evidence to represent different epochs and historical narratives; once the objects are placed in an ideological environment, value and meaning get attached to them.” (Blakkisrud and Kuziev 2019, pp. 1010).

With regards to the museum as the creator of meaning and narratives, the museum can also act as a memorial; with that, there is always the question of what the museum is memorialising in question, what narratives are being upheld versus others, something which is discussed by Tota, writing “in this respect, the choice of representing a controversial past through a specific cultural form can be viewed as a good terrain in which to study the process of selecting one of the competing versions of this past.” (Tota 2004, pp. 132) What meaning and narratives museums end up creating and supporting is always, naturally political – especially as talked about with Knell, with the museum being considered an important aspect of democracy, where Knell “aligns the museum with law courts, the free press, universities and other autonomous institutions which contribute to a state built around truth, justice and equality” (Knell 2020, pp. 143-144).

In the context of Australian democracies, this leads to the question of what narratives museums – museums like the Museum of Western Australia – decide to support and create, and which ones are left out. More particularly, what narratives our Australian democracy refuses to acknowledge – particularly that of Aboriginal history. According to the book, Cannibal Tours and Glass Boxes, the Ames views the museum as a institution based upon the subjugation of non-Western cultures, stating “museums are cannibalistic in appropriating other people’s material for their own study and interpretation, and they confine their representations to glass box display cases.” (Ames 2014, pp. 3). However, I feel that this does not do complete justice to the role of museums – while museums have played a part in the objectification of Aboriginal culture and history, the museum also holds the place to recognise the historical injustices committed in the name Australian society, with museums potentially “addressing cultural injustices requires a politics of recognition; and addressing political injustices requires a politics of representation” (Power and Taylor 2013, pp. 468) In this essay, looking at these essays, I intend to observe how museums encourage the public to interact with our private pasts – and I intend to observe what narratives museums create, through it’s objects and it’s exhibits; and whether museums are capable of representing post colonial narratives authentically and truthfully.

METHODOLOGY

At first, I did not take active notes of what I had written – I had feared that people may suspect that I was observing them, and because of that, their natural behaviour would change. I was planning on simply using my experiences – as a disabled queer women – as I watched people and interacted with the museum, and transcribing my experiences into thick description as soon as I got home. As noted by someone, the nature of the thick description as when observing museums through the lens of human rights research, “is helpful for countering the legalistic and mechanistic approaches which have predominated in human rights studies, for capturing the complexity of rights talk and processes” (Sandell and Nightingale 2012, pp. 196). This was not to say I did not take notes at all, during the time – I went so far as to take photos of the exhibits and write a few sentences in bullet points, but I made a point as to write more of what I experienced as soon as returned home. More importantly, I went and made an observation on the 21st of November, 2020 – on a Thursday, to be more precise.

FINDINGS: OBSERVATION AT THE MUSEUM

From there, I roamed the Western Australia Museum Boola Bardip and observed not only the exhibits, but also the people and how the museum was built in a way to encourage people to interact with the memories collected in a specific way – the map and the museum workers encouraging me to start from the third floor and descend from there. Since I was there with my mother at the reopening way of the Western Australia museum in 2020, I found the museum a little less lively (through there were still people there to be observed). People were encouraged to be quiet, to not run (any parents there I saw ended up scolding their child when they ended up forgetting that rule), to not touch certain objects - like the jewellery or the statues or pottery in the Ancient Greece special exhibit, versus when one is encouraged to feel a meteorite in the Diamonds to Dinosaurs exhibit.In this case, to walk through a museum to be in the presence of a walk-through memorial – the behaviour expected from museum goers being similar to that of attendants during the ANZAC Dawn Ceremony.

But what’s most fascinating is not necessarily how people were encouraged to behave in a public setting which acts as an eternal memorial, but more of how people are encouraged to use technology to interact with the past – and also to see what histories are being included within the museum. From the very title of the museum Boola Bardip, a term in Noongar meaning ‘many stories’, the museum has gone out of it’s way to include the histories and culture of Indigenous Australians – the museum having it’s own exhibit, Katta Djinoong, which focuses on Indigenous people (more specifically, the Noongar people of Western Australia) pre-colonisation to our present.

Beyond the inclusion of indigenous history, there is also the interesting question of how personal memory becomes public memory – what is considered worthy of remembering and memorialising? Some of the things memorialised in the museum have only happened five or ten years ago – when I attended the museum in 2020 for reopening day, for example and out of recollection, the museum had a temporary exhibit featuring the stories of nurses, doctors and essential workers during the COVID-19 (which featured photographs of my mother, as the disaster coordinator). Beyond that, during my visit on the 21st, there was an aspect of the museum which focused upon immigration – on which we saw the personal belongings of refugees on a boat that came over five years ago, alongside comparisons of anti-immigration refugee from the 19th century to now. The wedding dress of a Balinese woman who immigrated to Australia with her Swiss husband during WWII, the concentration camp uniform of a Polish Jewish refugee, the play items of children from 1910s Australia, the travel ads telling people in Britain to come over to Perth (a sign asking you consider what is the reputation of Western Australia amongst the international community).

And the last interesting aspect of the museum is how the museum positions people to actually interact with memory, not just to observe it – particularly with technology being the way to help pave the space between the present and the past. As seen in the peoples exhibit, for example, there are five long TV screens which show five people across different wars – the mother of a soldier during WWI, a young woman during WWII, a soldier from the Korean War, an Aboriginal soldier from the Vietnam War, and a solider from the Afghanistan War – all interacting with each other, all sitting at a table and in the same room. In front of you is a table with buttons – from there, you control what stories these people tell each other – about communication during the war (where memorably, we go from hearing the weeks-long wait for news from soldiers and how mothers ran from the sight of priests bearing bad news during WWI to hearing how an Afghanistan War veteran heard about the death of his friend from email), about how they were received after the war ended, about how civilians at home coped, and so on.

Some were personal, such as the experiences of how Aboriginal soldiers during discriminated during the Vietnam War, or about how female civilians found work aiding the war during WWII, all were interesting – all were presented in a way that could not have being possible 15 or 20 or 30 years ago. Alongside this, there are many examples of technology used to aid in the education and memorialisation of history. Going into a dark room with aboriginal artwork of lava and magma roaring across all the walls, the ceiling and the floor included, emulating the early days of the world. Animation of an everyday life long abandoned – like parties, like weddings, like war – coming alive on Ancient Greek pottery. A large room filled with stars, where the narration of the Big Bang is intertwined with Aboriginal astronomy and mythology. The ways of technology has expanded our ways of living – so too, it seems, it has expanded our way of remembering.

DISCUSSION

While the Boola Dardip museum has gone out of it’s way to present a history of Australia that traditionally has being excluded from Australian museums (and, by extension, within the mainstream social and legal systems of Australia), the museum as an institution itself could still be considered a source and weapon of trauma for marginalised histories. As discussed by Greenwood and the concept of archival violence, there is still the opportunity for museums to place Indigenous history and culture define by Western standards, where “the return of Aboriginal people’s histories is tied up in systems of recognition that demand discursive displays of evidence” (Greenwood 2018, pp. 595). This is also supported by Kenny, when discussing about the issue of historical amnesia for Aboriginal communities (particularly pertaining to the Yir Yoront) – where “that Aboriginal history can be told, but only in an Aboriginal way” (Kenny 1999, pp. 424).

From this logic, Aboriginal history and memory is viewed through a Western perspective , the museum being responsible for taking Aboriginal memories and trauma and presenting them into a narrative consumable for Western audiences. This, of course, creates the question if museums can play any role in being able to truthfully and authentically depict Indigenous or non-Western histories This difficult question of negating Western and Aboriginal truths within museums and anthropology itself is also discussed by Pilbrow, Pilbrow going on to write how “attempts to reclaim language and cultural practices are a double-edged sword when in confrontation with the state’s narrow and confining conceptualisation of tradition and authenticity” (Pilbrow 2013, pp. 232-233).

However, this is not to discredit the work I saw at the Boola Bardip museum – one thing that probably should be important to note, is that people would not have being encouraged to engage with narratives about Aboriginal history or colonisation ten or fifteen years ago as actively as we do now. Looking at both the academic readings concerning the role of the museums in the creation and maintaining of historical narratives and about the role of museums in colonialism, after going around the Boola Bardip museum, there is a question as to whether museums can present a postcolonial narrative of Australian history – one that acknowledges and includes the culture and history of Aboriginal Australians. As discussed by Knell, he articulates the principles of ‘contemporary museology’ in the face of growing information technologies and ‘borderless worlds’, one of which does not place hierarchies on societies and cultures, and one where museum attendants are encouraged to “look at the world from the position of the citizen rather than through the windows of the institution” (Knell 2020, pp. 154-155). Part of this ethical enquiry, of Knell’s issue to know and remember well, can be presented in what I found at the Boola Bardip museum – the possibility of integrating Aboriginal history and culture into mainstream institutions; something which was also found an article describing the use of Maori culture into the Museum of New Zealand, where the museum had placed emphasis in allowing the Maori people to become more than just subjects for the museum to display, but to also care for the collections and have power over what stories were told by the museum (Henare 2004, pp. 59).

One aspect that I found interesting, with the findings, was also how technology was used to interact with the past – when technology is usually discussed in accordance to museums, its discussed as a distraction, technology as the future that intrudes onto the past. However, an argument can be made for technology actually aides in the education and preservation of memory, noting how technology can be apart of democratising museums and about “collection makes it “the potential for visitors to access more information about the collection makes it possible to produce a deeper and more diverse engagement between visitors and the museum” (Brown and Waterhouse-Watson 2014, pp. 2). To the point wherein, returning to Pilbrow’s article, technology may be the one thing that allows for Aboriginal forms of oral history to be preserved – indeed, around the Boola Bardip, there were videos which had Aboriginal elders discussing about their culture, one example being the Aboriginal perspective of the Broome bombing. Indeed, there may be a way for a museum to be more than just cultures placed under glass boxes – but a place where all truths can be heard.

References

Ames, Michael M. 2014. Cannibal Tours And Glass Boxes. Vancouver: UBC Press.

Blakkisrud, Helge, and Faruh Kuziev. 2019. "Museums, Memory And Meaning‐Creation: (Re)Constructing The Tajik Nation". Nations And Nationalism 25 (3): 997-1017. doi:10.1111/nana.12519.

Brown, Adam, and Deb Waterhouse-Watson. 2014. "The Future Of The Past: Digital Media In Holocaust Museums". Holocaust Studies 20 (3): 1-32. doi:10.1080/17504902.2014.11435374.

Greenwood, Ashley. 2018. "Memory, Forgetting And The Reconciliation Process". History And Anthropology 29 (5): 584-598. doi:10.1080/02757206.2018.1528244.

Henare, Amiria. 2004. "Rewriting The Script: Te Papa Tongarewa The Museum Of New Zealand". Social Analysis 48 (1): 55-63. doi:10.3167/015597704782352762.

Kenny, Michael G. 1999. "A Place For Memory: The Interface Between Individual And Collective History". Comparative Studies In Society And History 41 (03). doi:10.1017/s0010417599002248.

Knell, Simon J. 2020. The Museum's Borders: On The Challenge Of Knowing And Remembering Well. New York: Routledge.

Pilbrow, Tim. 2013. "The Magic Of Narrative In The Employment Of State-Subject Relations: Who's Telling Whose Story In The Native Title Process In Australia?". Oceania 83 (3): 221-237. doi:10.1002/ocea.5022.

Power, Sally, and Chris Taylor. 2013. "Social Justice And Education In The Public And Private Spheres". Oxford Review Of Education 39 (4): 464-479. doi:10.1080/03054985.2013.821854.

Sandell, Richard, and Eithne Nightingale. 2012. Museums, Equality, And Social Justice. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.