remembering to forget

My Master’s allowed me to investigate the relationship between memory and place, and working alongside Gemma with local community development groups in the field of peace and reconciliation has given gave me opportunities to refresh my thinking on this relationship. Then I came across a short essay on landscape and the picturesque by novelist China Miéville in the review section of The Guardian, and a further critical view opened up.

I understand that space often is seen as the container for the flow of events through time. History is dynamic, while geography is stable. Place is supposed to provide an unchanging backdrop for constant temporal change. Of course, the reality is more complex than that, and geographers have protested the notion of place as static. Nonetheless, we tend to site our memories. When we commemorate events, we do it in the places where they happened (when possible), and we build monuments trusting that they will remain in the same places long into the future.

Further, traumatic events are believed by many to leave a kind of psychic imprint on the places where they happened, even – or perhaps especially – when tangible memorials are missing. Artist David Farrell’s series, Innocent Landscapes, alludes to this within an Irish context. He photographed sites where the bodies of people disappeared by the IRA have been searched for and on occasion found. At a glance, these photographs may appear to be innocuous studies of place, recognisably Irish in many cases, and occasionally picturesquely rural. However, they acquire a dark significance with a little background detail.

Image by David Farrell, details from Innocent Landscapes, 1999