nonsite

I’ve been wondering how our memory works and why we are able to remember certain things and why we forget others.

I have been focusing on remembering a brief but key moment in my own past and my evolution as an artist from August 1974 and over the next two years when I was an art student “back in the day” in Halifax at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. I was there at a what turned out to be a seminal moment in that school’s history, which was also a significant moment in my own history. I was 23 when I arrived, young enough to be impressionable but old enough to recognize what a great moment it was.

I’m trying to make sense of how to remember and record my memories of that time and collapse them into my current experience as an online masters student at Camberwell College of Arts. I’m planning to use a website as the home for this research- memory work laid onto autoethnographic storytelling.

Autoethnography is a postmodernist construct as anthropologist Deborah Reed-Danahay notes: “The concept of autoethnography…synthesizes both a postmodern ethnography, in which the realist conventions and objective observer position of standard ethnography have been called into question, and a postmodern autobiography, in which the notion of the coherent, individual self has been similarly called into question. The term has a double sense - referring either to the ethnography of one’s own group or to autobiographical writing that has ethnographic interest. Thus, either a self (auto) ethnography or an autobiographical (auto) ethnography can be signaled by “autoethnography”.

I’ve been reading about autoethnography as a research method and I’m trying to figure out if there could be any ethnographic interest in art students as a group. If we accept autoethnographic methods to “include journaling, looking at archival records - whether institutional or personal, interviewing one’s own self, and using writing to generate a self-cultural understandings”, then a weblog seems an ideal place for this research to take place.

A friend just put me onto Annette Kuhn, Professor of Film Studies at Queen Mary, University of London and her book Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination and more recently she edited Journey Through Memory with Kirsten McAllister.