Inaudible Memories
Summer 2004
40cm x 49cm x 2cm
Description
A square of textured interior fabric on a stretcher, painted black, with strands of audiotape hooked onto the centre.
Themes, Comments and Storylines
A black hole where voices disappear, sounds are muffled among the trappings of the home and family conventions. Walls that have ears.
"Though perhaps for those of us who have learned silence through shame, the hardest thing of all is to find a voice; not the voice of the monstrous singular ego, but one that, summoning the resources of the place we come from, can speak with eloquence of, and for, that place."
Kuhn, Annette, Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination, Verso, London, New York 1995, p.103
The recorded sound cannot be heard unless the tape is played – the problem of memory is not so much one of storage but one of activation, of retrieval.
"In the limited sense that the music on the tape exists only when the cassette is subsequently played, the engram only exists when it is ‘ecphorized’ – and the memory is retrieved."
Rose, Steven (1992), The Making of Memory, Bantam Press, London 1992, p. 319
Many hours of recorded sound – words and music – ending up in quiet whispers. Recycling, obsolete technology versus the longevity and unbroken tradition of textile processes.
"An individual patch in the impalpable material of that shroud."
Semprun, Jorge (1964), The long voyage, Grove Press New York, p.120