Looking forward to CAA 2024! I will be presenting A guest + a host = a ghost on The recovery of haunted and forgotten histories.
This panel critically explores memory, memorialization and remembrance, addressing forgotten or repurposed charged sites and their layered histories. In bringing together three reactivated social spaces, a bunker that is now a library or community lounge, a concentration camp disguised as a recreation park, and a colonial house that functions as a museum, our research acknowledges what is hidden and what stories still need to be surfaced and imagined.
The paper I’m presenting is A guest + a host = a ghost
This paper explores the colonial ghosts who persistently hide in the shadows and haunt the historic Etherington House at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Kingston ON. The exhibition and micro-residency, A guest + a host = a ghost, initiated by Sunny Kerr, Neven Lochhead and Dylan Robinson (8 February – 8 May 2022), will serve as a case study in haunting as methodology, the “summoning of an investigative common” and the current “paranormal turn” in art and exhibitions. In bringing together artists, the hope was to collectively reflect on our haunted histories and (re)imagine our futures by critically and creatively transforming the house back into a home. A specific focus will be on my involvement as a haunted house band-member and phantom librarian in Lochhead’s paranormal curation playgroups and shadow submits.
Panelists Include:
Bunker: a modern history of spaces for protection and seclusion
Laura Belik, University of California Berkeley
During the pandemic --when shelter in place became the new normal -- isolation gained an entire new meaning, and spaces for quarantine and reclusiveness attained increased visibility and popularity. Nevertheless, designing specific protective spaces through seclusion has been a widely disseminated modern strategy as part of military and sanitary actions. In this essay, I uncover the history behind such spaces, focusing particularly on the design of bunkers.
Originally, bunkers were built as shelter and protection. Bunker-types were widely used during WWI, and these types of spaces served different uses over the years. Although traditionally known as insalubrious underground spaces, this essay shows how bunkers evolved. Today they are no longer necessarily buried or hidden, and serve a variety of functions, depending on context and historical moment.
This article reflects on the different forms and uses of bunkers historically, and how each iteration of this type of space portrays the values and social disputes of their time. Responding to the exercise proposed by sociologist Raymond Williams in his seminal book Keywords (1976), this research seeks to revisit the “bunker” and its various meanings today, reflecting on the conditions of these spaces of confinement, but most of all, in the conditions that necessitated the creation of these spaces in the first place.
Remembering a forgotten concentration camp
Karen E. Frostig, Lesley University
The gulf between a recreation park and a forgotten concentration camp sits at the center of this paper. In December 1941, 3985 Reich Jews were deported to Jungfernhof concentration camp located on outskirts of Riga. Only 149 persons survived. In 2017, the site containing more than one missing mass grave was resurfaced and transformed into a public park designated for leisure and recreation.
The Locker of Memory memorial project is an international, multimedia initiative dealing with the lost history of a forgotten site. Established in 2019, Karen Frostig, granddaughter of victims, worked with a team of historians, geospatial scientists, technologists to recover camp’s history. Project website features interactive timeline and map, 3-D tour of seven killing sites, thirteen audio tapes, interviews with five survivors, heirloom gallery, videos, organizational charts, essays, maps, and ERT imaging systems used to identify underground voids characteristic of mass graves.
Plans for a naming memorial will begin with a commemorative event. Combining ritual with ceremony, Frostig is designing a large-scale handcrafted Mourning Shroud used to sanctify the land as project transitions from research to memorial development. The paper examines 21st century approaches to memorialization: What is the language of cooperation and repair between different stakeholders dedicated to restoring justice to a land bereft of memory? How do artists examine histories of perpetration and collaboration, formulate inclusive protocols concerning the language of truth and remembrance, pertinent to these times?
