How do co-creators become memory activists, producing work that unsettles our relationships to difficult heritage? How might this activism engage with the presence of archival materials and data visualisation?

This panel of artists and scholars uses alternative processes to commemorate stories and spaces. Through video-image projection, installation, and performance, Mi Young’s People in White revisits the trauma of the Korean War, while Hosein Khodabakhsh’s Against Communal Memory is a digital counter-monument that archives crimes committed by the Iranian government against its citizens. In Alternative Voices, Aggrey Agwata documents community engagement and artistic creation with the Ndotu Zetu group in Kenya. Finally, Kathryn Waring uses creative avenues to combat archival erasure of patient’s voices in the former Craig Colony for Epileptics in the state of New York.  

Moderators: Sydney Wreaks and Solomon Nagler

Presenters:

Aggrey Agwata Mohammad Hossein Khodabaksh Kathryn Waring Mi Young

www.countermemoryactivism.ca

Kathryn Waring

My work draws upon sociologist Avery Gordon’s notions of haunting, as well as film theorist Catherine Russell’s concept of the anti-documentary, to examine and document the experiences of patients incarcerated at New York State’s Craig Colony for Epileptics at the beginning of the twentieth century. Combining personal and familial experience with archival research, I grapple with the erasure of disabled voices from official records and look to the absence of such testimony to speak back to the institutions and individuals charged with patients’ care. In doing so, I rely on creative writing and digital storytelling techniques to reconstruct narratives about patient lives in the hopes of documenting that which the archive refuses to acknowledge. As Gordon writes in her book Ghostly Matters, “To write stories concerning exclusions and invisibilities is to write ghost stories.” Throughout these narratives, then, my project asks why certain lives are remembered, while others are deemed unimportant in traditional modes of history and public memory.

I plan to present a series of short multimedia works-in-progress and discuss both the challenges and opportunities of working within archival erasure, including the different outputs this kind of research may inhabit. This presentation will encompass both already completed and currently in-progress work, including a short film and several multimodal texts. In presenting this work, I hope to pose alternatives to traditional modes of archival research and speak to the possibilities presented within archival haunting to craft counter-narratives of history.

Kathryn Waring is a multimedia writer and PhD student in the Communication, New Media, and Cultural Studies program at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Her research encompasses digital storytelling, critical disability studies, American studies, and cultural memory studies. She is currently at work on her first book, which incorporates multimodal elements and examines America’s first epileptic colony, her family’s experience with epilepsy, and the ways in which we remember—or don’t—the history surrounding us. Kathryn holds an MFA in Creative Writing (nonfiction) from the University of Pittsburgh, where after graduating she taught creative and professional writing and directed the university’s Digital Media Lab. Her creative work has been published in literary journals such as Essay Daily, The Normal School, The Rumpus, and American Literary Review, among others. She originally hails from New York.

Mi Young Lee

This project is to reflect the experience and collective trauma of Korean civilians who appeared as ‘people with white clothes’ in the U.S. military documents, and to create a participatory, embodied, pedagogical, experimental and collaborative venue by interdisciplinary art forms mixtured with media projection, installation and performance. 

The projected moving images contain archival documents of the Korean War that compete with visceral ‘memories’ which appear and disappear often in random, still, ephemeral, or repeated ways with various time senses. Also, the media projection would include distorted, scattered, imperfect images of memory and blackout images of memory holes, oblivion in-between, in depicting the nearly forgotten experiences of the war due to multiple social factors and the passing of time.

Linear and non-linear images interact accidentally with the narrative of installation artwork by Angela Henderson and performance by Korean youth and Tammy Macleod. The archival found images regain life through conceptual presence of the installation work and performers’ body movements which stimulate physical senses.

Born and raised in South Korea, a divided nation with a troubled modern history, I am no stranger to the pain and trauma of social conflicts and political oppression under the colonial vestige. As a student activist in 1996, I started documentary filmmaking as a tool for resistance and social engagement. After finishing two feature documentary films with coal miners, I went to Montreal to explore cinematic languages and apparatus in nonfiction filmmaking. (Dictée - An Homage to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (2012) composed the expanded narrative, crossing diverse modes of artistic expression in the East and the West with multiple languages, voices, estranged images and sounds.)

As an Asian origin female diasporan filmmaker, I am attentive to the issues of gender, race, nationality, language and culture, and passionately strive to dismantle their barriers. My artwork is to challenge conventional representation and provoke critical thinking and creativity. It intends to form multi-faceted in-depth inquiries into transnational and gendered histories and contemporary crises related to legacies of class, colonialism, war and borders.

*Mi Young Lee has been committed to making documentary and expanded narrative films over 25 years. Before teaching at NSCAD University in Halifax, Canada, she taught and mentored numerous films over the years at Korea National University of Arts, Seoul. 

www.miyoungleefilm.com

https://peoplewithwhiteclothes.art

Photo: Aggrey Agwata, Alternative Voices Project.