ART EXCHANGE project pack: HISTORY and MEMORY Autumn 2013 By Albert Potrony TOY STORIES a collaborative activity for primary schools, exploring memory and personal history
Artworks for Inspiration:
Tate Thames Dig - Mark Dion 1999 During the summer of 1999, U.S. artist Mark Dion and a team of volunteers drawn from local groups combed the foreshore of the Thames at low tide along two stretches of beach at Millbank and Bankside, near the Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain) and Bankside Power Station, which would become Tate Modern, looking for fragments of individual and ephemeral histories. The two sites yielded a wide variety of artefacts and tokens of life. Dion's team collected large quantities of items, including clay pipes, vividly decorated shards of delftware, oyster shells and plastic toys. The finds were then meticulously cleaned and classified in 'archaeologists' tents' on the Tate Gallery's lawn at Millbank during the summer of 1999.
The Boat of My Life - Ilya Kabakov 1993 Kabakov's installation work "The Boat of My Life" addresses his flight from the Nazis to Samark and at the age of seven with his parents, his international exile and his emigration to New York in the spring of 1998 at the beginning of the Cold War thaw. The Boat of My Life features a 58-foot-long wooden boat with stairways at both ends and twenty-five boxes on its deck. These boxes, stuffed with clothes, photos, and other memorabilia that Kabakov accumulated over the years, are spread out on the boat's deck. Each box is accompanied by a text written on paper labels; each text refers to an episodes in Kabakov's life. Kabakov explained: " In essence, this is the idea of presenting my life, the story of my life, in the form of an installation."
TOY STORIES STORIES a collaborative activity for primary schools, exploring memory and personal history
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Tell your students the story of a toy/object you had when you were a child and that you really treasured (why was it special? Who gave it to you? What happened to it – did you loose, did it break?) Ask the children to think of a special toy/object they had when they were younger and ask them to make a drawing of it. Share the drawings with the class. Give each student a large label on a string or an index card. In pairs ask them to tell the story of their toy to their partner. Each child has to write or draw his/her partner’s story. Share stories with the class. With the stories and the drawings each child has to make a plasticine model of his/her partner’s toy (this is an easy way of introducing the idea of working from somebody else’s material and collaborating). Photograph the plasticine models with their labels on a neutral background. Film the models against a black background while each child reads the story behind it as the film’s soundtrack (each child will be reading their take on the story of their partner’s toy). Upload the photos and the film onto the ART EXCHANGE website and ask other ART EXCHANGE partners to add to your Museum of Lost Toys.
Ask the children from other ART EXCHANGE partner schools to go through the same process as your group and upload their pictures and films of their lost toys. You can download these and create a museum by displaying the photos and the films together somewhere in your school.
Toys Recovered (Extension activity): • •
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Print the photos of the plasticine models uploaded by other partner schools. Get your students to choose and cut out one of the photos. Ask your students to imagine where in the school could they have found the toys, (under a bench in the playground, the reading area in the classroom… Maybe they found them on their way to or from school?) Each child to place the cut out wherever in the school they have chosen and take a photo of the location with the cut out of the toy in it. Print the photos and transform them into postcards by writing the address of the partner school on the back and the story of how the toy was found. Post the cards to the partner school –ask them to do the same with your children’s lost toys!
FICTIONAL FAMILIES (Personal Archives/Fictional Histories) - a collaborative activity for secondary schools, exploring memory and personal history.
Artworks for Inspiration:
The Hotel - Sophie Calle 1981 On Monday, February 16, 1981, I was hired as a temporary chambermaid for three weeks in a Venetian hotel. I was assigned twelve bedrooms on the fourth floor. In the course of my cleaning duties, I examined the personal belongings of the hotel guests and observed through details lives which remained unknown to me. On Friday, March 6, the job came to an end. (Quoted in Calle, pp.140-1.) Each of the twelve rooms gave rise to a diptych of similar structure following the occupancy of one or more guests during the period of the artist’s employment at the hotel. Some rooms feature more than once as a second set of guests occupied them, giving rise to a total of twenty-one diptychs in the series. Calle’s descriptions of the hotel rooms and their contents combine factual documentation along with her personal response to the people whose lives she glimpsed by examining their belongings.
Susan Hiller – From the Freud Museum 19911991-6
From the Freud Museum 1991–6 is an anthology of materials collected by the artist - personal mementos, private relics and talismans - evoking a display in an anthropological museum. The boxes contain shards of memory archived in instinctive combinations of meaning. Narratives that may link object, image and text are suggested but not explicit, allowing the audience to add new layers of meaning. From the Freud Museum concentrates on the gaps between the known and unknown, dream and reality. The title relates to an earlier version of the work created for the Freud Museum, London in 1994. Hiller wrote in the catalogue ‘Sigmund Freud’s impressive collection of classical
art and artefacts inspired me to formalise and focus my project. But if Freud’s collection is a kind of index to the version of Western civilisation’s heritage he was claiming, then my collection taken as a whole, is an archive of misunderstandings, crises, and ambivalences that complicate any such notion of heritage..
FICTIONAL FAMILIES FAMILIES (Personal Archives/Fictional Histories) - a collaborative activity for secondary schools, exploring memory and personal history. Activity: •
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Ask your students to bring up to 3 photos from their family albums (going as far back in time as they can) and perhaps one object that has an important meaning/place within their family history. In groups of 3 ask your students to organise their photographs in order to create a fictional family tree by combining the various individual archives. Ask each team to re-write/re-imagine the history/story of the new ‘family’- or of a specific member of that family, weaving real facts and fiction within the narrative. Encourage your students to use atlases, travel magazines, National Geographic magazines, world encyclopedias, A to Z, road maps and the objects they have gathered to provide various backgrounds for the characters’ story/ies. Ask your students to research various archiving systems (folders, Index cards, boxes, photographic albums…) and decide in their groups on the best way of using these to make a piece of work with their material. Look at the way Sophie Calle uses photography and text to suggest narratives and how Susan Hiller exhibits her work – which normally involves extensive research, specially at how she chose to display From the Freud Museum. Could your students make a short video by re-telling the story of their character/fictional family using voiceovers and photocopy cut outs of the original photos against the various backdrops (maps etc)? Could they create an installation by organising and displaying the material in a way that tells the story they’ve devised? - Like in Witness, where Susan Hiller stages a sound installation with hundreds of small speakers broadcasting the whispering voices of people from all over the world re-telling their experiences of encountering UFOs. Could your students use sound to re-tell the real and fictional stories from their archives?
Taking it further: Upload videos, photo of the installations and photos of the characters from the various family archives onto the ART EXCHANGE website. Ask other ART EXCHANGE partners to do the same. Can you create fictional family groups whose members include people from various countries? Use these as the starting point for a whole series of works fictionalising the history/stories of the new ‘hybrid’ families. Can you create a web of narratives linking as many disparate family archives as participants?