Clanbrassil Street : Textures of Memory
This essay is informed by an understanding that art can play a critical and dialectical role in shaping understandings and evocations of ‘heritage’ as both site and memory.
Two artists, writer Ursula Rani Sarma and visual artist Sean Lynch, were commissioned as part of Placing Voices: Voicing Places to work in-residence in Clanbrassil Street. Originally a medieval suburb, Clanbrassil Street is a traditional, working-class area to the south of the city,which is fast disappearing under new apartment blocks, and in which a century-old Jewish population is now much-reduced in size and a Muslim population has settled. Not unlike, then, the patterns and displacements that have taken place in other cities – New York’s Lower East Side and London’s Whitechapel, for example – different waves of migrant groups have settled and moved on from Clanbrassil Street and its environs.
The initial brief asked artists to respond with ideas as to how they might ‘realise an arts-led collaborative project exploring questions of identity, community and history in the Clanbrassil Street neighbourhood.’The brief encouraged responses to the commission that ‘extend beyond the archaeological and ethnographic and open up questions of the domestic space and the idea of home, memoir writing and the performance of (auto)biographies within the Clanbrassil Street area.’
Conscious that a commissioning brief can limit an artists’ response and minimise the more provocative and risky approaches to a residency programme, the collective team of Placing Voices: Voicing Places used the brief as a prompt for conversation and dispute with the artists, to ensure that each artist had both the scope and support to respond to the street in ways that provided new insights and revealed potential models of engagement with local residents. In particular Create sought to encourage approaches to collaboration that were informed by openness and fluidity. Only through offering this element of action research could the critical framework of Placing Voices: Voicing Places be able to gauge how an artist’s approach might differ from the more sociologically-orientated exploration undertaken in the Monto on the north side of Dublin city. In doing so the team invited the artists to provide a counterpoint to a more systematic mode of investigation, to determine how an investigation led by artists in collaboration with local residents [TO1]as a specific sphere of cultural enquiry might provide alternative readings of heritage.
In this, it was Create’s hope that the artists’ residencies would evoke the contradictory and non-linear, and in the process diminish the capitalmonolithic “H’ of History and Heritage and uncover new formulations of histories and heritages that place a value on mutability and the incidental.
Visual artist Sean Lynch proposed to activate memories of the street through collating an ‘archive’ of personal photographs, advertisements and newspaper cuttings. His archival approach did not look to retrieve a chronological and sequential reading of change, but instead examined how urban landscapes are transformed by the lived experiences of residents to a collection of raw materials and potentialities.
Through actively engaging with shop owners and residents, Sean’s approach not only captured the changes in trade but also the shifts in the visual culture of the street. In cataloguing the arrangement of shop goods on pavements, the details of pub and shop signs and car showrooms, Sean’s residency excavated metaphorically the hybrid, improvised and transient as the dominant motifs of an inner city street.
In the two publications produced by Sean (Clanbrassil Street 1 and Clanbrassil Street 2) the assemblage of images and newspaper cuttings asserts the constancy of change at the local level, evidencing the ways in which new topographies of the local [PC2]
emerge from within buildings whose architectural grammar speaks of another time. The constancy of the change charted in the two publications resists a melancholic (and potentially reactionary) retreat into a wholly retrospective mode .Instead heritage appears as a complex set of relations between memory, the built environment, and historical processes, in which past and present are bound through dialogue and allegory.
His presentation of material remains – the newspaper cutting, the advert, the photograph – both document and contextualise the histories of contemporary Dublin. The documents and documentation of Clanbrassil Street 1 and Clanbrassil Street 2 discovers in the past a continuum in the development of the political economy. The denied and forgotten histories evidenced in thelabel written in Hebrew, of Guinness, bottled, distributed and sold locally on the south side of the city.
Its not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill . . . . Only dialectical images are genuine images . . . and the place where one encounters them is language. "Awakening.[1]"
For Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project cultural heritage is not a task of making a complete picture of the past, but assembling it in such a way that allows the awoken dead to speak out, to create textures of memory that also awaken the present showing us how we have arrived and what moments in history have been denied.
Sean Lynch’s Clanbrassil Street 1 and Clanbrassil Street 2 resists casting heritage as a trope of lost times and shows the ways in which notions of heritage are entangled in our understanding of the present. Sean’s ‘archival’ practice and his engagement with the local residents and communities of Clanbrassil Street was shaped by a commitment to encounter the past on behalf of the present. In mapping an ethical relation between past and present, his residency opened up conversations locally and internationally. Calls were received from past residents living in the USA to receive copies of Volume Two, local residents called the artist and suggested areas for exploration/excavation overlooked in Volume One, and the local Indian restaurant display their contribution in Volume One.
The fragments of cuttings and images that make up both volumes generate their meanings through relations of cross-reference with images and texts illuminating each other to provoke multiple readings of heritage. No one photograph or newspaper cutting acquires its full potential for generating meaning unless placed in relationto the remainder of the volume – and with the larger whole. What we findin Sean Lynch’s publications – Clanbrassil Street 1 and Clanbrassil Street 2 - is a series of fragments and shards of time that the reader and the local community of participants (co-researchers and archivists) reassemble into a narrative of ‘heritage’, that is at the same time contingent, explorative and unfinished.
For writer and theatre maker Ursula Rani Sarma, heritage as a process through which the future might be gleaned was re-worked as an assemblage of ‘texts’ written by final year students from the local primary school, - Educate Together School, Griffith Barracks Multidenominational School. Through a three month residency within the school the young people, aged 10 -12 years, were asked to respond to their homes and the streetscape.
The condition of ‘being at home’ was expressed physically – my flat, my house, my bedroom, my sitting room, parents and siblings – and also in terms of an estranged ‘home space’ - Pakistan, Somalia, France. In the autobiographical ‘I’ of the texts that the young people produced, the place of Clanbrassil Street is memorialised as the location of writing. The young peoples’ writing is ostensibly autobiographical However just as Sean Lynch’s volumes make doubtful the possibility of reading texts and images as documentary presentations of Clanbrassil Street, Ursula Rani Sarma in the project ‘Home’ asks the reader to acknowledge the use of literary technique, disrupting the reading of autobiography as reliable historical archive.
The residency in the school mixed photography, interviewing and writing to explore how meaning is constructed and made in order that the young people could come to an understanding of their own, emergent and interrelated way of seeing as a group. By examining the theme of home the artist was able to touch upon the themes of heritage and place and to interrogate issues of form and materiality.
I think every wall and piece of a home is made of all the emotion of everyone in it[2]
The apartment that I’m in now doesn’t really feel like I’m home because when I was in my Dad’s country it felt like I was really from that country[3]
Home is not an object or a place, its more of a feeling[4]
The young peoples’ understanding of home and heritage, as neither transparent or unproblematic terms, edge toward descriptions of home as something that is in process. While on the other hand the ‘I’ who writes already thinks of itself as enunciated, as speaking from another place and time. This double aspect of place and displacement was poignantly described by those young people of dual heritage, while for other young people it resonated in the awareness that they themselves were ending a period of their lives as their final term ended in their primary school.
Ursula Rani Sarma with agreement from the young participants produced a postcard, assembling their various descriptions of home as a continuous narrative. The postcard, more often produced to provide an image of a city purchased by visitors and tourists to send home, is in this instance inverted. In The Home Project the postcard is a message of home sent to the city, an interpretation of the city authored by the young people of Griffiths Barracks, articulating a sense of place, location and identity. In constructing the postcard as a shared group narrative of home and the city, the artist, by extension, positioned the residency programme as belonging to Clanbrassil Street and the wider city of Dublin.
This affirmation of Clanbrassil Street as the physical location of the residency was addressed through The Home Project installation. The young peoples’ statements of what constitutes home were reproduced on Clanbrassil Street through water powerhosing through stencils. Just as the postcard provided a snapshot of thoughts and feelings of the city as home, the temporary street installation with the young peoples’ statements legible through the street detritus washed clean into the footpath surfaces spoke of different senses of home and heritage as manufactured and constructed through and by place. The interlinking of the postcards and the street installations coalesced a sensitivity to the passage of time and offered a detailed recognitionof the city as it is imagined and experienced by its inhabitants.
Through the residency programme of Placing Voices:Voicing Places the artists Sean Lynch and Ursula Rani Sarma located their arts practice in direct engagement with local residents and communities, inviting them to actively co-author and co-produce contemporary art. Their collaborative practice explored not only what we understand to be heritage but also mapped what is actually involved in the passing of time and the creation of meaning. Both artists in looking to reframe working in residence with local communities as a cultural mediation, unpicked some of the critical questions of heritage, materiality, and identity as not only the core processes that organise urban life but also as the processes that constitute urban space.
Sarah Tuck
[1]Ralph Tiedemann "Dialectics at a Standstill" in Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Trans. Cambridge, Ma: Belknap Press, 1999., p 462.
[2]Mauricia Kiesse ‘Home is Where I am Queen’, reproduced in The Home Project booklet, Ursula Rani Sarma, 2009, page 5
[3] Jordan Farrell, ‘Home for me is Pakistan’ ibid, page 13
[4] Jack Dolan ‘Home is not an object or a place, its more of a feeling’, ibid page 21
[TO1] …’
[PC2] he sites explored.