LOSING CIVILISATION ARCHIVE 2008

From The Book of Instant Knowledge; Fig. 106.9, 2007, gold leaf on silk screen print, limited, varied edition of 10

From The Book of Instant Knowledge; Fig. 106.9, 2007, silk screen print, limited, varied edition of 10

From The Book of Instant Knowledge, 2007, etching, limited, varied edition of 10

From The Book of Instant Knowledge; Fig. 23, 2007, etching, varied, limited edition of 20

From The Book of Instant Knowledge; Fig. 23.9, 2007, etching, varied, limited edition of 20

From The Book of Instant Knowledge; Fig. 1, 2008, etching, varied, limited edition of 20

From The Book of Instant Knowledge; Mourning Poem, 2008, etching

Losing Civilisation, 2008 (excerpt), 3:49 min

Losing Civilisation Archive 2008, was a response to the all-consuming grief that arose from the sudden loss of my beloved father. This work archives my struggle to preserve what was left behind. The archive developed indeterminately out of a disposition to identify and classify representations of loss, the drive being to safeguard memory and to commemorate my loved one but also a desperate attempt to find him. Whilst exploring the archival activity in this work as an expression of mourning, the result was an interdisciplinary work that consisted of a collection of labeled objects in cabinets, prints, book works and a three part video film, in which I performed a journey. The journey was akin to walking with the dead a psychoanalytical term that is used to describe what happens when a subject is unable to cope with their losses to the extent that they will withdraw from normal life choosing to exist psychically in the realms of the deceased. I have chosen to subvert the negative connotations of this idea, and suggest that walking with the dead is a ‘normal’ response to loss and grief and not necessarily a pathological symptom.

In the film Losing Civilisation, my performance of walking with the dead is punctuated at different points with a series of rituals that are carried out as conversations with my father; silent invocations; appeals to a higher force; yearnings and longings; reparations; and remembrances. This work is a dialogue of mournings, a psychoanalytic term used by Darian Leader to discuss the Lacanian notion of art as lack, lack becoming an object born out of absence, which is then shared with the outside so that others might access their own losses. For Leader, “the arts exist to allow us access to grief, and they do this by showing publicly how creation can emerge from the turbulence of a human life.” (“The New Black”)