Images

The focus of the research examines how domestic space can be articulated through memory after the space has been vacated. The researcher will transcribe the participant’s verbal descriptions of rooms once inhabited to alternative photographic image making processes that unites memories of interior space to abstract representation. The implications of this project create a visual language of memories embedded within the home to function as a tool for storytelling. Within the practice of visual communication, this research situates representations of home and memory in a new context. The goal of this project is to create a collective archive of remembered homes as reinterpreted. This archive will be made public as an artwork. The participant’s name and contact details will remain confidential.

This research will be conducted in two thirty-minute interview sessions, either in person or through a questionnaire, over a period of time agreed upon by both the researcher and the participant. The researcher will ask the participant to verbally describe from their memories a room or rooms from a past lived-in home. The interview will be recorded in written form, and with consent an audio recording, as a reference to the researcher in translating the descriptions to an image. During the second interview, the participant will be asked to respond to the visual images created by the researcher based on the descriptions recorded during the first interview. The anticipated results of this research will reveal that these images of the participant’s rooms will alter or trigger further memories within these spaces.

To participate, please contact: Pamela Salen, MADA, Department of Communication Design

Phone: +61 3 9901 2201

Email: Pamela.salen@monash.edu

The Times Higher Education recently reported that the University of London has taken legal action to challenge its own deed of trust concerning the care and integrity of the Warburg Institute. Possible results of this action include the dispersal of the library, or its relocation abroad.

The Guardian has more information on the proposed changes, and on the unique library itself. The Institute was relocated from Hamburg to London in 1933, endangered by Hitler’s rise to power, and although the University of London accepted the collections in 1944 (the agreement currently under review), similar action was considered in 2010.

Change.org is hosting a petition calling on the University of London ‘to withdraw their legal action and keep the Warburg Institute just as it is, for three reasons:

1. To keep the Warburg Institute’s collections intact. In over 50 years since the library’s resettlement in London, it has grown from 80,000 to 350,000 volumes, 40% of which are unique and not held in the British Library.

2. To preserve Aby Warburg’s intellectual legacy. The Institute’s collections are organised unlike any other in the world – according to a system  developed by Warburg as a product of his own research. Dispersal is tantamount to destroying one of Warburg’s greatest works of scholarship – the library itself.

3. To maintain the vibrant intellectual community the Warburg fosters. A one-of-a-kind collection both in content and form, the Warburg has drawn together a world-class scholarly community for decades. Taking the collections outside of the space of the Institute would displace that community of researchers.’