Sally Timmons
Ireland
The ventriloquist that balances corpses on its knee, that gives speech to silence, and transforms bones and blood into reminiscences, is none other than the historian. The keeper of the text. The teller of the story. The worker of mute mouths.
— Barbara Kruger / Phil Mariani, 1989
This short video loop illustrates the irreconcilable nature of a popular approach to storytelling. The process of recall happens in more than one way. This relates directly to the notion of history and how it is experienced and interpreted. This vignette serves to illustrate some of the processes which contribute to the construction of history through the use of memory and recall. It is not enough to have the capacity for memory in the form of historical archives and memory banks, because it is through the telling of a tale from the past in the future that a legacy will live on. History is increasingly experienced through popular media, which is considered by some a contributor to the amnesic culture within which we live now, and possibly in the future.
(Text: imagine limerick catalogue, 2004)
Back to Artists