Description
Book SynopsisI am walking through a destitute, poverty-stricken, rotten building. Although people are living here, my aim is not to interact with the current tenants but rather to try and uncover the memories that are hidden in the façade, the plaster and the bricks of this building. I use my mobile phone to record what I see, but in my head, it is February 1945. I hear the sounds of war "
Travelling along a timeline of memory, Tanja Sakota takes us on a journey through South Africa, Germany, Poland and Bosnia/Herzegovina. Using a camera and short film format, Sakota hosts several workshops in different countries focused on interacting and engaging with remembering through different memory sites. The author sits at the core but the book is an interdisciplinary work shaped around films made by different workshop participants using film to access personal interpretations of space and place. Questions that underpin the uncovering of memories are: How does one use a camera to make the invisible visible? How does one remember events that one hasn’t necessarily experienced? How does one use film to interrogate the past from the future present? As the journey evolves, workshop participants and readers alike enter into a conversation around practice-based research, autoethnography and film.
Table of Contents
- List of images
- Foreword – Cynthia Kros
- Acknowledgements
- Map of Africa and Europe
- PRACTICE-BASED RESEARCH, TEACHING AND LEARNING
- Chapter 1 Creating a context
- Chapter 2 Film as a research tool
- Chapter 3 Accessing memory through the visible and the invisible
- Chapter 4 Timelines and site-specific research
- Chapter 5 Working in parallel why the workshop process?
- PART I WORKING WITH STUDENTS: Cape Town, Johannesburg, Berlin
- Chapter 6 Decolonising the curriculum
- Chapter 7 Tropes of time workshop
- Chapter 8 Towards a future past workshop: a German perspective
- Chapter 9 Conversation with memory workshop
- Chapter 10 Memory through site-specific research: a discussion post-practice
- PART II WORKING WITH PEERS: Constitution Hill, Johannesburg
- Chapter 11 Personal interpretations of political spaces
- Chapter 12 The past, relevance and readings
- Chapter 13 The politics of remembering workshop
- Chapter 14 Understanding personal, political and cultural memory
- Chapter 15 Point of view: a discussion post-practice
- PART III WORKING WITH MYSELF: Poland, Germany, Bosnia/Herzegovina, South Africa
- Chapter 16 Finding my voice
- Chapter 17 Autoethnography and remembering through the self
- Chapter 18 Excavating ghosts: Perpetrators and victims
- Chapter 19 My film Shattered Reflection
- Chapter 20 Looking at the reflections: a discussion post-practice
- MOVING FORWARD
- Chapter 21 Recognising artistic research as good practice
- Film credits
- Glossary of terms
- Bibliography
- Index
