The work we propose to perform focuses on the cellar workspace left by Eleanor Bowen’s father, a landscape archaeologist. Now collapsing, the archive space is both a repository of archaeological material intended for posterity, and also the intimate trace of a life. Victor Burgin cites Bergson’s description of duration as ‘an indeterminate period of lived existence that may expand or contract according to the attention brought to it’. We bring attention to a period of lived existence through the reading of the objects in the cellar.
Vladimir Nabokov warns us that there is no possible reading, only re-reading. Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, places emphasis on misreading and takes as its text those things that others discard: dreams, slips of the tongue, forgetting, unintended acts, symptoms. So how is one to read?
Reading, whether re-reading or misreading, is an interpretative act. It creates a product that draws on the read, whether aiming to replicate the reading, deduce from it, or improvise around it. It is an act of the mind and the senses. JD Prown asserts that ‘objects created in the past are the only historical occurrences that continue to exist in the present’. This he attributes to the indexical linking of an object with its history. As inheritors, we propose to tell the object’s story, its role (however you read it) as witness
