archaeography

Islandbawn Street, Falls, Belfast - April 2006.

This image represents some of the child fatalities caused by plastic-bullets, with the victim’s portrait, and age being present on each individual baton-round.

I think these images work well within the notions of presence and absence. At one level the motifs/murals suggest a presence in a particular community, while the virtual lack of any people in the photos testifies to a feeling of absence (they were taken on a Saturday afternoon), as does the absence of some of the people represented in the murals. One can layer these proposals further with archaeological themes. For instance, one could propose that some of the images are about memory, citation, the socialising of place, materiality, worldviews, trace, identity, monumentality, performance, emotion, politics, history, rupture, poetics, aura, context, scale, consumption, ephemerality, superimposition, technology, networks, power, dwelling, simulation, texture and temporality – to name but a few!

One can also consider the politics of spectatorship and the multiple view-points or gazes/glances involved. I was not the flâneur – my presence was acknowledged and people did notice me, even though they may have appeared absent.

Archaeology should be self-reflexive. Extended conversations with Ian Russell have led me to reflect upon various aspects of these images. We considered questions regarding the appropriation of the images, and whether this adds to the construction or perpetuation of conflict tourism. Is it acceptable to decontextualise these images from their social, political, historical and topographical settings? In doing so, does one neutralise the impact of the image, and render it banal or redundant? What are the risks, if any, of using and viewing these images – in situ or otherwise? Would the images resonate differently if I had deliberately framed people in the photographs? Should we consider the politics of ocular inclusion and exclusion? As a tourist, my transactions with the images never ended in perfect reciprocation, but instead they were constantly renewed, imbalanced and residual.