IN-PERSON Barcelona. Section B

Abstract

In 1922 seven centuries of the official record of a city and country housed at the Public Record Office of Ireland was destroyed in the engagement that marked the beginning of the Irish Civil War. Led by researchers at Trinity College Dublin, the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland is a permanently available open-access online resource which has reimagined and recreated the archive. Members of the public can virtually tour the building online and similarly, by locating duplicate documents held at other locations around the world, can browse a growing collection of materials. In using the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland to imagine the lives shaped by centuries of colonisation, I will make a multichannel sound art piece inviting attendees to travel across space and time. From a colonial urban centre, where planning and policies were made by an imperial power, to a capital city of an independent nation – with specific focus on documents in the Irish language from the Public Record Office of Ireland archive, I will engage with this digital rendering of culture to create a piece of sound art that probes the development of Dublin and suggests alternative futures. I will deliberately destroy and remould vinyl records to make a new ‘record’ linking the urban life of past, present and future, using spatial sound techniques to evoke our roles in co-creating shared space. In emphasising the connections across space (pre, during and postcolonial in Ireland and beyond) and across time (the pre, during and postcolonial eras), my submission embraces ‘multidirectional memory’ (Rothberg), which highlights the ‘dynamic transfers that [occur] between diverse places and times during the act of remembrance,’ and therefore the ways in which acts of remembrance are interwoven and implicated in each other.