writing_womans_lives_symposium_paper_book_v2

EXPLORING IDENTITY THROUGH A FAMILY ARCHIVE
Margaret FITZGIBBON *
Several years ago my mother gave me access to a collection of thirty personal love letters that she
had in safe keeping for over fifty‐five years. My father had written these in the 1950s during the early
months of his emigration from Ireland to England. This individual experience coincided with a mass
emigration ‐ known as ‘the second wave’ ‐ that saw over 50,000 men and women leave Ireland
during that decade desperately looking for work but also seeking a more modern, upwardly mobile
life‐style. 1 Around the same time I came into procession of the letters, I began creating experimental,
8mm, short films and this prompted me to re‐engage with a store of home movies shot by my father
during our early childhood now long forgotten and stored in the family attic. The death of my father
in April 2008 brought into sharp focus the fragile, temporary access we have to our unique, familial
stories and myths and lent a greater urgency and poignancy to the possible function and meaning of
these artefacts. I decided to redeploy the material in such a way that would allow me to not only
explore my own life script and childhood but also to delve into the wider context of Irish, national,
collective, familial and social memory of the period 1950 ‐ 1966.
The fact that my mother entrusted me with these letters and, that she was able to add her
perspective on the content and interpretation of all the material was crucial to the project. My
mother had five sisters ‐ all still alive (now all in their eighties and nineties) and these six women,
close in age, had been very involved in each other’s daily life’s; regularly sharing holidays and family
get‐togethers and feature significantly in my childhood memories. To expand the discussion and gain
more insights into the prevailing value systems I decided to interview all six women and allow their
testimonies and observations to be integral in developing the art project.
When family archives become ‘counter‐archives’
In the 20 th century, two major poststructuralist thinkers have radically re‐theorised ‘the archive’
claiming it to be a more fluid, discursive and even haunted site than traditionally conceptualized and,
thus opening up the possibility to creative, imaginary and indeterminate interpretations of the
concept. Michel Foucault argued how the archive, far from being a neutral, set of static records, is an
integral tool deployed by those in power to control and perpetuate certain ideologies and by
suppressing others. 2 On the other hand, Jacques Derrida focuses on the archive’s relationship to
Freud’s psychoanalytical processes of the unconscious by suggesting that the archival process is a
desperate attempt to ward of the terrifying aspect of our own demise or what Freud terms ‘the
death drive.’ 3 Derrida refers to this as the ‘ personal presence’ in the archive and this in turn further
complicates notions of the archive as temporally fixed – because, as he argues, once the time of the
archive is aligned to the unconscious it too becomes timeless. Furthermore, the deferred time of the
archive suggests that the archive’s primary relationship is not actually the past but rather the future ‐
as it is always compiled with an imagined future reader/viewer in mind. Writing in The Archive:
Documents of Contemporary Art (2006), Charles Merewether develops this arguments in an artistic
framework by noting that since the 1960s there has been a worldwide turn to ‘the archive’ and the
nexus of images, objects, documents and traces through which we recall and revisit individual and
shared memories and histories. Significantly he observes that such artists usually take a more
‘counter‐archival’ approach,
*
The National College of Art and Design - Dublin, Ireland.
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