WITNESS, 2013. (Giclee Prints, 841 x 1189mm)
|
|
“Just at the moment when Jane begins to remember..., she closes her eyes and holds her eyes with her fingers. Is this a final effort to not see, just as she begins to see what happened? Is it the need to not see what is around her as she focuses on the internal pictures that she so vividly describes a moment later? Or is she showing us that although she sees..., she is not prepared to remember all of it, and must still hold back from remembrance much of what occurred?”
Paul Eckman: Expressive Behaviour and the Recovery of a Traumatic Memory: Comments on the Videotape of Jane Doe; 1997
Paul Eckman: Expressive Behaviour and the Recovery of a Traumatic Memory: Comments on the Videotape of Jane Doe; 1997
'Witness' is a vast series of photographs that contributes to an ongoing endeavour to describe the fragmentation of remembering traumatic episodes. The research searches for a communicable language with which to register something of the experience and understanding of traumatic memory and focuses on the phenomena of dissociation, the notion of absence as one of the manifestations of having witnessed trauma.
Writing from inside trauma is a constant struggle between the colonizing power of language and words and the revolt of what is being rejected or silenced. Cathy Caruth suggests that trauma opens us up and challenges us to a new kind of listening, the witnessing, precisely of impossibility for “the traumatized… carry an impossible history within them… they become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess.”
(Trauma and Experience, Introduction; p3-7)
Writing from inside trauma is a constant struggle between the colonizing power of language and words and the revolt of what is being rejected or silenced. Cathy Caruth suggests that trauma opens us up and challenges us to a new kind of listening, the witnessing, precisely of impossibility for “the traumatized… carry an impossible history within them… they become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess.”
(Trauma and Experience, Introduction; p3-7)