SARA ANDERSDOTTER //// PORTFOLIO

‘Memory is voice which speaks, talks to itself, or whispers, and recounts what happens… what the voice as memory reports are more voices' (Deleuze 1989 51)

My 2009 installation she felt empty in my hand attempted to express and discuss memories of coming to terms with certain aspects of life. I attempted to do so through the apersonal affects of the personal, a Deleuzian ‘transhuman’ connection (O'Sullivan 2007 50), by focussing on mutual elements of being, change and the experience of temporality that human subjects endure, mutual understandings of life and existence. In this instance it is the sudden understanding of death, occurring perhaps to most of us at a juncture in time in childhood or adolescence; at point at which I realised that adulthood is not the final stage of existence. Hence the installation functioned in a manner that Anne Ellegood, through her discussion on contemporary installation art, may have thought of as a construction of ‘distinct but connected parts, capable of suggesting ‘the aftermath of an event or a moment’ (2009 11). These moments of understanding, of coming to terms of elements of life – and here, death as part of conditions of life – may, as in my case, lack representation. The role of the installation could perhaps through its physicality, serve as a space in which events can be thought-again, felt-again – not as a pure repetition of that moment, but as a re-visit with difference, reflecting on the ‘unrepresented' and ‘undocumented' (Reiss 1999 xv). The installation also provided encounters with various materials, but it also played on the tensions between those materials; tensions that could only be felt in their presence. The inability to reach or to access, the bringing together of familiar materials, and the translocationary nature of the exhibition mirror my feelings regarding the very experience of memory – something familiar, fleeting, mobile but also part of that which cannot be returned to.