A Restless Still Life: The Architecture and Medicine of Collecting History and Memory, finding a voice in geographical isolation

Abstract

After the passing of my grandmother this year, I discovered hundreds of photographic contact sheets that captured the history of my grandparents’ life in China, Hong Kong, New Zealand, and Australia. In the performance of looking, the archive was transformed into living memory; it was brought from the static past into the present. In viewing the history of my family, through photographic representation, the spaces have become a part of my memory. Here, in A Restless Still Life, tiny fragments of these photographs have been cropped and enlarged, honing in on the small details of a world that have indirectly influenced my own life; the doll my grandmother was given by missionary doctors, the stack of prescriptions in my grandfather’s office, the drawers holding medicine in his store. The past that my grandmother had long since forgotten after many years with Alzheimer’s and dementia is reimagined. My grandmother’s parents were among the first in China to be trained in Western medicine, she trained in midwifery, and my grandfather and his father were traditional Chinese doctors. With my own parents being a doctor and an architect, family conversations have frequently revolved around medicine or buildings, inevitably inspiring my work over the years. The inherent structure of memory draws parallels with architecture, its continual development, growth, and erosion. Memory and architecture’s simultaneously transient and concrete natures are fundamental to the building of societies, to the creating and documenting of histories. Memory stitches together slivers of information, rewinding and fast-forwarding time, revealing a myriad of views, close-ups and long shots, but never anything in its entirety. Memory is never whole, it is never complete, nor finished. It is revised and edited, both intentionally and unintentionally. Memory is embedded within spaces and anchored to architecture. Our past is remembered in relation to the houses, buildings, and streets we have inhabited. The process of remembering is a medicine, an act of healing and rebuilding. In reviewing our past we reorganise and reorder our understanding of where we have come from and of whom we are now. Pierre Nora noted that modern memory is archival. ‘It relies entirely on the specificity of the trace, the materiality of the vestige, the concreteness of the recording, the visibility of the image [...] The fear that everything is on the verge of disappearing creates in us the desire to preserve past and all of the present.’1 In this current age of constant technological advancement, we have become indulgent in our memory recording, but we have also become lazy, reliant on computers and machines to store information for us. We take thousands of photographs but they are held in a digital vacuum, smeared across social media, our personal memories shared for the world to see. Our minds are overwhelmed by the wealth of information that is thrown at us, but it cannot process everything quickly enough, so our memories are only stored on a superficial level. Our personal history and remembrance of it connects us to the people, places, and time around us. Therefore when it is lost, when we cannot remember it, we feel severed and uneasy. Memory loss, for whatever reason, creates a psychological restlessness, an agitation as we lose sense of who we are. Conscious of this danger of loss, stability is established when we create memories and personal histories. Memory allows us to connect and solidify ourselves within our world; it gives us our sense of identity.