Erasing the violence of the past - Palimpsest

My previous post was added with some haste, and I intended to write more about it, but events, both worldwide and close to home took over; the coronavirus pandemic and subsequent societal lockdown here in Scotland.

The work was done at a weekend retreat with Janet Melrose at her studio in Crieff on 22nd and 23rd February 2020. We met on the Saturday morning and briefly discussed our worries concerning the coronavirus outbreak. It was on our minds, but it was in no way the overwhelming situation we are in today.

Janet had previously sent us a call to action; to respond to the word ‘palimpsest’. Do some research - think about what it might mean to us. I immediately responded to the word, as I have been working on renovating two conjoined shops in Burntisland in Fife (more on that later), and had really enjoyed the process of uncovering layers of history in the place, both removing and leaving traces of the past. When I have been leaving some trace, I feel like I am ‘framing’ them, helping them to be seen anew.

The group found that we sparked off each other very well, and some interesting discussions ensued. Janet had provided some written material to look through, and I was immediately drawn to a print out of an essay by Brian Dillon in the Tate etc magazine from 2006.

“‘Erasure is merely a matter of making things disappear: there is always some detritus strewn about in the aftermath...some reminder of the violence done to make the world look new again.’ Brian Dillon looks at undoing, from Joseph Kosuth’s Freudian wall texts, to Soviet Russia’s doctored photographs.”

In particular the essay contains two photographs: one is an undated photograph of Voroshilov, Molotov, Stalin and Nikolai Yezhov, commissar of water transport. In the second photo Yezhov has been ‘removed’ from the image. He was shot in 1940.

I found the images very powerful. There can be no type of erasure more violent than the erasure of an individual’s existence for political or ideological reasons. The doctoring of a photograph to change the narrative about the shifting political landscape is a frightening act of erasure because it is an attempt to skew the views of people living through the period, to propagandise the actions of powerful figures and governments. Ultimately it is an attempt to change the course of history by changing people of the future’s knowledge.

Janet had also provide us with some materials, including pages torn from a book, and purely by coincidence the pages I was given were from a book about Russia; its geography and history

I started the process by handwriting the quote above over the printed text. I repeated the same lines over and over again, beginning each new paragraph at the end of the previous one, destroying any ‘sense’ which could be previously gained. I used a red marker to randomly block out pieces of the text, using a method of dotting vigorously though sheafs of thin cloth-like paper, the patterns on the cloth creating randomly assigned patterns. it wasn’t until afterwards that I realised the cloths themselves were part of the work. The dot making shook the table and made a disturbing and disruptive noise, however the other people at the workshop seemed to enjoy the disruption. In retrospect the movement was performing a violent act of erasure. Using rough blue stitching I covered over text and joined pages of text together randomly.