Remembering the Unknown - multi-screen video installation
Rogers, Kathleen (2019) Remembering the Unknown - multi-screen video installation. [Film, Installation]
Video installation composed from 4 x 11-minute photo/poetic/film essays with dynamic typographic elements representing an experiment in life writing based on post-genomic epigenetic research into the transgenerational transmission of trauma. Text animations and manipulated still images resonate and bring together poetic and philosophical accounts and themes expanded in the paper – Writing in Body – The Dark Matter of the Genome(cited elsewhere). Working from site-specific expanded black and white photography the work offers a subjective accounting of how photography and traumatic events might share common structures.
Roger’s video installation Remembering the Unknown is based on photographic work that reconfigures site-responsive photo work associated with trans historical cultural memory. The work applies montage and dynamic motion graphic poetic texts to enhance psychological connections embedded in the photo works to reference repressed intergenerational memory and trauma. The sections; I Poor Orphan & Here There and Everywhere were created at CERN, Geneva (Switzerland), Matrem, produced within a bioscience and stem cell research context in the UK, and the Home series at Roger’s father’s former Children’s Home, Styal, Manchester in 2019 (UK). The film integration of these works evolved slowly allowing for Roger’s organic and complex methods of autoethnography – allowing correspondences between memory, trauma and family archives. Roger’s autoethnographic methods apply qualitative research methods across numerous disciplines. In Remembering the Unknown she uses self-reflection to explore the subjective experience that seeks to connect life-writing narratives to wider cultural, political, and social meanings. Roger’s research methods use ‘second witnessing’ approaches that intersect with Barad’s diffractive epistemologies of agential realism. Her work resides at the intersections of art and science with regard to ethics, politics and subjectivity. Rogers cites photography theorist, Ulrich Bauer and psychoanalytic theories that re-conceptualize the mechanics of photo operations. Drawing on Bauer’s critical interpretation of photography, the work draws on accounts of second witnessing to explore the dissociative cognitive anomalies of trauma.
Remembering the Unknown is a reflective work and the elliptical form is intended to produce a mesmeric effect. The film aesthetic re-assembles the digitally manipulated series of photos with dynamic text overlays to develop a different synthesis and to explore themes of trauma, self-fragmentation and emotional detachment.
Roger’s visual research seeks to expand these contextual theories to broaden the reach of biosocial approaches to cultural epigenetics and trauma studies through art.
This research builds on Roger’s previous interdisciplinary research in the fields of consciousness studies and embodiment theories in art and science. Based on the concept that the genome is not the sole agency in inheritance Roger’s conceptual research and resolution explores the persistence of epigenetic trauma signatures of inherited PTSD across generations of her close family. This research examining the relationship between the imaginary and reality revealed how the reflective process practice-based research might be brought to bear on the science of epigenetics to offer new modes of visual narrative in autoethnography.
Roger’s site-specific pre-productions photo methods allowed for the development of new speculative sites and approaches to technologies and ideas of culture and political and personal life.
Life writing narratives based on subjective accounting of epigenetic causation of intergenerational PTSD can be viewed as controversial but thinking in multi-dimensional ways that trace genetic citizenship as contingent and inseparable from the feeling and sensing cultural mind and using the visual arts can help integrate ways of understanding people’s differing responses to traumatic life experiences to creative, compassionate and therapeutic approaches to the universal themes of selfhood, identity and healing.
There is increasing evidence for trans-generational inheritance of what are called trauma signatures. These studies suggest that infant experiences of poverty and cruelty can have long term somatic effects on the mental health experience of successive generations. The research is framed by anthropological, philosophical, trauma theory writings of Jane Bennet, Antonio Damasio, Cathy Caruth, Catherine Malabou, Tom Ingold, Ulrich Baer, Noella Davies, Braidotti and Stengers. Tim Ingold, Chair of Social Anthropology, Aberdeen University is known for his socio-ecological theories that focus on the continuum of human and non-human animals, plants, the biosphere and cultural transmission:
Non-reductive materialist accounts of evolutionary biology offer conceptual models of the genome that put the environment before the gene. This reversal challenges the fundamental genotype to phenotype transcription model offering a holistic comprehension of our biological origins and the continuum of organic life with psychic and cultural phenomena. (Ingold, 2001)
Karen Barad’s writings are also important to Roger’s research whereby the human organism is understood as highly malleable and interdependent with its environment. Epigenetics represents an unfolding view of an organism as a work in process, continuously responding to complex environmental cues through patterns of chemical responses. Environmental patterns change quickly, and so some see epigenetic factors as the primary driver of the adaption of the organism. Roger’s working concept of epigenetics suggests a residue of ghost images linking chains of intergeneration to biomolecular life processes.
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2889-665X
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