Bark and Butterflies - Projection, Post-Memory and Phantasmagoria

This chapter explores the role of site-specific projections in the digital remediation of family and personal history and their role in memorial work and remembrance. The chapter refers primarily to the mixed-media performance/installation Bark and Butterflies by the author (palkadiaries.com). Drawing on the work of Marianna Hirsch, the chapter explicates the notion of post-memory, which complicates and extends family history through the idea of inherited traumatic memory. The concept is applied to Bark and Butterflies and accordingly the chapter offers a case study, amplified with theoretical reflections, on the role of projection in the creation of mixed-media memorial works and their dissemination. Bark and Butterflies was the artistic result of a research trip to Siberia following in the footsteps of an inherited wartime diary, which narrates the exile to the Gulag of the author’s father and grandfather. The chapter outlines and demonstrates the role of site-specific projections in a series of action-research performance interventions en route and examines the potential they offer for the visual interrogation and remediation of symbolic space. The chapter argues that site-specific projections produce a ‘phantasmagoric’ counter-world in which the experience of time and space becomes collapsed and that through this temporal and spatial overlap Bark and Butterflies enacts an immersive process of ‘self-sacralization’, using projections to re-enact paradigmatic devotional forms (Turner), in a type of secular ‘aesthetic redemption’ (Kristeva). In this case, the chapter concludes, the art of projection acts as a contemporary procedure within a personal ritual of pilgrimage and remembrance.