This seminar set out to identify, interrogate and chart the intersection of personal and collective history at play in Belfast as a post conflict society. Numerous subjective and fragmented memories are embedded in the consciousness of effected communities, bound up in a collective trauma of past events. With the passage of time and the dissolution of narrative, the “labour of memory * generates intangible memorials to physcologically harrowing events. This condition is not unique to Belfast and parallels can be drawn in Argentina, Guatemala, Cyprus, Chile, El Salvador, Mexico, Rwanda, Lebanon, Palestine, South Africa, Israel, Japan and many other countries.

Our specific interest in this vast field deals with the inter-relationship of memory, trauma and counter trauma in relation to place. In living with the traces of the past of physical, physcological and monumental memory and in acknowledging the transmission of oral history from one generation to the other, how do we now negotiate memories, relics, buildings and spaces that hold political and emotional potency. How can many conflicting subjective perspectives simultaneously claim authorship over the construction of a post conflict history?

“The politics of buildings may be mute but they are potent. They supply some of the dream images by which the polis , the group, identify themselves and therefore they cannot be innocent of their own force as political, in the widest, non partisan sense of the term” (Heaney 1989).

Dr Kris Brown, Research Fellow, Queens University, Belfast (2006-8)

Dr Brown is working on a two-year project held jointly with local organisation, Healing Through Remembering (HTR), to prepare an audit of the artifacts (e.g. objects, artworks, letters, audio and film recordings, ephemera) relating to the conflict in and about Northern Ireland. This research will inform the work of the Living Memorial Museum Sub Group, which is addressing the HTR recommendation on a Living Memorial Museum of this conflict. While this audit will focus on the material culture of the conflict over the past four decades it may also incorporate objects that contextualise what engendered these divisions. It will include artifacts held in museums, galleries, libraries and archives, and those held by private individuals. The institutions surveyed will include those in the UK and Republic of Ireland.

Horst Hoheisel , Artist, Germany

Among the hundreds of submissions for a German national memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe, Horst Hoheisel's design embodied very precisely the impossible questions at the heart of Germany's memorial process. Already well-known for this negative-form monument and his Denk-Stein-Sammlung in Kassel, Hoheisel proposed a simple, if provocative anti-solution to the 1995 memorial competition: blow up the Brandenburger Tor, grind its stone into dust, sprinkle the remains over its former site, then cover the entire memorial area with granite plates. How better to remember a destroyed people than by a destroyed monument? Rather than commemorating the destruction of a people with yet another constructed edifice Hoheisel would mark destruction with destruction. Rather than filling in the void left by a murdered people with a positive from, the artist would carve out an empty space in Berlin by which to recall a now absent people. Rather than concretizing and thereby displacing the memory of Europe's murdered Jews, the artist would open a place in the landscape to be filled with the memory of those who come to remember Europe's murdered Jews. A landmark celebrating Prussian might and crowned by a chariot-borne Quadriga, with the Roman goddess of peace, would be destroyed to make room for the memory of Jewish victims of German might and peacelessness. Perhaps no single emblem better represents the conflicted, self-abnegating motives for memory in Germany today than the vanishing monument. Of course, such a memorial undoing will never be sanctioned by the German government, and this too is part of the artist's point. Hoheisel's proposed destruction of the Brandenburger Tor simultaneously participates in the competition for a national Holocaust memorial, even as its radicalism precludes the possibility of its execution. At least part of its polemic is directed against actually building any winning design, against ever finishing the monument at all. Here Hoheisel seems to suggest that surest engagement with Holocaust memory in Germany may actually lie in its perpetual irresolution, that only an unfinished memorial process can guarantee the life of memory. Better a thousand years of Holocaust memorial competitions in Germany than any single 'final solution' to Germany's memorial problem.©

www.chgs.umn.edu/Visual___Artistic_Resources/Horst_Hoheisel/horst_hoheisel.html

Dominic Adams, Coiste

Coiste is an umbrella organisation co-ordinating groups and individuals working for the social, economic and emotional well-being of republican ex-prisoners, displaced persons and former activists and their families Dominic will discuss their position and thoughts on the Maze redevelopment.

www.coiste.ie

Sharon Paz, Artist, Germany

“Through the years I have found myself observing the space between people and their various ideas, searching for the basic feelings and thoughts that we all share. I was born and raised in Israel, a country that carries many conflicts, a cultural mix of diverse origins and beliefs. Previous to Berlin I lived in New York, another cultural conjunction for diverse nationalities, a place where people constantly straggle between the need to belong and the longing to preserve their original culture. With this personal history in mind I develop installation using mainly the media of video, along drawing and objects. My work investigates ideas about human psychological perception of home, land, nation and culture. I explore personal history in relation to the political and historical currents that shapes the patterns of group and individual migration.” Sharon Paz's practice combines video and performance and it has Investigated the various divisions created by walls and borders - whether physical or psychological - that divide in from out. Paz's explorations of walls as what partially constitutes, defines and protects the individual or group and as what creates territory which excludes the other, has a particular resonance here in Northern Ireland. This is on the one hand, particularly so in terms of the protective relationship between the peace walls and those who live in proximity to them in Belfast where movement is often seen as restricted. While on the other hand their relationship to that of the tourist (who encouraged by tour-guides leave personal inscriptions on the walls thereby declaring their presence publicly) encounter these spaces as very accessible, public and layered by movement.

www.sharonpaz.com