A re-contextualised audio-piece entitled 'Elsewhere & Afterwards', where the artist is in conversation with Eunice Smith, an aboriginal elder from The Arnham Lands, Northern Territory, Australia. The work explores notions of past and present, memory and history, change and progress and creates a new environment, one in which both audio and visual reveal a conflicting process of recording and erasing....  
“The disaster is related to forgetfulness – forgetfulness without memory, the motionless retreat of what has not been treated – the immemorial, perhaps. To remember forgetfully: again, the outside.” 

SOUND, MEMORY & DIALOGUE: Interested in the dialogue between photography and sound and how both mediums relate to the past, our histories, our environment and our collective and individual memories. 

The work explores the multi-sensory nature of photography, In particular the relationship between orality and visuality and the combining of mediums to create new contexts. Opening up to the personal space of trauma to broader affects and questions about the environment, plus the passage of time. Sound is movement – movement in time – movement in space.  In the end, our experience is never exactly the same. We can listen to the same recording on different days and hear it differently each time, because we have changed.

The impetus for the audio track came from a recorded conversation with an aboriginal elder from Theodore, the area in which I worked restoring the photographs.  Afterwards – the word itself and the audio track title – can mean many things. In his essay “Scars on the Soul’ Tobias Brosch quotes Samuel Pepys, who after the Great Fire of London in 1666 reported: ‘So great was our fear, it was enough to put us out of our wits. Afterwards, news of a chimney fire some distance away put me into much fear and trouble.’ In a sense all catastrophes, man-made or natural, can have this effect on people far removed from the actual events: afterwards, then, every listener can rightfully expect to feel, ‘much fear and trouble’. 

In essence the soundtrack attempts to describe the incidental and the unseen, to re-read a story/history in other ways. In the process of doing so it accepts the fallibility of memory, and our inability to grasp the entirety of any experience, our subconscious filtering of information, and our always-partial experience of events. When looking at vernacular photography, we also construct our own narratives without the constraint of reputation or knowingness of the photographer. 

In creating this project I considered the notions of storytelling and Paul Ricoeur's theory of narrative – stories are tripartite in nature: event to experience, to form to reception. Despite not being at the scene of the event, the work itself is an intervention in the construction of narratives in which the event now exists. 

The research is based on the idea that we are subject to a constant flow of images – via the internet, television and the press, and this project aims to side step the stream of real-time images and break free from the demand for sensationalist pictures. Many photojournalists today are being asked to record audio documents and aural testimonies alongside photographs because, according to the photojournalist Sebastian Meyer,: "it's important in an age where we've become numb to a lot of visual images to find another sensory level to tell stories at" (2011)


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