Just a little bit of history repeating is an artistic project that proposes an engagement with the social and poetic resonance of absence, and of the personal and collective recollection of past events and places, within our common understandings and uses of the places that we inhabit in the present.
As its initial starting point, and through acts and strategies developed for and within the locale specifically, the project proposes to return real-time archive audio recordings or live firsthand description, of past events or places, to the site of those events or places – these aural traces being delivered directly within the location of the now absent activity or architecture that they attempt to describe. The work is manifest in the act of that relocation, in the gatherings it proposes, and in the refreshed and personal perspectives of a place that might be revealed through direct meetings with the history and community that shape it.
The work explores our understanding of ‘place’ – as space that, through use, has acquired meaning. Our intention is to relocate events that resonate within the daily fabric of a locale, without interpretation. To allow a personal meeting with the possibility of past events, beyond their narrative or received significance – as a catalyst for personal and social reflection in the present.
Just a little bit of history repeating proposes an active engagement and animation of social space. Its primary medium is audio material, its primary strategy is public broadcast, its poetic engages both personal memory and social identity.
A series of context-specific interventions in social space co-created with Mike Brookes
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Providence cove walk
On Saturday October 19th 2013, Mike Brookes and I, accompanied by local residents, walked a route that followed the now absent shore line of the original Providence cove, Rhode Island,…
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Historic parking lots of Providence / Introduced birdsong
For a single working day, on Thursday 17th October 2013, and with the help of local residents, Mike Brookes and I highlighted thirty of central Providence’s surface level parking lots…
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Greetings from Salina, crossroads of the nation
During the autumn of 2013, Mike Brookes and I spent six weeks as resident artists in Salina Art Center, Kansas, USA, undertaking research and fieldwork within the city. The resulting participatory artwork was…
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Euskalduna shipyards
In the autumn of 2011, on the riverbank adjacent to the Guggenheim Gallery in Bilbao, within the open public spaces that now occupy much of the site of the vast…
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Alexandra Gardens bandstand
During the summer of 2010, B-side Multimedia Arts Festival commissioned a number of artists to develop works in response to sites along two routes in Weymouth and Portland. Mike Brookes…
With the support of BilbaoEszena, Festival Bad Bilbao, B-side Multimedia Arts Festival, Wales Arts International, Brown University’s Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies and Salina Art Center