‘It Will Bury Its Past, It Will Paper Over the Cracks’: John Duncan’s Trees From Germany

Abstract

Emma Grey chapter examines John Duncan’s Trees From Germany (2003), an exhibition commissioned by Belfast Exposed Photography to ‘produce a photographic work of Belfast post-conflict on the threshold of progress’. Grey explores how this project builds on Duncan’s previous work documenting the planned redevelopment of Belfast and the idealised visions of its post-conflict future. Grey traces the fault lines of post-conflict Belfast, between the recalcitrant traces of a past that the peace process seeks to eradicate and a future it aspires to achieve. Drawing on Duncan’s images, Grey addresses how the peace process’s consignment of traumatic events to the archive of history and its desire for a ‘fresh start’ is underscored (and undermined) by its reliance on selective forgetting. According to Grey, Trees From Germany—through its unrelenting gaze on the architectural outcomes of the peace process and how the city is being rapidly overwritten—frames post-conflict Belfast to reveal its impact on how people live their lives in a radically changed urban environment.