Ghosting: Putting the Volume into Screen Memory

Abstract

Yagan Square, a new civic space in central Perth, opens in 2016. Designed to create a new focus of social, cultural, and economic exchange between the central railway station and the central bus station, it is also intended to fulfill an important symbolic function. This chapter discusses some of the mechanisms being used to deliver the symbolic program. In 2014, the author was commissioned to develop a “creative template” for the site, a compilation of images and stories that could form the basis of a bicultural approach to Yagan Square’s physical design, interpretation, and ongoing program. Later the same year, the author was invited to become one of the commissioned public artists for Yagan Square. The outcome of this, Passenger, is a text-based “screen” work distributed across the site. This chapter explores the tensions between the public programming expectations of a digitally-based screen culture and a work like Passenger, which, in mimicking screen projections in an analogue mode, suggests an archaeology of the screen image, one that haunts the screen with a memory of something deeper and hidden, a lost body that possesses volume.

A discussion of the uneasy relationship between the Freudian “screen memory” and acts of historical commemoration that serve to cover up and forget contested pasts introduces an account of the challenges presented by the legacy of Noongar freedom fighter, Yagan. Murdered and dismembered in 1833, his remains transported to England, how will he enter “a new body” as Noongar Elder Ken Colbung hopes? What representation can preserve this hole in reason? The artwork Passenger responds to this obliquely through the evocation of another “ghost,” that of [Fanny] Balbuk, a Noongar woman notorious in the late nineteenth century for her determined traverses of the Perth city grid: breaking through the new organisation of space and time, she inscribed a dissident history into the fabric of colonial power. By remembering her through the device of a hole, silhouette, or cast shadow, the comfort of the “screen memory” is refused: the larger façade of forgetting is materialised, with the concomitant invitation to walk in Balbuk’s tracks. In this way, the screen acquires depth and, merging into the construction of a new public space, suggests a participatory witnessing that turns the screen back into a site of social production.