For this piece I was inspired by the discussion on Pierre Huyghe’s The Third Memory, in particular Ruth Erickson’s article. In her article, she argues that The Third Memory exists in a simulacrum where competing realities (truth and fictitious) co-exist. Where both the recounting of events in Dog Day Afternoon and Wojtowicz’s reenactment are both real and not. What is real is the combination of both these perceived realities and the one that exists in the collective memory. In other words, Erickson points out that to reconstruct a memory through representation is near impossible as this image exists in a non-space.
A Song to Sleep to is an installation that consists of a mahjong table in a small room, playing an audio recording of my mother playing mahjong. I wanted to recreate a familiar scene that was a large part of my childhood. Janelle L. Wilson in her book Nostalgia: Sanctuary of Meaning argues that “expressing and experiencing nostalgia require active reconstruction of the past—active selections of what to remember and how to remember it.” Memory is reconstructed through bits and pieces, it is made up of little parcels. For this piece, I included the things that stood out to me most. But as elaborated earlier, representations of the past through images is insufficient. Instead the viewer is confronted with an empty mahjong table yet the sounds of mahjong tiles colliding with one another can be heard. The sounds of incoherent speech, of celebration, of frustration, of joy grow clearer as the audience listens more closely.
I wanted my work to reflect this non-space, this non-image that Erickson pointed to. As such I sought to eliminate representation entirely and focus instead on something ephemeral, sound. Sound and music has this ability to bring one back to that particular time and space. While the installation has an image, the mahjong table merely acts as a reference point. The absence of the tiles are of particular importance as a child I had a limited view of the table, the sensory experience is auditory rather than visual. Without context, a readymade object points to no particular moment or memory, it is the sound that which evokes the image.