"Forest of Memories"
Newspace Arts Foundation, Hue - Vietnam, 3 April to 23 May, 2011
As individuals, we live our lives and then we die. We may live on in the memory of others, but maybe when they die, our memories die with them. However, a country's memories live on through generations as we tell and retell our stories of the past. These are our shared stories, our history, our culture. Each new generation brings another layer of experience, another layer of memory, and the culture grows richer. When we forget, our culture grows poorer.
It is important to maintain these shared memories, to add to them, to learn from them, to continue to enrich the culture. It is important to remember the good as well as the bad. As we move from aural story-telling traditions to the written word and on into cyberspace, these are still tools for recording and communicating, for passing on knowledge and continuing to enrich the culture.
Kristine McCarroll worked collaboratively with Geoff Levitus on this exhibition during an artresidency at the Newspace Arts Foundation (NSAF) in April 2011 . The work is dedicated to the memory of the Vietnamese people who have lived and suffered under the oppression of China, France and the USA. It is an installation piece made of 11 banners of double layers of silk organza, printed with real image of a legless child, stencil silhouette of plane bombers and embroidery. The banner are 280cm high by 90 cm wide and are suspendd from the ceiling, acting as a forest of trees amongst which the viewers will be able to meander. The memory side of the project is reinforced by video interviews of old people from Hue. They are in English, French and/or Vietnamese. Those videos, produced by Geoff Levitus,enable thise people to tell their story with special effects, which evokes some aspect of Vietnamese culture or history. Those vidoes are projected on additional “blank” silk banners to serve as screens as well as plasma TVs.