The Suppression and Realisation of my Northern Irish Memory

I've been having a look back through some journal articles that I have collected and found this one [below] by Justin McKeown which has a new relevance for what I am doing at the moment. 

McKeown talks about the problems of 'memory building' and 'normalisation', writing that the former encourages a re-imagining of the past and the latter asks us to remodel ourselves on other Western societies. Both terms suggest a revising of the past in order to form a collective future, which I find extremely problematic.

Northern Ireland crops up in my head a lot when I am thinking and writing these days, maybe because it is a society where memory is very present (in the sense of always being there) and yet very misunderstood. It is rarely framed as an active and temporally present process, as I have come to (re)understand it recently. 

McKeown articulates this when discussing the Troubles Archive, a digital archive about which he writes: 

There is something very attractive about the idea of a digital archive. One of the problems of many archives is that they act primarily as collections and not as discursive bodies. As such, it is hard for users of the archive to enter into direct documented dialogue with the archive. However,with a digital archive the technological potential exists to make it possible for users to not only view the material but also to comment or respond to it and have these responses documented within the archive itself. This is an exciting prospect if one wishes to begin a dialogue surrounding not only the contents of the archive, but also the nature of the Northern Irish imagination as personified through the artworks therein. (2009:3)

I have, and continue to have issues with the idea of the archive, as it triggers an oddly emotional desire to let sleeping dogs lie, to bury the past as it were. My experience of archive in Northern Ireland is as a source of TV news that follows stories of violence, as a way to say, 'the present might be messy, but look how well we are dealing with our past'. My experience of memory work and archiving in Northern Ireland is that it rarely affects my present but constantly reminds me of the conflicted nature of our past, however the digital archive, as articulated by McKeown presents a new potential. 

Ultimately McKeown suggests that instead of trying to create a canon of Northern Irish art we begin to look at the relationship between Northern Irish art and art from elsewhere, and try to understand ourselves in relation to wider cultural production. By doing this we open up the possibility to use culture not as a way to revise our narratives of the past but to understand ourselves through other people's presents and to finally get to grips with the potential of Northern Irish memory.

The Supression and Realisation of the Northern Irish Imagination by Justin McKeown