How to archive ‘sound’ in a more engaging and contextual way? This work employs the factory sounds which the ethnographer Xinyuan Wang recorded in the factory where her informants worked and she lived for 15 months. It is a combination of the real-life sounds with images of the factory workers. Just like the factory where those rural migrants work and the place where they live, the small space of the glass bottle is stuffed with people and filled with noise. Factories not only produce goods but also ‘factory workers’. No matter who you are, where you come from, and why you are happy or upset, one’s personal stories and emotions are overwhelmed and flooded by the roar of machines on the assembly line and the scale of the factory itself. So in this exhibit we find them crammed into a mass of other people and deafening sounds.
Sound, bottles, cork, paper drawing
All rights reserved, Xinyuan Wang
[Bio c. 2014] Xinyuan Wang was originally trained in classical Chinese painting and calligraphy, and currently working as a PhD student at the Department of Anthropology at UCL . Her project is a part of the Global Social Media Impact Study, and her research is funded by Wenner-gren foundation. http://www.ucl.ac.uk/global-social-media
The Bureau of Memories: Archives and Ephemera is a thematic reflection on the archive and its discontents. Washington’s identity as the seat of American political power is amplified through its role as the locus of its own memorialization. Where there is history, there is haunting. By drawing on the archive’s unnerving, uncanny, and ephemeral specters, this exhibition is an effort to re-imagine and reposition archives as sites which not only have the capacity to produce and contest historical memory, but also generate significant gaps and blind spots.