- Venue
- The Women's Library
- Location
- London
(In) Memoriam
The Ignite Arts Collective (Ana Escobar, Natalie Koffman, Barbara Proschak, Ilenia Voleri)
Collective work is not for the weak but for those individuals strong enough to merge and aim for change. The critical demands of (In)Memoriam drew the artists Ana Escobar, Natalie Koffman, Barbara Proschak and Ilenia Voleri into the crystallizing process of collaboration, which they named and celebrate as the Ignite Arts Collective. The mix of cultures that shaped them as individuals are trans-european – Escobar is Spanish, Koffman British, Proschak German and Voleri Italian. But as their collective acted as a sounding board for developing their individual works, it became clear that it was their common gender politics that was inciting their art to action.
When I learnt that the Ignite Art Collective developed (In) Memoriam to challenge the Jack the Ripper tours around Whitechapel, I suddenly remembered Carol Morley’s short film Stalin My Neighbour (2004). We follow a young woman called Annie as she zigzags across these East End pavements to stick up Lost Cat notices. She talks almost non-stop, entertaining us with local history like an experienced tour guide. But her pace is troubled and her mood volatile as she deflects an interviewer’s probing questions about her own history. Annie’s in pain, and the only time her face brightens is when she’s holding forth on her neighbourhood’s colourful past.
“Jack the Ripper tours come along here. I’m smack in the middle of all the murders!” She cheerfully points in about 4 directions. Off we go again, past Tower House where George Orwell and Stalin once stayed until we are brought to a halt on “the exact spot”. This is the story that leaps forward to (In) Memoriam. She stands in front of railings on a busy road, making a loud noise like a siren. She enjoys this performance, smiles broadly and explains, “This is the exact spot where Catherine Eddowes was arrested for impersonating a fire engine when she was drunk. The police locked her in a cell and when she sobered up they released her into the fog in the early hours of the morning. Twenty minutes later she was murdered by Jack the Ripper.”
Her mood sobers and the interviewer asks: do you think the policeman who released her would have felt guilty about what happened to her? And Annie’s angry defensiveness makes it clear that the murder of this playful woman echoes the tragedy that she cannot bring herself to speak about, the unsolved death of her sister. The unbearable tension between these deaths across time plays across Annie’s face and her inner hell, despite the fiction of the film, feels true. (In) Memoriam reminds me this was the first time I’d learnt anything about one of Jack the Ripper’s victims and that by bringing her to life the film stood alone until now.
Natalie Koffman’s video The Tour settles us safely in Mitre Square at night. Listening to the uneasy peace of an urban space after dark the scene is cut through by the chilling phrases that embellish tour guides’ descriptions of the murders that happened there. The texts move by speaking only in our minds, devoid of the seductiveness of the performing male voice and isolated from the complicity of a paying audience. This stripped back enactment makes us wonder. What exactly do we forsake when we gather together at the location of a murder to hear a graphic description that likens a woman’s death to a pig’s at slaughter? This is not fiction. And the violence described is a daily occurrence, not history.
I’m writing, in London, sitting on the 63 bus. A moment ago the passenger to my left snapped open a tabloid and I glanced over. The inside page headline: Police Search for Second Body, is all I need to see to know it’s a woman’s body they’re looking for. We seem to absorb this image of gender violence as casually as turning a page, and so Barbara Proschak’s Shrine of unwritten sheets speak of the unrecorded women most eloquently, by retaining this bitter blankness. Names and incidents are so grossly underreported that she mirrors the censorship brought about by the media’s routine sensationalism of gender violence that reinforces the pervasive invisibility of its impact on our lives.
Ana Escobar deploys social networking to invite us back to Mitre Square. She films individuals leaving tributes to Mary Jeanette Kelly on the bench and low wall. At last, a tender humanity returns to this “exact spot” that by day serves as a stage for tourguides enacting the cheap thrill of horror at Mary Kelly’s expense. In their place we see ourselves as ephemeral, leaving behind flowers and other offerings that remain a while longer until the tourguides return and sweep them all away. The most enduring elements of these visits are probably the one minute silences we are asked to keep. The filmed individuals look as if they succeed in stepping out of the urban rush hour, but the way to experience 60 seconds as an eternity – to really step out of time – is to be gripped either by extreme pain or absolute peace.
The female body is boldly reintroduced into the experience of commemoration by Ilenia Voleri’s performance work made with the dancer Magda Tuka. Here we explore the intimate psychic edges of pain and peace to which those under constant threat are driven. We can identify with the body’s contractions and tormented gestures in dialogue with the possibility of calm grace. Silence is transgressed by the explosive cursing of Tuka, as mental anguish breaks free of being a long soundless scream. Gender violence is nothing less than a brutal slapdown silencing, but the dancer raises her arms in an easy arch to emerge from the shudders of inner pain. This is a body reclaimed on behalf of many.
The move to physically reclaim victims of gender violence through art was also at the heart of 400 Women, an exhibition organized by Tamsyn Challenger last November in nearby Shoreditch Town Hall. Here 400 portraits commemorated the women and girls murdered in recent years in the Mexican town of Ciudad Juarez. Apathy in the face of such appalling violence is denied by the images and by working with Amnesty International the hope is that the exhibition will travel to Mexico and bring these women home. It is I hope unthinkable that in 100 years time a walking tour will invite anyone who would pay to hear the story of their deaths for entertainment.
(In) Memoriam brings the histories of all women suffering violence into view by retrieving the identities of Annie Chapman, Catherine Eddowes, Elizabeth Stride, Mary Anne Nichols and Mary Jeanette Kelly into a space dedicated to the preservation of women’s history. The project is finalized with the site installation of a plaque for each woman, named with her life dates. At the end of this Alternative Jack the Ripper tour on the 5th and 28th of May they will enter local history in their own right with the urgency of activist street art and the weight of rediscovered truth. Those “exact spots” that fascinate us with the promise of some kind of continuity with the past, and explanations for the present, absolutely need the presence of these individuals not to remind us of a serial killer with a nickname, but to remind us of our shared history of gender violence. These women suffered untimely deaths for no other reason than that they were women. It’s as simple and as wrong as that.