Memoria Rerum: Animated Materiality, Memory, and Amnesia

Abstract

is Professor and Head of MA Animation at the Royal College of Art London. She has published widely on animation and film, and is Editor of Animation: an interdisciplinary journal (Sage). Her research theme of Pervasive Animation positions animation as central to contemporary debates in visual culture, and as a primary driver of the digital shift and resulting changes in cultural metaphors. She is interested in the evolving relationship between media, creative industries and social change, She is also active as a curator, most recently Animated Wonderworlds, Museum of Design Zurich (2016).

Experiments in Hybrid Documentary and Indigenous Model Animation

“…She quickly gathers her equipment and steps into another photograph to see her grandmother as a boarding-school student. This movement demonstrates Suzanne Buchan’s (2020: 23) explanation of how stop-motion animation can work with ‘objects, materials, and textures’ that operate as ‘placeholders of a memory’, depicting ‘what is unseen, but felt and remembered in the human consciousness’. As Strong enters the past to bear witness to settler violences against her family (especially land dispossession), these images situate her as a remediator of Indigenous–settler history.…”

“…Much of Skawennati’s work has been devoted to transposing Indigenous aesthetics and cultural protocols into a speculative future, to demonstrate that not only will they be viable in the future, but they will be vital to the future. TimeTraveller TM presents a collision of future and historical representation: digital instantiations of traditional cultural objects, imagined in a speculative future, likewise engage with what is ‘felt and remembered in the human consciousness’, just as with Strong and Calder’s stop motion (Buchan, 2020: 23). Its nine machinima episodes represent the technically unrepresentable, addressing settler violences impossible to adequately depict onscreen.…”