The British Library
Pearson Creative Research Fellow
Memoriography is the culmination of Chino Otsuka’s year long fellowship at the British Library. As the Pearson Creative Research Fellow she has had the extraordinary opportunity to spend the last twelve months researching the Collection, choosing to focus her research on the photographic collection and the Sound Archive. The results of her journey are now on display here in this new collection of photographs and soundscapes in which her archival discoveries have combined with her own audio and visual memories to create new work.
And suddenly memory returns. The taste was that of the little crumbs of madelein
The Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust
Memoriography is the culmination of Chino Otsuka’s year long fellowship at the British Library. As the Pearson Creative Research Fellow she has had the extraordinary opportunity to spend the last twelve months researching the Collection, choosing to focus her research on the photographic collection and the Sound Archive. The results of her journey are now on display here in this new collection of photographs and soundscapes in which her archival discoveries have combined with her own audio and visual memories to create new work.
In many ways throughout my research at the British Library I was searching for my own crumbs of madelein that might trigger my own memories. The first of these came while searching through the vast collections of photographs and photo albums in which I discovered a photograph of a girl standing in the snow on the way to school, her pose and gaze instantly recalling my own childhood. In another photograph I came across a familiar place in Japan, a place that is near my grandmother’s house. The photograph dated back to 1906 but, as I looked, I saw the image of the same place in the present time: images began to oscillate between the two worlds as the memory started to travel through time. In the Sound Archive I discovered sounds that I had forgotten. Listening to these recordings from Japan and Britain I remembered the places where I once belonged. I started to make my own recordings in Japan, and just like when I take photographs, I collected the sounds around me, capturing within them slices of time.
Memoriography is an exploration into the art of remembering in which the archive of my own memory is interweaved with that of the British Library. How do we remember and how do we preserve our memories; these are the questions I constantly ask myself and continue to fascinate me. It is a collage of my research here as it has interacted with the narrative of my life. A journey - as Daniel L Schacter in Searching for Memory suggests that the idea of remembering is also like a mental time travel.
