Performing erasure
conference contribution
posted on 2013-01-01, 00:00 authored by Dirk De BruynThis presentation examines my abstract films from my ongoing 16mm and digital experimental film practice, e.g.: 223(1985, 6 mins), Migraine Particles (1984, 12 mins) , Understanding Science (1992, 18 mins), Rote Movie (1994, 12 mins), Trauma Dream (2002, 7 mins) and Analog Stress (2004, 12 mins) as expressing a process of erasure, a method employed to construct a gutted and marooned identity. It rereads the essentialism of Modernism as laying bare the mechanics of erasure and denial and Peter Gidal’s anti-illusionist ‘Materialist Film’ as a practice outlining the structure of trauma, and the nature of traumatic memory, described as dissociative in Pierre Janet's early work.
I understand my practice as a response to trauma, dislocation and resettlement expressible in the emptied and gutted voice of the New Australian, a 50s term for the assimilated migrant of which the Dutch were considered exemplar performers, good white New Australians, who neatly left their Dutch identity at the door, but who never-the-less witnessed the ambiguities of the ideologies they implicitly embraced. The term ‘New Australian’ is an ‘official’ 1950’s identity which asks you to forget your past for a problematic, undefined Oother¹ that is set apart from ‘Australian’.
I understand my practice as a response to trauma, dislocation and resettlement expressible in the emptied and gutted voice of the New Australian, a 50s term for the assimilated migrant of which the Dutch were considered exemplar performers, good white New Australians, who neatly left their Dutch identity at the door, but who never-the-less witnessed the ambiguities of the ideologies they implicitly embraced. The term ‘New Australian’ is an ‘official’ 1950’s identity which asks you to forget your past for a problematic, undefined Oother¹ that is set apart from ‘Australian’.
