As research material
• Funded project• Creating knowledge• Changing cultural resonances of social life
from past to future
Cultural Haunting in Cosmopolitan Urban
Spaces:
Art and Social Dreamingin London, New York
and Sao Paulo
Capturing haunting
The importance of disclosing haunting is addressed in socio-analyses and in psycho-analyses, by reference to diverse concepts and empirical engagements. These reveal that significant areas of social life are forgotten and made invisible which express and also create dramas replicated across history, in social space and across regions.
In Sociology
• Avery Gordon – shows entire countries experiencing states of haunting – ghostly matters made marginal through the violence of modernity
• Pierre Bourdieu – symbolic violence and ‘misrecognition’: imposition of categories of thought and perception upon the dominated social.
[‘Psyche in the habitus?’]
Psychoanalysis
• Bracha Ettinger – affective history is passed down through generations. Transmission of the haunting via matrixial space and borderspace
• Gordon Lawrence – dreams as collective knowledge, as ‘objects’ woven into experiences
Psychoanalysis
• Christopher Bollas – dreams as ‘evocative objects’ for transactions between internal and external worlds
• Wendy Hollway & Lynn Froggett – dreams as ‘objects of provocation’ bridging imagination and reality in ‘scenic composition’
Using Pillows to capture Cultural Haunting via the Dream
project, enacting action research via public intervention
and community art organizations
Methodological Exploration
• The pillow as an instrument• Eclecticism and inventiveness in methods• Social Dreaming Matrix• Visual Matrix• Performance art