Claire is filmed on the remote Scottish island of St Kilda, which was evacuated in 1930 by its remaining 36 inhabitants, who felt hopelessly cut off from the reassuring social experiences and communal memories of the outside world.
Four blocks away, at 12205 Imperial Avenue, in a neighborhood called Mount Pleasant, the home of Anthony Sowell had stood until the previous December, when city officials decided to demolish it, to expunge the communal memories of bad smells and the deaths of eleven colored women.
Keeping her company is Pilar, a Spanish friend -- glowing, frank, good-natured" -- who amiably pries at Bronagh's reserve and serves as a voice of worldly experience, being schooled both in sexual matters (thanks to a "very nice Italian on a motorbike") and communal memories of atrocities committed in her country's civil war ("What can we say, we know it happened").
From this experience, she recognized that art could be used to articulate the communal memories of survivors of human rights atrocities.
In this idea, there is perhaps a rather poetic connection to President Shriver's work on the significance of communal memory, particularly of the shameful past.
In this post, Rachel Unkovic, member of the 2016 cohort, talks about why oral historians have a unique role to play in amplifying and signal boosting marginalized voices to enable "history" and communal memory to be appropriately critiqued.
Ausubel's novel is concerned with family history, communal memory and the power of the imagination, and maintains an uncanny, sometimes troubling, aura of innocence throughout.
Photographers, as this exhibition shows, have an important part to play in these acts of communal memory.
