Anne KarhuMargin of absence
Presence and absence, fragmentation and integration, association and disassociation are all important elements in my audio, visual and written works, which operate on multiple levels from the personal and intimate to the universal and numinous. For the Selected Bibliography I chose to explore the notion of preservation with material from my personal sound archives. I worked with sound material captured on magnetic tape twenty years ago and the piece consists of three generations of voices; my maternal grandmother, my mother and myself, thus creating a tonal narrative, a distant memory now broken in translation.
The listener is invited into the intimacy of this aged conversation that offers a meeting place for both public and private as well as linguistic and non-linguistic readings. The act of recording has an element of capturing and freezing the fleeting moment, providing a return to a distant place, which no longer is, and where the abstraction of the tonal dialogue and storytelling is taking slices of time away from its original context. Something which would have otherwise been forgotten has been preserved and is open to breathe again through new interpretations.