HOLY GROUND, 2021
I have always been enamoured by the metaphor of
memory as a landscape. This was especially inspired by
a paper I was reading, ‘The Ghosts of Place’. In it, author
Michael Mayerfeld Bell explores the concept of imbuing
spaces with collective cultural and personal memories, or
“ghosts”, thereby giving it meaning and making “space”
“place”. These places, filled with personal histories, then
become sacred to us – the extent of sanctity sometimes
parallel with the degree of unspokenness and secrecy
around the meanings particular places have for us.
“When we, through ghosts, make space place, we treat that spirited space with ritual care. We approach it with more measured step. We find that its aura calls out from us our faculties of wonder. We resent as defilement practices that fail to do homage to the ghost or ghosts within - development projects being one large category of such defilements. Simply put, we treat a place as a shrine.”
Gradually, our approach towards these spaces become more calculated and our attitudes more reverent. We have a sense of romanticism for places just as we have a sense of sentimentality for things; these spaces to me are on par with objects and souvenirs we collect throughout our lives as a more permanent means of holding on to the impermanent and the transient – moments in time.
“When we, through ghosts, make space place, we treat that spirited space with ritual care. We approach it with more measured step. We find that its aura calls out from us our faculties of wonder. We resent as defilement practices that fail to do homage to the ghost or ghosts within - development projects being one large category of such defilements. Simply put, we treat a place as a shrine.”
Gradually, our approach towards these spaces become more calculated and our attitudes more reverent. We have a sense of romanticism for places just as we have a sense of sentimentality for things; these spaces to me are on par with objects and souvenirs we collect throughout our lives as a more permanent means of holding on to the impermanent and the transient – moments in time.