Helen previously studied Mixed Media Fine Art at the University of Westminster. MISCARRAIGE OF THE MEMORY forms part of a larger project in fragments. Her work has been published by Cipher Press, Goldsmiths CCA, and somethingother.org. She works for Southwark Council as a Heritage Officer and is one half of a publication project called ALMANAC.

helensavage-@hotmail.com

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MISCARRIAGE OF THE MEMORY: SPECULATIVE READINGS

1. Did someone insert a probe into the history of women’s lives? For its gone awry, amiss. Where does a miscarriage, an abortion, go? It travels down the sewers, into the cesspits, into the waters. History has become detached from its body has been left to die, rot, in the deteriorating archives, in the libraries beginning to close, even history books torn out because no space for them here, in the damp.

2. A long metal probe is heated up in a pan on a stove of a woman. She inserts the metal probe into the thick memory skin of the world. She can abort some of the memories, or at least she attempts destroy its density and allow some light to come in.

3. They were bombarded by information. All day and sometimes at night too. The information kept coming and sometimes they ingested it and other times they could not. In some cases the information was so hot off the press it burnt small cigarette holes into the minds of the people. The news, kept coming and coming, and one news article went onto the next so quickly, each news report had a clipped edge. The news came daily and often it was a repeat of what had come before but using different phrases or framed in a slightly different way. In this way it was as if the media, and those who dictated to the media what to do, and we the viewer, were being made to ‘forget’. By reminding us, it was as if they assumed we had forgotten the previous day. It was not that we had forgotten, but being made to feel this way, we performed forgetfulness, until one day, finally, this performance became all there was.

4. A worlds historic memory as a backdrop and in the foreground the American election in 2020. A woman heats up a metal probe in a pan. She uses the probe to abort some of the historic memory of the world. In its space is a black hole. The candidacy of two white older rich men no-longer makes sense. Their power no longer makes sense. It is all a legacy of memory.

5. The years she spent coming of age as a teenage woman in this world trying to forget what had just happened the night before, mainly drunk and disorientating sexual encounters, meant that she had procured a habit of wilful forgetfulness.The use of recreational drugs during this time could also have had an eroding effect on her memory, especially her short term memory.

6. Some parents were passing on a miscarriage of the present to their children. It was a middle class denial. They did not want to consider where they had come from because it was too shameful. When something was thought, it was instantly forgotten about. For example, the plan to sort out all the overwhelming piles of paper in the house. It was a good idea on the surface, but it did not get done. In this way it was as if the short- term did not exist.