During my residency, I sought to understand how the Institute building, the Society and its artists came together into the contemporary moment of 2022. Using the artwork, “The Garden of Eden” by the South Australian artist, Barbara Hanrahan, as a starting point, I decided to explore the idea of the Institute building and the Society as being a sanctuary for artists, a garden of Eden in which innocence is lost as wisdom is gained. The Institute building and the RSASA have been a part of the arts scene since the colonial settlements and the architecture itself can be seen as a symbol of the colonial need to transpose imperialist values onto the colonies. The building is heavy and imposing and along with the other early colonial buildings that line North Terrace, it sits in a trajectory of imperialist culture- that of judicial control and the upholding of imperial values through the arts. However, just as the row of colonial era buildings that line North Terrace can be read as a signifier of colonial desire, the Institute building itself can be seen as a site of possibilities, where its inhabitants over time are able to push against the forces of imperialism so brutally reproduced in architecture and ornament, and in doing so, potentially create new repositories of meanings.

If history could be experienced phenomenologically, instead of through the lens of the archive, what would that look like, and could the layers of the historical space be pried open to explore what is resting there? Just as there is a ghost in the machine- ephemera that activates the deadened space of mechanics, there must also be a ghost of the archive, the misty or mystical inhabitants that haunt the archives. The work I have created during my residency and presented as part of the joint exhibition, “Mnemonic Disturbance”, is a presentation of the ghosts of the archive. While tradition seeks to hold onto the old, we need the disruptions of ghosts and of those who will not be silenced, who talk from the pages of history and remain despite the institutional silencing of the new. The Institute and RSASA sit in an uncomfortable junction of old and new. As the theorist, Frank den Oudsten points out, “exhibitions are a medium of memory”. This exhibition hopes to sit amongst a set of new mnemonics, where the old is disrupted to make way for alternative voices.