Multisensory narratives of home and belonging : investigating virtual representations of physical places in Towards Telepathy (2017) and Home Museum (2020)

Abstract

In 2017, while living in two geographically distant locations, South African artist Katherine Bull and French artist Emmanuel de Montbron collaborated on a project in which they used mobile phones and an online blog to share stories about their experiences of place. The end product of their collaboration is Towards Telepathy (2017), a two-channel video that engages viewers on a visceral rather than a merely visual level. In a similar manner, artists who participated in the virtual exhibition of the 2020 Lagos Photo Festival, titled Home Museum (2020), used photographs to produce narratives of home and belonging that are shared with others in an online environment. In this article, I explore how Towards Telepathy and selected photographs from Home Museum draw on memories of multiple senses in order to relate stories of place-making when geographic and physical distance has become the norm. I argue that all the artists can be regarded as sensory autoethnographers, as they used digital technologies to record and present their life histories virtually. Furthermore, I analyse the video and the photographs with reference to Laura Marks’ notions of haptic visuality and recollection-objects. These lenses allow me to show how the images increase the potential for distant others to empathically connect with the artists’ personal and collective stories of place and belonging by evoking sense-based perceptions other than sight.