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| Photo credit: Heather Benning |
In 2007, my sister Heather Benning, a visual artist, restored the interior of an abandoned farmhouse to the date of its abandonment in the mid-1960s. She re-shingled, re-plastered and painted, refurbished the original flooring, and staged the house with vintage furniture and knickknacks: a water glass with bright orange flowers left on a kitchen table; a copy of The Western Producer, folded open to the grain markets slumped beneath a lamp; crocheted doilies on the chesterfield’s armrests; a flannel shirt hanging from a bedroom door. Heather removed the house’s north wall and replaced it with plexiglass so viewers could look into the house the way they would a child’s dollhouse. She locked the house to discourage entry. She entitled her site-specific installation, The Dollhouse.
Typically homey contentment is not the object of our reflection. Rather, we know our households primarily through use; things are handled, smelled and touched, but are too close to us to be seen clearly or discretely – think of how we shade our eyes in moments of embrace (Tuan 144-146). Looking creates distance. By locking the house and keeping the audience at a remove, Heather forced viewers to take note of the domestic bricolage that composes a sense of home, the humble furnishings and their implied web of communal activities.
The affective power of The Dollhouse existed in how it spoke to our nostalgia for connectivity. Svetlana Boym suggests that our culture suffers from acute nostalgia, a “global epidemic,” resultant from the accelerated rhythms of modern life. “Progress,” she writes, “didn’t cure nostalgia but exacerbated it.” Similarly globalization has inspired longing for stronger local attachments. Counterpoint to our fascination with “cyberspace and the virtual global village, we yearn for community with a collective memory…” (xiv). The Dollhouse appealed to our desire for “continuity in a fragmented world,” imparting in viewers the sensation of intimate dwelling even as the possibility of doing so was sealed off from them.
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| Photo credit: Heather Benning |
But what does dwelling entail? American philosopher, Edward Casey traces the word dwellback to two apparently antithetical roots: Old Norse, dvelja – to linger, delay, tarry; and Old English dwalde, to go astray, wander (Getting Back into Place 114). Dwelling-as-residing and dwelling-as-wandering: every hearth made warmer by departure, by the journey abroad, by the wildness beyond the confines of our built places. Similarly, Casey suggests that built places, if they are to qualify as human dwellings, must satisfy two conditions: they must allow for repeated return and they must possess a felt familiarity, which, in part, arises from reoccupation itself (116).
The dual nature of both dwelling and dwelling places accounts for why it is so devastating when Heather burns down The Dollhouse. If The Dollhouse suggested nostos, the promise of home, appealing to our fantasy for return, then the act of burning it down forces us to linger in algia, the pain of longing itself. Reoccupation is made impossible; our homecoming forever delayed.
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| Photo credit: Heather Benning |
In the winter of 2014, Heather and filmmaker Chad Galloway documented the burning of The Dollhouse. This controlled burn was part of the plan for the project from the beginning. Pragmatically, Heather knew that eventually the house would be broken into; because she could not guarantee the building’s safety, she decided that once it was tampered with she would destroy it. But more importantly, with The Dollhouse Heather wasn’t interested in constructing a mausoleum, a reactive emblem of a past time.
This impulse to rebuild the lost home is characteristic of restorative nostalgia, one of the two kinds of nostalgic tendencies that Boym identifies in our attempts to make sense of our relationships to the past, to our lost homes, to our apparently inexpressible homesickness (41). Boym writes that “[r]estoration (from re-staure – re-establishment) signifies a return to the original stasis, to the prelapsarian moment” (49). The past for the restorative nostalgic is not “duration but perfect snapshot” (49). At worst, restorative nostalgia is behind resurgent nationalist movements which elide the complexities of historical time by “engaging anti-modern myth-making and nationalist symbols” (42). In its less extreme forms, restorative nostalgia still has no use for the complications of history – “the ruins, the cracks, the imperfections” (45). It is manifested in total reconstructions of monuments of the past. Signs of decay are “freshly painted” in the attempt to achieve the “original image,” to remain “eternally young” (49).
Fragments overlap in the short film Heather and Chad made about burning The Dollhouse; they tug at the viewer’s vision. A winter field: power poles, snow and sky. A scrub of poplars. The house, its rotting shingles. Lace curtains, a vase in a window, a plastic rose. Flames. Skates in the back entrance. A child’s laugh up the stairwell. A low drone. Cracks in the plaster. Ash on the bed. Flames climb the wall. Lace curtains, The Western Producer, a child’s book, a woman’s portrait – curl with flames. The rose twists, melts. The drone builds.1
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| Photo credit: Heather Benning |
Reflective nostalgia, the other kind of nostalgia distinguished by Boym, does not focus on recovery, but rather “meditates on the passage of time.” As she points out, the word re-flection suggests “new flexibility, not the reestablishment of stasis” (49). Instead of seeking Edenic unity then, reflective nostalgia lingers on the fragments of memory (49). For Susan Stewart, this sort of nostalgic narrative remains inconclusive; it is “enamored of distance, not of the referent itself” (145).
In the film, as the flames take over, fragments turning to ash, the low drone in the background, which at first recalls a dirge, crescendos into the clash of disaggregated sounds. Performed by Godspeed You! Black Emperor, a Montreal post-rock group, the anarchic soundscape is the sonic equivalence of this place’s undoing, its violent dismantling. If previously The Dollhouse’s un-restored exterior, the rotten shingles, the weathered siding, suggested to viewers passing time, that the mythical place called home cannot be returned to, the fire makes this distance irrevocable. The home is in ruins. And then, the home no longer exists. According to Boym, this sense of distance, compels the reflective nostalgic to tell her story – to try and make sense of the relationship between past, present and future (51).
Notes
1 The Dollhouse has been selected to show at film festivals in Paris, Granada, Detroit, Glasgow, Varna, Lviv, LaGuarimba and Warsaw. It is also viewable at the National Screen Institute of Canada: http://www.nsi-canada.ca/2015/03/the-dollhouse/
Works Cited
Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York, Perseus, 2001.
Casey, Edward. Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the
Place-World. Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1993.
Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham, Duke UP, 1993.
Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 1977.
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