At the edge: Balnakiel,a video and sound installation by artist Shona Illingworth

Balnakiel: views and perspectives

The incomers were all escaping something. They’d come to the edge of the country to escape something. They wanted to absent themselves from the pressures of urban living. ¹

Distance pervades Balnakeil, the place, and arguably Balnakiel, the film. Distance and separation – the edge limit – are not only embedded in the physical and social landscape of this remote location but also in the psychological dimension that shapes the work. Formally, Balnakiel can be read as a palimpsest of points of view through which the loose narrative of the film unfolds and whose structural counterpoint is integral to both the aesthetic quest of the work and to the psychological content that informs it. The work is structured around a series of circular sequences characterised by the layering of visual and acoustic motifs whose sensorial intensity interrupts the forward motion of the film both temporally and spatially. This produces a series of compositional vertical volumes that achieve a three-dimensional effect in the immersive sensorial environment of the installation. Projected onto a large screen in a dimly lit space, the installation uses five overhead speakers distributed around the room with the addition of a subwoofer whose low frequency produces vibrations that can be physically felt by the viewer across and through the body. In the words of the artist, ‘the sound “creates” the sense of space – and works with and against the image sequences on the screen’. ² The installation space is congruent with an idea of memory that is not merely linear and chronologically organised but that is also volumetrically layered: a dynamically changing mental space that we inhabit.

The film opens with a prelude. At first, the sequence lingers on an aerial view of the area of Balnakeil and the nearby bay. The high-ground perspective, as if seen from a helicopter or low-flying aircraft, floats mid-air conveying a feeling of suspension intensified by the use of black and white. The scene moves to the close-up of the metal frame of a semi-open window that swivels on its hinges. Black and white changes to dark brown introducing colour. The camera lingers on an adolescent girl, seen through the window as she lights a storm lantern. During adolescence, memory assumes social and cultural connotations, adding to the construction of self-knowledge. In this sense, the girl symbolises a threshold between her own child-centred memories and the formation of more culturally contextualised ones. According to Martin Conway,

One might view the aerial images of Balnakiel and the surrounding landscape as being impersonal, a different organic aspect of memory, a set of images at the surface of the brain. As the sequence progresses we move into an area of memory that is more personal, connected to the individual, the self through the image of the girl. (Conway quoted in Illingworth, 2011: 120)

In the film, the girl acts as an agent of transition between the landscape and its social context, and between modalities of memory, at the interface of subjectivity and external perspective.

In the next sequence, the camera assumes the girl’s position, her first-person perspective, showing the same window from her vantage point, and then, it follows her as she climbs out of the window and slowly walks along the perimeter of elongated concrete buildings dimly lit by the swinging lamp that she holds. These barracks were built in the 1950s as a military camp in the eventuality of a nuclear attack. The camp was meant to support an Early Warning Station that should have replaced a military radar station and ‘listening’ post part of the Home Chain command during the Second World War. The Early Warning Station was never completed, and 10 years later, the now derelict barracks were gradually converted into living spaces and workshops for a nascent centre of creative crafts. The girl stops at another window, and she looks inside, mirroring the previous sequence. This completes the morphing of the initial linearity of the film into a volumetric environment. The sound that was almost muted during the first sequence – high distant wind – increases as we shift to ground level, and we hear lower ground wind whose sound is layered on other acoustic components, such as a deep and intermittent low-frequency pulsing rhythm, in order to achieve an enveloping effect. The following sequence shifts back to the initial aerial view and to the light sound of distant wind as the linear movement of the film is reinstated. The prelude establishes the pace of the video work and through the interweaving of perspectives, its visual rhythm and emotional content.

The overview of the landscape slowly zooms-in to the one road that runs along the coast. Alone in an empty school mini bus, the girl looks out from the window as it rains. The motif of the window with close-ups of glass panes – at times opaque with condensation – returns throughout the film to frame views and perspectives, as if they were concealing screens. This is paralleled by the juxtaposition of the interiors, with the barracks almost ‘huddled together’, one against the other, and the open space of the natural landscape and the overarching view that the Range Control Tower dominates. The camera dwells on details – a hanging cloth moved and wrapped by the wind, Tornados flying over the bay and a suspended piece of paper floating gently in the breeze. The aerial perspective lingers on the orography of the terrain, marked by stone demarcations and the bareness of the soil (Figure 1). The physical edges that divide the land iterate the visual motif of the frame and hint at deeply inbuilt separation lines. The camera abruptly shifts point of view and roams inside the glass perimeter of the Range Control Tower, rolling through a 360° view, signalling the military presence in the area.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Balnakiel, aerial view, 2009, a still from the film.

Disconnected voice-overs intercept the images recounting personal and collective experiences of the place. They express the diverging views in which the village and the landscape are both perceived and represented, intimating feelings of ‘displacement’ and ‘cultural distance’. Fragmentary, these voices implicitly convey the complexity of the social structures of Balnakeil where three communities are recognisable and among whom invisible boundaries are at stake: the local people who bear the traumatic legacy of the Highland Clearances, which occurred during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the craft-workers who moved into the concrete buildings in the 1960s to create an alternative way of life away from the constraints of capitalism and the impinging fears caused by the Cold War – they are the incomers, those who idealistically ‘escaped’ to the edge of the country – and the military whose presence is antagonised. Indeed, Balnakeil’s strategic position on the North Atlantic still holds within the present geopolitics as a ‘front line’ of the War on Terror. The nearby promontory of Faraid Head hosts the Range Control Tower that surveys a large area of land and sea, known as the Cape Wrath Bombardment Range. This is used for the training of British, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and allied forces, including the US armed forces, to be deployed in conflict zones across the world. The area is in fact considered especially advantageous due to a 360° live range of control, which enables attacks from any position. This is matched by the possibility of conducting combined land, air and sea exercises. Remote and impervious, the place embodies antagonist ideals marred by questions of belonging, displacement and identity.

From the Range Control Tower, the camera shifts to an aerial view of the coastline seen from the sea and back to the elongated rectangular buildings of the barracks that visually iterate the militarisation of this landscape. The camera roams the empty walls generating a disorienting feeling of enclosure. The barrenness of the concrete walls finds a correspondent in the erosion of the ground and of the coastline. The inhospitality of the landscape renders palpable the latent fear that the presence of the concrete barracks insinuates: they are like ‘unfinished shells of buildings’, as one of the voice-over comments. The focus shifts to the girl spinning with a rope on the roof of one of the barracks, and the camera turns with her, as the deafening downward engine noise of a helicopter mix with rising acute thin notes and the intermittent horizontal whipping sound of the rope slicing through the air (Figure 2). The effect is ominously threatening. The point of view of the girl spinning interweaves with an external observer’s point of view as colour and black and white images are seamlessly intercut producing a visual and acoustic vortex for the viewer. Hence, the impression of seeing oneself rotating meets that of the rotating view, while the rising pressure of the sounds press down on the installation space. Low-frequency sounds intensify and compress the sense of space as a low aerial view from the helicopter moves over the village. One hears the high frequency of the helicopter blades cutting through the air, as it merges with the low-frequency sounds coming through the subwoofer in one’s chest. This is echoed in the flapping of wings and screeching of a goshawk trapped in one of the buildings. ³ While the film shows the bird pressing against the windows in an attempt to escape, the rising tension in the sound of a helicopter at take-off generates the feeling of a vertical push.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Balnakiel, girl as she spins on the roof of one of the barracks, 2009, a still from the film.

The film concludes with the girl leaving on the school bus, as the military helicopter circles overhead. The bus stays in the frame, as it were in a ‘state of leaving’ that is not completed. Indeed, the film returns to the initial sequence where the school bus was also in the process of leaving rather than arriving. In the final frame, the first-person perspective gives way to the external observer point of view, showing a fighter plane dropping a bomb on an invisible target with a distant silent explosion as the military monitors the drill from the control tower. For Conway, the image is akin ‘to the moment when an item of knowledge is finally activated deep in long-term memory’ (Conway quoted in Illingworth, 2011: 94). The activation spreads automatically, causing the emergence of other kinds of knowledge and details, ‘and in the case of a traumatic memory it overwhelms current processing sequences, and turns cognition chaotic’ (Conway quoted in Illingworth, 2011: 94). It is a moment when memory erupts out of control, like an explosion.

The visual charting of the village and of the surroundings of Balnakeil through the shifting perspectives of Illingworth’s work foreshadows the contrasting emotions that imbue the landscape and the latency of history that denotes this location. Throughout, the artist repeatedly returns to different locations altering the point of view, angle and focus of the image and hence, the impression that the place creates through its visual ‘re-presentation’ and emotional charge. Balnakeil – the place – is evoked at the interplay of intimacy and distance, as marginal, at an edge that lingers on predetermined co-ordinates that are constantly rehearsed and adjusted and whose significance ambiguously depends on an ever-changing point of view. But how does the fluid shift of point of views in Illingworth’s work implicate notions of memory?

The edge of memory

Illingworth’s careful modulation of perspectives, from aerial views to liminal close-ups that linger on windowpanes and doorways, can be compared to processes of memory formation, in particular, with the function of the point of view in memory retrieval when dealing with visual memories. This regards the transition from sensory perception to the mental ‘re-presentation’ that can constitute a memory, as the sequential framing of experience in discrete pictures that the mind recomposes to recall an event. During retrieval, perspectives within the memory image may vary according to the manipulation of the point of view, namely, an external observer (third-person perspective) and a subjective angle (first-person perspective). Since this shift has consequences on the way in which we experience the memory and its emotional charge, a few considerations on the psychological understanding of the point of view in memory retrieval are helpful for further considering the alternation of visual perspectives in Balnakiel and their significance in relation to Illingworth’s concerns with the psychological and sociopolitical connotations of memory.

The point of view pertains to processes of mental recollection proper to what in psychological terms is referred to as autobiographical memory – the transitory, though stable, mental representation of experience that constitutes the narrative configuration of the self and one’s knowledge (Conway, 2002: 55; Williams et al., 2008). Although not solely, autobiographical memories can be visual and relate with various degrees of abstraction to ‘event-specific perceptual details’ that have entered the structures of memory formation and have become accessible to memory retrieval (Conway, 2002: 56). When recollecting, these event-specific perceptual details constitute the raw material of memory formation. Each time that one remembers, these details reconfigure, anchoring memory in the contingency of the present as pertinent to the here and now. This also regards the position of the self in remembering – in other words – the points of view from which the self perceives herself within and in relation to a recollected visual memory. Such perspective can vary and can be shifted for the same memory from an internal point of view (first person) to an external onlooker position (third person). The shift of points of view nuance the spatial and temporal connotations that compose the memory and its visual features, including colour, proportion, illumination, clarity of details and the like, altering the internal experience of the memory in terms of emotional intensity and vividness (Conway and Loveday, 2010; Rice, 2010: 231–235). ⁴

To remember as if seeing the scene with one’s own eye differs from seeing the same scenario as an external observer, visualising oneself in the image. Such manipulation of the visual perspective in the process of retrieval is presumably related among other factors to whether we are dealing with a recent or old memory, to degrees of self-consciousness in relation to a specific memory, to prospecting discrepancies or tensions between past and present ideas of oneself or cultural assumptions on which self-knowledge is constructed and, most relevant for our discussion, to the affective intensity of the memory. The point of view from which memories are represented to the self bears the feelings of the image: those that are experienced and that are woven in the sensory content of the memory, and those related to the process of retrieval, including its purpose and connectivity to the presence. In memory processes, in fact, emotion depends upon the specificity of the point of view at retrieval ‘in that both retrieving emotional memories and focusing on this emotional aspect of an event produces more first person perspective memories’ (Rice, 2010: 233). The first-person point of view at retrieval elicits a broader range of emotional, physical and psychological information compared to the third-person perspective. The first-person point of view is the ‘default’ perspective of retrieval. The third-person point of view is instead richer in descriptive details and generally pertains to memories whose emotional content is integrated with the autobiographical knowledge that they sustain (Rice, 2010: 232–233). It tends to betray memories whose emotional intensity is very high but not properly interwoven within the framework of autobiographical knowledge.

The observer perspective generally suggests the reprocessing and recoding of a memory. In the case of emotionally disturbing memories, this presumably occurs to protect the self from emotions that would be too destabilising to experience or recognise. As Conway comments,

One result of reprocessed memories is that it becomes more difficult to gain access to aspects of the original memory and so access parts of the memory, which may be affecting consciousness (emotionally or otherwise) but are not accessible to consciousness. (Conway quoted in Illingworth, 2011: 100)

This limits the information originally available through the first-person perspective, rendering the memory problematic, almost a contested territory for the mind. One explanation proposed by Conway is that the memory has been erroneously framed: if we imagine the mental structure of autobiographical knowledge as windows of cognitive and affective sensorial information or conscious imagery, emotionally problematic memories are presumably attached to faulty conceptual frameworks to compensate for the disturbance of their intensity (Conway, 2009: 77–82).

In watching Balnakiel, the viewer is drawn into an immersive space that is physical as well as of the mind, where images like memories form, unfold and dissipate. In the continuum of the film, perspectives and points of view vary as the memory-images that make up our individual and arguably our collective stories, at times intensifying the perceptual features of the work (visual and acoustic), upsetting the balance of seeing and feeling, of perception and cognition with their disturbance. Considered within this framework, the choice of perimeters, such as the aerial view of the coastline or the camera span of concrete walls, thresholds and frames, including the iterated use of views of and from windows, and the attention to the demarcation of perimeters, such as those of the empty barracks or the control tower, is contingent to a knowledge of the place and to the affective intensity that it bears. The metaphor is apt to the ways in which memory operates, whereby the otherwise inaccessible assemblage of the sensory perceptions that constitute each lived moment (episodic memory) is framed into significant imagery (visual and acoustic). In the process, memory also integrates the emotional content that runs through these sensory-perceptive data and that is essential to the salience of a moment and its being shaped into a memory.

The work’s juxtaposition of internal and external perspectives conjures up the antithetical forces that run through Balnakeil, the place. Hence, the landscape features as a medium in which the environment actively interacts with the social, economic and cultural components that characterise it (Mitchell, 1994: 2). Through its complex visual and acoustic landscape, Balnakiel articulates a site of contested appropriation and readings, in which private and collective identities are at stake. Accordingly, Illingworth integrates the beholder in her ‘re-presentation’, as an unstable point of view in an emotionally charged territory of vivid sounds and images that betray contrasting impressions and recollections. Emotions run through, across and in-between the physical and figurative lines that denote the landscape. These visual edges evoke the social and cultural boundaries that define the relations among its inhabitants, partially presented in the film through the disembodied and fragmentary voice-overs and the interference of military radio exchanges. Difficult to align with any specific group, these voices emerge and disappear in the acoustic texture of the work, often in juxtaposition to the images on screen. Their perspectives are ambivalent and mutually contradictory.

From a cognitive standpoint, each group (the local inhabitants, the incomers and the military) perceives and lives the landscape using different conceptual frameworks that are embedded in their personal histories and use of that landscape. According to Conway, the image of Balnakeil that emerges for the inhabitants can be imagined as a ‘personal space partly determined by memory and partly by the environment’ (Conway quoted in Illingworth, 2011: 71). Hence, for the local people, one can suppose some sort of ‘integration between memory and physical space’ (Conway quoted in Illingworth, 2011: 71). Imbued with affecting cues, the landscape is a charged environment of memories and therefore the space upon which their construction of the present and future depends. ‘For the local people the landscape works to create and preserve individual memories that link them into the history of their time in space’ (Conway quoted in Illingworth, 2011: 71). This is less acutely felt by the incomers who live in Balnakeil and have a broader range of references beyond the specificity of the place. For the military, the landscape has instead a utilitarian function since it is tied to the forging of a cognitive framework of skills to be deployed during combat. It is used to create a ‘mental schema’ through the repetition in training of complex sets of actions that the pilots will then transpose to war zones. As Conway observes, ‘The military are disconnected from that specific landscape but not from that “type” of landscape and when they transfer to a site of conflict elsewhere, it is the disconnection which allows routine actions to continue’ (Conway quoted in Illingworth, 2011: 71). In Balnakiel, the cultural and emotional dissociation of the military is epitomised by their presence in the watchtower with maps and instruments that chart and mathematically compute the landscape, as if in an attempt to grasp and turn into knowledge the physical data of the place, while the limits that set them apart from the local communities remain unaccountable.

More generally, throughout the work, the symbolic and physical contestation of territory that historically defines place involves memory as a means of establishing individual and collective trajectories of displacement. Balnakiel renders the emotional disturbance that affects the topographies of place through the visual and acoustic texture of the work and its installation, creating a space that acts like a ‘resonant landscape’ for the visitor. The effect is one of disorientation as if the viewer was made aware of sensory interference and of the uneasiness of perceptual sensation. The screen and the image are conferred a physicality that exceeds the visual to intimate a space that remains uncertain and that can only be charted through experience, by being a body in the installation space. The visitor is not merely a spectator in front of a screen, but he or she is immersed in the volumetric room of the installation – a space that the artist manipulates by claustrophobically compressing or vertiginously shifting its spatial perception through compositions of sound and moving images, thus interfering with the logic of mapping and our rational knowledge of a place.

Balnakiel: place and screen memories

In my stomach. In my chest. Breathless. It’s like being breathless with your heart pounding at the same time. Feeling sick [ ... ] Almost a silent hissing in your head. It is like adrenalin. So wired. So completely wired. And ... and the crazy thing is – not once – was there an incident – for me to fear walking through the village. (Voice-over, Illingworth, Balnakiel, 2009)

What causes the speaker to feel ‘so wired’? What is remembered? And what not? Are we confronted with the recollection of a real event, or with a falsified memory? How can the recollected feelings be explained vis-á-vis the lack of an incident to account for the fear that the voice relates? Was there never an incident that the speaker remembers to justify the feelings or has the incident been removed from his consciousness and hence his accessible memory? The ambiguity and vividness of the recollection are part of the sensory–emotional texture that is contingent to the formation of memories and to the role of emotions in memory processes. The cultural analogy of the moving image is pertinent to one of the first descriptions of the visual perspective in memory retrieval and of its related emotional intensity.

In an article published in 1899, Sigmund Freud introduces the concept of ‘screen memories’ or mnemonic images to explain the specific nature of vivid though apparently trivial memories of early childhood. Rooted in traumatic or highly emotional events, mainly due to fear, shame and physical pain, these memories are predominantly visual and, according to Freud, result from processes of displacement and substitution in which experiences that made a strong impact on the subject, but whose content has been repressed, are indirectly ‘re-presented’ using features of other memories. In his essay, Freud refers to the case study of man who, in analysis, reports the memory of a childhood event that he believes never occurred to him but that yet bears strong impressions of the past. As he observes,

Recollections of this kind, whose values lies in the fact that it represents in the memory impressions and thoughts of a later date whose content is connected with its own by symbolic or similar links, may appropriately be called a screen memory. (Freud, 1899/1953: 316)

Indeed, for Freud, ‘screen memory owes its value as a memory not to its own content but to the relation existing between that content and some other, that has been suppressed’ (Freud, 1899/1953: 320). Freud draws attention to the sensory intensity of the image and the positioning of the subject within the memory as he sees himself as a child with the knowledge of being a child, suggesting a time lapse between the original sensations on which the memory is based and its later plastic formation.

Like in a film of the mind, in Balnakiel, the compounded images of memory aggregate and combine on an ideal screen in a double act of revelation and concealment. The analogy resonates with the cultural context that Balnakiel explores as a site that contends with its own memory of fear and trauma, both individually and collectively. This is the case of the voice-over extract quoted above in which the account of the intense feelings of fear in walking through the village is made deliberately ambiguous as it is layered onto the rolling sequence filmed in the control tower (surveying a 360° view of the landscape). Yet, the voice belongs to one of the incomers. The man evokes how he feels when he walks past a particular place in the nearby village of Durness. For him, the original childhood memory that triggers the fear is not consciously accessible, suggesting the lack of a recallable incident to impute it to.

An attempt to explain this incongruity is the so-called ‘dual-representation theory’, whereby trauma memories are explained as processed in two brain systems that create distinct mental ‘re-presentations’. One of them can be consciously accessed as part of autobiographical memory (verbally accessible memory); the other one is encoded in the situationally accessible memory where sensory information (especially visuo-spatial information) in the form of visual images is stored (Holmes et al., 2004: 4). According to the authors, ‘Information in this system can be accessed automatically by exposure to relevant cues and may be spontaneously re-experienced in the form of detailed visual images, affective responses and emotion-laden flashbacks corresponding to moment of intense arousal during trauma’ (Holmes et al., 2004: 4; Kirmayer et al., 2007; Krans et al., 2010; Leys, 2000). This helps to explain the intrusive experience of the traumatic memory and suggests the affective resonance that the external environment can acquire, as a space loaded with sensations that, as in the case of the man in Balnakiel, trigger the dissociative feelings of a memory that eludes him and remains latent to consciousness. As Cathy Caruth (1996) puts in her discussion of traumatic memories,

Trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature – the way that was precisely not known in the first instance – returns to haunt the survivor later on. (p. 4)

The memory is neither remembered or forgotten, or as Freud (1914/1953) argues about repetition ‘something is “remembered” which could never have been “forgotten” because it was never of any notice – it was never conscious’ (pp. 148–149). Hence, quoting Caruth once more, the subject deals with experiences that are not ‘wholly possessed, fully grasped, or completely remembered events, but more complexly, or partially or ‘missed’ experiences’ that define an inner landscape doomed by repetition and dissociate recollections (Caruth, 1996: 124 n. 14). This produces the latency of the trauma, as something that is liminal and resides at the edges of memory and knowledge.

Conway describes these ‘missed’ experiences in terms of episodic memories that remain visually vivid for the individual, but whose access is only partial, since they have become detached from the conceptual frame that conferred them meaning (Conway quoted in Illingworth, 2011: 78). Clearly belonging to the past, the image is yet disconnected. In order to make sense of it, the subject attaches the visual and emotional material of the memory to another conceptual frame. The result is misleading, causing an interference of sorts. The work renders this through the visual and oral displacement of the incomer’s memory onto the Range Control Tower ambiguously overlapping the incomer’s emotional evocation of memory onto a military factual survey of the landscape. This further disrupts the relation between an individual’s distressing recollection and the menacing atmosphere that pervades the place, intensifying the frisson of past and present fears that run through the work, as the impinging threat that trauma poses to psychic defences.

In this context, the silent bombing at the end of the video, remote and present at the same time, epitomises the contested history of this isolated place and the pervading anxiety, if not terror, that saturates it. The harshness of the weather – ‘most of the time it’s actually a kind of ... a kind of dusk’ says one of the voices; ‘I remember people saying I haven’t been out for forty-two days’ comments another – and the military presence that produces a constant feeling of threat and immanent war – ‘it felt like being under attack’ – conjure the insipient menace of Balnakeil, and the emotional landscape of the film. As for ‘screen memories’, the tension between exposure and concealment manifests in the reciprocity of the visual content of the work and the underlying ‘suppressed’ experience of the place, the historical repository of antithetical perspectives of displacement and belonging to which Illingworth alludes by focusing on the edges that delimit the land, the perimeters of buildings and the thresholds of windows. These boundaries figuratively denote the transitory place of memory at the interface of conscious and non-conscious processes of perception and sensation.

The inner disjunction that is ascribed to traumatic memories but that also clearly appears for screen memories presupposes memories that interfere with the autobiographical unfolding of one’s internal film by intercepting and disturbing its narrative flow with alien and emotionally intense images. Freud alludes to the plasticity of screen memories to account for the visual vividness of the compound imageries that form them. Contemporary cognitive psychology interprets this vividness further, connecting it to the point of view of an external observer who alters the perspective of a memory at retrieval to dissolve or at least contain the ‘threat’ constituted by the emotional charge of the memory. This produces a discrepancy between what is seen and what is felt, as if one were figuratively displaced and drawn into a vertiginous space of conflicting memories, into a liminal space of ‘screened’ fears. In Balnakiel, this space is rendered through the vertical volumes that intercept and disrupt the linear narrative of the film, intimating the surfacing of ‘non-conscious’ overwhelming features that, as Conway argues, are potently disorienting. The introduction of a gap in the narrative flow also creates latency within the visual texture of the film. As in the case of the girl rotating on the roof or of the trapped goshawk, the viewer is caught between the screen and the physical impressions of the surrounding installation space. The experience is deliberately visceral and momentarily destabilises the visitor’s sensorial bearing by affecting the body beyond cognition (Baer, 2002; Bennett, 2005; Huberman, 2008; Luckhurst, 2008: 149–208; Shaviro, 1993; Young, 2000).

One could argue that by including both the internal beholders of the film sequences and the external spectator as inherent to the ideological and visual rendering of a landscape, Illingworth duplicates the intersecting of points of view within and without the screen, engulfing the viewer in the emotional territory of the work and the tension between its sensory intensity and the latent content that subliminally denotes the landscape of Balnakeil as a site of fear. As for a screen memory, it is the relation between the image and its implicit allusions or hidden content, the film and its sensory scoring, the tension between the linear unfolding and the intermission of vertical volumes of images and sounds, the multiple shifting perspectives and the alignment of the spectator with the changing points of view that sustain the analogy of memory and moving images. In the projected space of the installation, the spectator enters the sensory texture of the work and the contrasting mappings of place that the film exposes. Here, the reciprocity of memory and space dynamically articulate the encounter with the natural and social environment of Balnakeil and its multiple significations as a place of memory – a lieu de mémoire in Nora’s terms.

No less than individual autobiographical memory, historical memory is tied to the mutuality of time and space through the circumscribing pressure that the present imposes on the selection, location and construction of the past. This translates for Pierre Nora in the distinction between the milieu de mémoire and the lieu de mémoire. While the former are sites that act as authentic environments of memory through rituals and other practices, lieux de mémoire are places that remind us of the past, bearing traces of something that should be remembered but is mostly forgotten or partially suppressed (Nora, 1989: 7–24; Nora, 1997: 14). Contemporary historical memory is for Nora built on lieux de mémoire at the tenuous boundaries of recollection and oblivion, of places that screen through loose historical traces, the bulk of what remains hidden, forgotten or repressed. History, thus, also presupposes latency and the confrontation with what remains liminal. The metaphors of the edge and of the threshold as the line around which memory spatially becomes in the present a place for the reconstruction and concealment of the past are thus pivotal to the figurative location of Balnakeil at the boundaries of local interests and global spheres of control. It presupposes the spatial plane of memory as a tangible and figurative location of disturbance, where the feeling of ‘being under attack’ ambiguously refers to both the relentlessness of the weather and the military drills.

If, as Peter Sloterdijk (2010) argues, the harmful exploitation of the environment, which is at the basis of 20th century ‘terrorism’, exposes the visibility of the human’s ambience, space is increasingly alienating and ambiguously harmful (Bennett, 2011: 158–171; Huyseen, 2003: 11–29). ‘New weapons of terror are those through which the basic means of survival are made more explicit; new categories of attack are those which expose – in the mode of a bad surprise – new surfaces of vulnerability’ (Sloterdijk, 2010: 29). They seem to define a space without protection open to the insinuating presence of violence, of a fear that cannot be imputed to a ‘specific incident’ but that nonetheless affects the nature of the place and the physicality of the environment. The consequence of this exposure is latency: ‘The long concealed, the unknown, the unconscious, the never-noticed and the imperceptible, were forthwith forced to the level of the manifest, [ ... ]’ (Sloterdijk, 2010: 58). This latency partakes to the historical legacy of Balnakeil as a physical and metaphorical territory of hegemonic control.

The military’s use of the landscape as a utilitarian ‘type’ that functions in the execution of certain tasks signals a projection of memory that it is devoid of emotion and is solely contingent on the future in terms of the repetition of actions. This notion clashes with the controversial militarisation of Balnakeil, epitomised by the barracks. While in Balnakiel the tornadoes fly at close distance from the village according to predetermined patterns, they are at odds with a psychological mapping of the place that contends with what remains hidden, fragmented and unheard: evoked in the dissonance and interference of images and voice-overs. From these disrupted testimonies and multiple perspectives emerges a view of the place in which its seclusion renders it both peripheral and central to international hegemonic concerns. The Cold War outpost intended for the protection against a potential nuclear threat haunts Balnakeil’s identity as the historical counterpart to the natural harshness of the location. The disturbing presence of the neglected and decaying concrete barracks denotes the place inscribing mute traces of the latency of international tensions on which 1950s ecologies of power were articulated. They constitute a site of memory whose significance resonates in the present and in the appropriation of the area as the dislocated terrain of today’s impinging menace of the War on Terror (Mitchell, 2011: 3).

The overarching threat that hangs over Balnakeil never materialises. Its latency, however, affects the transparency of historical memory, the screening of visibility that the places of memory unravel. This is the space of Balnakiel, the room where the place and the film merge. It is like the screen of the ‘re-presentation’ on which memory is enacted and trauma indirectly manifests. This is the place that the spectator inhabits, the point of both convergence and divergence between the subject and the image, the landscape and the observer, the space where event-specific sensory details translate into memories. It is the edge of resonance of the film and place alike. Here, the sensorial palpability of the processes of memory formation and retrieval that the film achieves envelopes the viewer allowing for the analogy of the mind and screen to re-emerge anew and to display new edges of signification.