Rebecca Holderness and Andrew Miller
Sopre Mare
The “Sopre Mare” installation reflects a journey between the material and the immaterial. For Rebecca Holderness, “digital” conjures up an image of immaterial space. But that space is, for her, inhabited deeply with thought, image, feeling – and every other thing. Yet these important and meaningful things are immaterial. The Look Here! project inspired Holderness to create a story that might or might not be true from digital and material resources and research.
According to Holderness, a house is also material and immaterial. Ideas of how it should be built are constructed into the house itself. When empty, the house becomes the container for history. History is immaterial. But it leaves traces. What then is a digital collection but an immaterial record of the material traces that create a history? The installation project involved creating a history that might inhabit the house. Research using the UWM Libraries’ Digital Collections and Special Collections contributed to the creation of pieces of the possible story. The rest arose from contacts and experiences in that immaterial digital space. Playwrights were invited to digitally correspond with one and another as people who did, or might have, lived in this house. They include the architect David Adler and the lady of the house Agnes Smith, alongside other fictional characters. While David and Agnes were real people, the story Holderness and others create for them comes from those digital remnants. Many of the artists working on this project only know each other in digital, imaginative space. Digitized items from the UWM Libraries’ Archives, Special Collections, and American Geographical Society Library (AGSL)--as well as materials housed at the Art Institute of Chicago’s Library—all contributed to the inspiration for the project. As this is a story of travel, Holderness was particularly interested in AGSL’s global photograph collections and in postcards from the Archives’ “Greetings from Milwaukee” digital collection.
“Most of all I think an empty house has all the romance of a half understood language. What secrets does the house conceal? What private conversations can it reveal? And all of it we invite you to complete in your own imagination. I invite you to listen to the house so that you can now become the material container for a new immaterial story.”
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