Reviewing the Aftermath Project (2013-2014) in the Light of Affect Theory

Abstract

The Aftermath Project (2013-14) aims at offering insights into comparable experiences of displacement and trauma in times of conflict through an assemblage of online media as well as exhibits throughout Ireland. This contribution suggests that the project goes beyond asserting the sole prism of the Irish Troubles by considering other, more recent experiences of migration to Ireland. As a complex object that is more than what it looks like, I argue that it addresses the interaction between the auto-ethnographic subject, the camera’s eye and the critic’s, and the role of the network in the circulation and perception of other people’s affects and of one’s own. To do so, I propose to implement Lisa Blackman’s methodology in order to “construct a material-semiotic-affective apparatus that reorients the perception towards new ways of seeing hearing, listening, and feeling”.