My research project retrieves and revalues “subjugated knowledges” (Foucault 1980 p.81) of Scottish Gypsy Travellers through critical archival interventions, place-based approaches, experimental filmmaking and gleaning practices. In so doing, it adds to urgent scholarly work addressing the cultural ramifications of colonial legacies which actively erase Indigenous and local knowledge systems, their cultural heritage, and collective identity. My project pays homage to an absent history and a silenced ancestral sonic lifeworld through “a ritual of archival… reclamation” (Brooks 2021, p.376).

My research is based on the Scottish Gypsy Traveller sound archives located at the School of Scottish Studies in Edinburgh. I knew nothing at all about this vibrant oral tradition before starting my research. The project emerged in my life as a form of haunting and grew out of my family’s denial of their traveller genealogy. It was considered a shameful secret and kept hidden for two generations. Placing this lost bloodline at the heart of my research has enabled me to think about haunting as a search for context about the past, and my wanting to understand the forces of secrecy and shame that had kept this aspect of history hidden for so long from me.  

Susan Morrison writes, “Waste in all periods constitutes “simultaneously civilization’s other . . . as well as the trace or remainder of civilization,” and is liminal, hybrid, and socially specific” (2015 p.9). My research recognises and repurposes waste and foregrounds its paradoxical position, one that is weaponised against Scottish Gypsy Travellers and simultaneously used as a tool of survivance. Gypsy Travellers are a “people dedicated to making sure nothing goes to waste” (Curtis 2021 p.107), for whom foraging, scavenging, gleaning and mending have been survival strategies across the ages. This notion forms a useful method in the development and retuning of my own new ways of knowing and artmaking through collecting and curatorial processes and skill-building.  I have adopted strategies of a ‘derelict figure’—the rag and bone collector— to combine a repurposing of audio archival detritus, alongside found footage debris so that they may, as Walter Benjamin noted, “come into their own” through their performative powers (2002 p.460). Borrowing from the Nabakovian concept of ‘the dream life of debris’, I want to demonstrate the potential afterlives of digital readymades through the democratisation of access to digital archival materials. This makes the work of revivifying possible. It is a working method that simultaneously transforms quality into accessibility and “represents a tradition of inventions rather than an invention of tradition”. 

Through my ongoing research, I am developing a practice of textual accumulation as described by Katherine McKittrick (2021) that involves a creative repurposing and meandering between ‘miscellanea’ — objects/fragments of images, songs, stories, testimonies and places. I am re-sounding gaps, slippages, vocal hesitations, and stumblings, to draw out these sonic reverberations in order to dismantle, reassemble, and revalue them. Seeking ‘haunted’ sonic traces, I disorientate and defamiliarise sounds as acoustic registers of Scottish Gypsy Traveller insurrection and empowerment.