Leslie Corbay

Forced Migration: Ghosts of Familial Memory

In Forced Migration: Ghosts of Familial Memory, I create a haunted archive through performance and recorded conversations with my mother and grandfather. Our conversations focus on my ancestors’ forced migration to Canada as children in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries. Beginning in 1618, the United Kingdom shipped as many as 150,000 children to the colonies; I create a haunted archive of sound recordings to tell stories of my ancestors’ migrations – Joseph Hart, Louisa Hart, and Eleanor Copeland – while tracing the impact of these stories through my own embodied and performative response. Performances are recorded using video and still photography, and my mother and grandfather’s stories are accentuated through collected sound. This haunted archive contends with the official adoption records of my ancestors’ migration by highlighting the storytelling voices of my mother and grandfather. My archive lives in a website which pairs performance documentation with audio recordings. I use queer and hauntological theory to reflect on my experience as a haunted archivist in the creation of a sound and performative archive.

 2022