In his novel The Emigrants, W.G. Sebald memorably draws upon his own experiences of Manchester to evoke a walk along the Manchester Ship Canal into Salford. The encounters with the built environment he details upon the way develop into an affective topography of the industrial vista. This episode will form the basis for Victoria Lem's works for Ruinous Recollections. Vic photographs post-industrial ruins, uncovering ghostly remnants of preserved memory, often adding extra layers of palimpsestuous reading to her artefacts by using a time-based pin hole camera techniques and by making spectral fragmented screen prints of the images she captures - the dramatic photograph above is from a series Vic took at Barnes Hospital. Re-tracing the footsteps of Sebald, Vic will add her own memories and fictions to the city.
