GHOST SHANTY

TEAMMATES: SEAN HIGGINS, LAUREN FLEMING, PERRI KINSMAN, TYLER MACNEAL, & SAM CLAUSEN

The Ghost Shanty held a collection of artifacts from across the region selected to express the diverse character of a vernacular Minnesota experience. Visitors were encouraged to interact with, translate, interpret, or simply ignore the hanging objects.

With any of the art materials provided, visitors used the shanty walls as a canvas to draw their own artifact, leaving a trace of their Minnesota. At the end of each weekend, the artwork was covered by fresh layers of paper. All the existing contributions became ghosts -- impressions attesting to a dynamic and undefinable Minnesota.

This type of mapping of historical experience can create a compelling legibility of layers, traces of much larger system of cultural memory. The marks left on the walls of the shanty represent an embodied experience, much more subjective and experiential. The choice of participatory narrative invites subjective positions about that place.

Suddenly the experience becomes much more specific about the person, who they are, and what they feel.