Documenting Disappearance

Abstract

This article presents a one-day project documenting the empty house of folklorists Iona and Peter Opie. This house was both a family home and an archive of international importance. It contained an extensive archive of childhood ephemera, folkloric artefacts, and a private toy museum. When this one project was conducted, this private ‘research laboratory’ was in a state of near dilapidation, waiting for the collections to be re-housed. Framed around first-person, present-tense notes and photographs taken over the course of one day, this article presents a phenomenological study of the experience of being alone in the Opie house on the winter solstice, 2018. Drawing on the critical vocabulary of Surrealism, and particularly James Clifford's notion of ‘ethnographic surrealism’, it presents a survey of the Opie house from the complicated perspective of a relative, researcher and practitioner. In doing so, it explores the latent ‘Surrealism’; of the Opies' house and of their own work. It also explores the possibilities of ‘surrealist ethnography’ as a form of engaged observational practice. This critical perspective, it argues, allows for navigation between a number of tensions: between personal and private writing, domestic and research environments, research and practice, memory and loss.

Notes

1 See, for example, Mass-Observation’s survey of the 1937 Royal Coronation day, anthologized in their book May the Twelfth (1938).