Introduction

This chapter considers the film recording of stories from a conflicted past in a contested present that make up the Prisons Memory Archive (PMA), a collection of audiovisual walk-and-talk recordings at the locations of the Maze and Long Kesh Prison, which held male prisoners, and Armagh Gaol, which held mostly female prisoners. Both prisons operated during the period of political conflict, sometimes known as the Troubles, during the last third of the twentieth century in the North of Ireland. I initiated the project and was involved from research through production to exhibition and have written elsewhere about many aspects of this project.

With the North of Ireland emerging out of violence, there is a general, but not yet officially sanctioned, consensus that storytelling can be one of the ways of addressing the legacy of the conflict in the present. The Northern Ireland Victims Commissioner's We Will Remember Them (1998), the Report of the Consultative Group on the Past (2009), the Hass-O’Sullivan Report (2014), and the Stormont House Agreement (2014), all established by the state, call for oral history/storytelling as part of a range of recommendations requiring government support, yet none have been implemented since the signing of the Belfast Agreement in 1998 which consolidated ceasefires by opposing military groups. The PMA is just one of the many initiatives that have addressed this vacuum and been produced by civic and academic communities as part of attempts to find ways to come to terms with our violent past. Brandon Hamber and Grainne Kelly confirm, ‘To date, the most widespread mechanism for “dealing with the past” has been unofficial, decentralized storytelling initiatives.’

The PMA project established early on the need to address the political and psychic sensitivities at work in such contentious locations for both participants and viewers. Ethical protocols of co-ownership, inclusivity and life storytelling were employed in order to address concerns about remembering experiences from a conflict that is within living memory and that continues to produce political instability and occasional spasms of violence. An illustration of ongoing contention can be found with the decision, after initial agreement by the main political parties, to withdraw the proposal to construct a Peace Building and Conflict Resolution Centre at the Maze and Long Kesh site, designed by the renowned architect Daniel Libeskind, with the offer of 18 million Euro from the European Union.