Reterritorialization and Whispers From the Walls
According to Kellie Jones, reterritorialization involves ‘recapturing one’s (combined and various) history, much of which has been dismissed as an insignificant footnote to the dominant culture’. In this essay, I bring artist and photography scholar Deborah Willis’s use of Jones’s concept of reterritorialization to bear on Whispers from the Walls, an installation that Whitfield Lovell created at the University of North Texas Art Gallery in 1999. Chiefly, I explore what kinds and whose histories Whispers from the Walls engaged. In particular, I emphasize contributions that the photographs Lovell studied to create the installation and the objects he included therein made to recovering histories.