7/31/2019 Reworthit Dionea Rocha Watt Fin

1/3

WOOLWORTHS

Dionea Rocha Watt

I

In December 2008 Britain's best-loved store, Woolworths, went intoadministration. A nation mourned the loss of this high-street institution1

Loss comes from Old English los, destruction, and can indicate deprivation of apossession or the grief felt after losing something of value. Woolworths was theplace for acquiring not so valuable possessions and by offering such plenty forso little, etched a place in the nations heart.

The loss of something we love triggers mourning, which Sigmund Freuddiscussed in the essay Mourning and Melancholia,2 published in 1917. We mournto deal with the loss. Freud explains this as the work of mourning, a processthat involves an attempt to sever the attachment to the lost object andincludes approaching representations of the lost object from many differentpositions. The work of mourning has both a temporal and a spatial dimension.It is a long and gradual process, performed over time and through memory.Memory is both a looking into the past from a position in the present and theplace where things are remembered as representations. The psychoanalystDarian Leader notes the importance in mourning of selecting representationsfor the construction of a symbolic space, where things can stand for loss and

memory, where representations of the lost object are represented asrepresentations. In the famous example, Marcel Prousts taste of aMadeleine dipped in tea or sight of a cracked paving-stone in Venice acted asconduits for overpowering sequences of feelings, ideas and emotions linked toa lost love.3

For so many, the attachment to Woolworths goes back to childhood, tomemories of picnmix sweets, of toys and games. Sweet memories of enteringa space where little pocket money was in inverse proportion to the excitementof their first shopping experience. For adults, the store was often the place togo for everyday items, the mundane that nevertheless offered the comfort ofthe familiar. Woolworths had become, in effect, a symbolic space, augmented

by its demise. A place of nostalgia, of remembering and re-telling stories,even, or especially, for those who had not been there in years. In a strange

1http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00jnkg8 (last accessed 04 March 2010).2Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia (1917), in The Standard Edition of theComplete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, Trans. James Strachey,London: Hogarth, 1958, pp. 237-58.3Darian Leader, The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression, London:Penguin, 2008, p. 103.

7/31/2019 Reworthit Dionea Rocha Watt Fin

2/3

way, it had already been lost. Or perhaps it was never there, as suggested bySusan Stewarts description of nostalgic narrative in her book On Longing:

By the narrative process of nostalgic reconstruction the present is denied andthe past takes on an authenticity of being, an authenticity which, ironically, it

can achieve only through narrative Nostalgia, like any form of narrative, isalways ideological: the past it seeks has never existed except as narrative, andhence, always absent, that past continually threatens to reproduce itself as afelt lack.4

Perhaps, the mourning was not so much for Woolworths, but for everything wehave lost, including childhood itself.

II

Loss unfolds itself in time and space. It is sensed for what is no longerpossessed, what is not seen, what is not present, what is absent. Therecognition of loss is brought about by the registration of the absence of whatonce was there or what will not be there at some point. The imminent absenceof Woolworths from the high street made its loss felt, and triggered theReworthit! project a creative response to the loss of a store of material andimmaterial goods; a source of cheap raw materials and objects, and ofmemories.

Psychoanalysts have examined the link between loss and creativity. HannaSegal, for example, develops Melanie Kleins ideas about symbols and writesthat loss gives rise to symbol formation:

a creative work involving the pain and the whole work of mourning. Ifpsychic reality is experienced and differentiated from external reality, thesymbol is differentiated from the object; it is felt to be created by the self andcan be freely used by the self.5

The artists taking part in this project selected objects from the dwindling stockof their local Woolworths and transformed them into symbols of memory andloss, and of the possibility of renewal. It is interesting to note that thecommonly held notion that using found objects gives them a new lease of lifeimplies, in a veiled way, that they are already dead. If the work of mourning

necessitates a second killing, a symbolic laying to rest,6

perhaps usingfound objects is a kind of killing. A killing of the dead.

4Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir,the Collection. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993, p.23.5 Hanna Segal, A Psychoanalytic Contribution to Aesthetics, International Journal of

Psychoanalysis, 1952, quoted in Segal, Hanna, Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein, London:

The Institute of Psycho-analysis and Karnac Books, 1988, p. 76.6Darian Leader, op. cit., p. 117.

7/31/2019 Reworthit Dionea Rocha Watt Fin

3/3

According to Freud, when the work of mourning has been accomplishedthe ego will have succeeded in freeing its libido from the lost object.7 Thissuggests that the ego will be free to form new attachments. By making work inresponse to the demise of Woolworths, the artists participating in Reworthit!have created new objects to be loved, sometimes tinged with melancholia,

sometimes playful. Demonstrating, above all, the ability to create somethingout of loss.

7 Sigmund Freud, op. cit., p. 252.