Josephine Machon ---- Immersed in Illusion, Haunted by History: Marisa Carnesky’s Ghost Train

Immersed in Illusion, Haunted by History: Marisa Carnesky’s Ghost Train

Josephine Machon

Abstract

Figure 1: Marisa Carnesky’s Ghost Train Blackpool Winter Gardens, Pleasure Beach Promenade, UK, 2011. Image copyright courtesy of Marisa Carnesky.

In this chapter I discuss how Marisa Carnesky’s Ghost Train (2004, 2008-), an immersive and truly ‘sensational’ populist performance event, accentuates the spectral potential of such rides and plays with the multifarious possibilities of ‘haunting the imagination’ that the form offers when employed as an artistic intervention. I will consider specifically how she exploits the unheimlich (literally, ‘unhomely’; uncanny or eerie) aspect of illusion, the visceral impact of fairground rides and the affective possibilities of ‘the haunted house’, to instil an immediate, live and ‘lived’ – thus ‘live(d)’ - response in the audience-participants; specifically to the historical, the mythologised, the political and the personal narratives of displaced and sex-trafficked women from recent history.

The discussion draws on (syn)aesthetic analysis (Machon, 2009, 2011), a recent manifesto for ‘New Magic as Contemporary Art’, (various, Straada, 2010) and Jacques Derrida’s ideas around ‘hauntology’ (2006), to illustrate how Carnesky’s idiosyncratic fusion of disciplines across theatre, cabaret, film and fairground, extends forms of representation and invites the audience to experience the historical ‘identities’ of silenced, migrant women across the 20^th and 21^st centuries by using aspects of illusion as ghostly apparition, to sensual and metaphorical ends; gendered historiographies that are felt as much as intellectually understood. Carnesky’s Ghost Train takes a journey through the uncanny time-place continuum of the historical, the imaginative, the architectural and the durational to establish a paranormal artistic activity that makes manifest these ‘lost’ lives.

Figure 2: Marisa Carnesky. Publicity image for Marisa Carnesky’s Ghost Train, 2008. Photo Credit Marcus Ahmad.  Image copyright courtesy Marisa Carnesky.