Calling up Annie Moore

Figures 1-3
Susan Kelly

We see a woman clothed in a late-nineteenth-century dress coat and a wide-brimmed hat. She sits on a black swivel chair with wheels. On the floor next to her are a small bag and an electric candle that shines when the surrounding environment is dark and fades out when the room gets brighter. She faces the wall onto which she projects slides. The images are mostly of her own bronze portrait sculpture.





Figures 4 and 5

Annie Moore was the first immigrant processed through the Ellis Island Immigration Station when it opened in 1892. She presents us with the slide show of her trip. She appears through the medium of her contemporary double who uses spiritual devices such as magic lanterns, photographs, slide projectors, and videos to conjure her in what seems to be real time. She repeats the story from the guidebook. She repeats the story from the official Ellis Island National Monument guidebook in the first person. She repeats the story from the plaque on the pedestal beneath her. She repeats the story from the plaque in the first person. She goes on to repeat the story from her photo caption, the plaque in Cork, and the guidebook from the Cobh Harbor Heritage Center in the same manner. After a chance encounter with the bronze portrait sculpture of Annie Moore at the Ellis Island Immigration Museum in 1998, we developed this project initially to trace some of the buried histories of immigration to the United States. Extensive research into Annie Moore's life turned up archival documents, guidebooks, commemorative plaques, and photo captions that endlessly restated the same facts of her arrival. The figure of Annie Moore disappeared in a series of dead ends, gaps, and ellipses within an archive that represents an Irish immigrant woman as an exemplary U.S. citizen. The tautological structure of the archive reinforces a systematic amnesia of the social and historical conditions that led to Moore's arrival and eventual assimilation. Using several methods to "call up" Annie Moore, we trace the radical discontinuities between early immigrant histories and the social conditions of non-European immigrants dwelling in the contemporary United States and Ireland.

Calling Up Annie Moore was originally conceptualized in 1998 as a mixed-media installation, combining slide projections of archival photographs, video projection, and live performance. Through a palimpsest of slide and video documentation—of found archival photographs from the National Park Service archives and the vast corporate photo bank of Corbis—and their subsequent reincorporation into the installation, the overall piece worked to reveal the technical structure of Annie Moore's archive.

Jacques Derrida (1996: 1) contends in Archive Fever that the word archive means both beginning and command. In this piece, we examine how this double sense of commencement and legislation embedded in the word archive might be used to trace a different way of understanding the histories of Irish immigration and the moment of arrival in the so-called New World. Derrida (1996: 16-17) comments that the technical structure that allows one to "archive an archive" also determines the "archivable content" and its very coming into existence. This archivization produces as much as it records (Derrida 1996: 17). Annie Moore is known to us simply because she was the first immigrant to pass through Ellis Island on the day it opened. The predetermined technical structure of archivization into which Annie Moore literally walks is what produces her public existence. By working with an "archivable concept of the archive" (Derrida 1996: 36) and tracing the process whereby this event comes into being, we hope to open a different relationship with the future.





Figures 6 and 7

My name is Annie Moore and this is my holiday slide show. What a potent mixture of excitement and apprehension I must have felt as a fifteen-year-old girl from Ireland when I descended the gangplank of the steamship...