The Long Goodbye, a Conversation across a Century

Description of The Long Good-bye: a Great War Centenary Project
 sponsored by the Exeter Annual Award

Beginning: March 2014 (Get involved!)
Rollout date: 4 August 2014

Exeter, Devon, UK.

Welcome to The Long Goodbye, another eXegesis production. eXegesis is the international collective of artists that include, Dr. Jaime Robles (Creative Writing, The Dark Lyric, Hoard (Shearsman 2013)), Mike Rose-Steel (PhD Researcher, Creative Writing, The Ineffable), and SMSteele (PhD Researcher, The Art of Witness: Truth, Process and Form in the Great War Narrative, Canadian war artist 2008-2010). eXegesis is the collective who have brought you the internationally recognized Wall of Miracles, 51 Shades of Black and Blue, a poetry cabaret, and most recently, The Wittgenstein Vector. We invite you to join The Long Good-bye. Please contact us through this website and we'll tell you how you or your group can get involved!

The 4^th August 2014 marks the centenary of the Great War. While there will be many memorials and appropriately sombre remembrances of the significant loss and tragedy of the war, eXegesis proposes to “re-voice” the war narrative through a large-scale installation of love letters to those who left their homes to serve. Those who left, includes army, navy, air force and support trades, as well as munitions workers (many women), land army, Volunteer Aid Detachment Workers VADs, professional nurses, First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANYs), Ambulance Corps workers (many of them Quakers), chaplains, medics, and many, many others. For this project we shall also include those who contributed in other ways. These could be the children who collected blackberries for soldiers' jam, and eggs for the war effort, or the sphagnum moss gatherers from up in the moors whose moss was used for bandages., or wheelwrights, veterinarians, football teams -  there were sports battalions  who all gave, or left. But this was not a European engagement only, people from all around the world coped and contributed - a million soldiers from India, tens of thousands from Africa, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Jamaica, Morocco, China… We invite participants from the "other" side too, your words are worthy and welcome to us... the voices of Germany, Hungary, Austria… and we welcome words to those who felt they could not for moral or religious reasons participate.

Titled The Long Goodbye (TLG), this installation proposes to present for the public, love letters to those who left for the Great War. TLG will combine reproduced archival material such as postcards, diary pages, medical reports, or photographs, with a handwritten, contemporary response—poetic or prose—on the other side of the letter, as a “conversation” across the century. The physical objects, small and quietly unobtrusive—echoing leaving and absence—will emulate the formats available during the war years, will be interactive (with a digital signature co-located to an audio reading of the work done by the university’s drama students), and will be designed to be bio-degradable—drawing on eXegesis’ experience with the earlier Wall of Miracles (2012), and the Wittgenstein Vector installations. Local historian Richard Batten, PhD (History) whose research focuses on Devon and the Great War, will advise the project and assure its historical integrity.

The installation will begin to be hung on 4 August 2014, in the former stables of the university—representing the “everyman” who enlisted—and will slowly roll-out from this site, enacting a journey to war, with an end-point exhibit at, or near, the rail station, the point of departure for the Front and other sites of war work. The route of this installation will encourage the reader to imagine taking the same route and will potentially bring a physical and more immediate perspective to the centenary. Ideally, other community sites would participate in the roll-out, including smaller villages throughout Devon, whose sons and daughters said “Goodbye” a century ago.

In partnership with the University of Exeter, the City of Exeter, the schools, and community groups throughout, eXegesis will co-ordinate a series of workshops on writing and the crafting of a set template (for uniformity of aesthetic outcome) of letters, and will curate and install the exhibit. There are plans for a publication and formal exhibit as well, with the potential to engage the drama department in readings and possible dramatic staging of the letters.

The Long Goodbye aims to re-embody the farewells of so long ago and we recognize the importance of memory and recognition to those who leave the safety and comfort of home. This holds true especially for those who return and cannot begin to describe to their loved ones where they have been and what they have seen and done.

The Long Goodbye then, is an opportunity for the university community and the community at large to engage in historical research and imagination, and make a significant, heartfelt and knowledgeable contribution to Exeter’s Great War Centenary.