Page - 20 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 4/2018

20 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 4 2o18 Katy Beinart | Khlebosolny/Bread and Salt vate realms relate back to the wider society and culture we exist in? Therefore, an important aspect for Rebecca’s and my journey was to develop our work with visibility and to make specific acts or rituals that would allow us to mark the past while acknowledging the choices of our family to leave that past behind. The difficult relationship that can exist between past and present when certain aspects of the past do not want to be acknowledged is something I seek to explore in this article. In order to reflect on this further, I include short texts written at the time of making the artworks (which we wrote as part of an online blog15) alongside later reflective writing that brings in relevant theory to understand the meaning of the artworks, so that within the text there is a layering of voices from different moments in time. Performing rituals in sites of our family history gives voice to the past in the present, allow- ing what Karen Till has termed ‘spectral traces’16 to resurface, and past generations to be heard in the here and now. This article describes our trip in search of the personal absences within our family story. On the trip, rituals and practices are developed which become a means to remem- ber, and to embody absence; the materials of bread and salt become a means to fill absences, and to embody different kinds of meaning. Our bodies become a means to establish a link to the past, making forms of memorialisation which are ephemeral and transient. The journey to Eastern Europe In order to trail our family’s migrations, we planned to travel as much as possible over land and by sea, but not to stick exactly to our family’s routes. This was for several reasons: we did not know their exact routes; we were re-enacting multiple journeys by family members; and it was not always possible to access the same routes they had taken (for example, sea travel from Hamburg to Hull no longer operated). We therefore planned to travel overland to Hamburg (where the studio photographs of our great- great-grandmother Anne were taken), before taking a fer- ry from nearby Kiel to Klaipeda in Lithuania. We would 15 Beinart, Katy and Rebecca, Origination (blog), (2008-12). Project Blog at AN Artists Talking, <https://www.a-n. co.uk/blogs/origination/> 16 Karen Till and Julian Jonker, ‘Mapping and excavating spectral traces in post-apartheid Cape Town’, Memory Studies September 2009 vol. 2 no. 3, pp. 303-335. Figure 3: Map of route. Source: author.