Barber, F., 2024.

Women in Long Kesh/Maze prison: We Were There (2014), memory and visuality

This essay focuses on issues raised by the film We Were There: The Women of Long Kesh / The Maze Prison directed by Laura Aguiar using the resources of the Prison Memory Archive (PMA) now held by the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland. As a former Art History tutor for the Open University in Northern Ireland I taught several students in the prison during the late 1980s-early 1990s. What I learned from that experience had a profound effect not only on my understanding of the effects of political conflict in Northern Ireland, but on my knowledge of the role of vision and visuality within a gendered environment. My account of this period, recorded during a visit to the former prison in 2007, became part of the Archive's holdings. An edited version was selected for inclusion in We Were There. Reflection on both my involvement with the film and the PMA becomes a a catalyst for an autoethnographic exploration of a gendered encounter with the Maze prison: what it was like, as a woman, to briefly inhabit these institutional spaces, and how their visualisation challenges existing narratives around the gendering of conflict and postconflict experience.