Six Memories I
Never Had
2012 | VIDEO SCULPTURE: PROJECTION MAPPING ONTO SIX PLEXI-GLASS CUBES, FOUND FOOTAGE | VARIABLE DIMENSIONS | 10:08" LOOP | SOUND BY SEBASTIÁN VERGARA
The present is permeated by the past through memories, experiences, and the unconscious that reorganized themselves in relation with the present events, creating a narrative of our lives under the light of future expectations. Hence, past, present, and future coexist.
Photography is the compression of the present and the resistant to leave the moment in the past, without ensuring its return. Photography and film capture the moment, fixate it, but at the same time, they take it out of time turning it into subject of new narratives, endowing it whit a new temporal logic, a new relationship with the autobiographical time.
I believe that images reveal the hidden processes by which humanity leaves the traces of its existence and that every picture becomes a fragment of an irretrievable past. The archive appears then as a potentially successful means of accessing what has been lost, reconstructing the past, putting together all these fragments through methods of order and categorization to be display as reliques. But those methods of order and structure, recollection and repetition, may become system of passive latency, rather tan a dimensión of active remembering.
In “Six memories I never had” I propose/present an inventory that activates the archive – a re-appropriation of anonymous stories – while recognizing a system in which the function of the past is not determined by its status as unequivocal event, but where its meaning is rather constituted retroactively and rearranged at every point in time. In the functioning of remembering the value of the past is not that of truth but of desire Driven by desire, memory allows for both preservation and erasure, and memory objects can be manipulated to facilitate new versions of the past.
In this video sculpture, I’m working with found home-movies, which create a new narrative through montage and juxtaposition. Images are projected on a structure made with transparent plexi-glass cubes that seem to contain the images. Each cube is autonomous and at the same time part of a whole. In this way, memory and the archive are deconstructed and re-articulated, allowing all the moments to coexist in an intimate web of space and time.
