Memoriamatic
Two years ago, I discovered that my father had begun to catalogue all our old slides with meticulous precision, recording dates and contents of each photo in two old notebooks.
When I got my hands on them and started to read, memories that I had removed resurfaced and I had to take note of the fact that many things I thought I remembered perfectly were actually wrong.
A sense of alienating familiarity appeared looking at those photographs that had nothing to do with me personally, but that portrayed my father in his life before my birth.
The reflection that ensued, led to the birth of Memoriamatic, an installation project that explores the theme of memory and questions the capacity of our mind to create and destroy the reality that surrounds us.
Using the medium of photography, which quintessentially lends itself to the ambiguity of "true" and "false", I built false memories - family pictures representing the life of a person, slides of events that may have occurred or that we desired - driven by my need to answer a question: can we shape our present by "tricking" the brain, by altering the past?
The photograph, drawing on common imagery from the family album and snapshots, becomes the metaphor of our genetic make-up, both of what we inherit in a more or less conscious way, and of what we can modify: an accumulation of true and false memories, perceptions and events which we can subject to active, long-lasting and paradoxically "real" manipulation.
Each photograph presented in this project is a real old photo taken from my family album, scanned and modified to recreate a possible but false memory. Then, I re-photographed the photos I made to have real slides that couldn't be distinguished from the original ones. The project is presented as an installation in which the viewer can take the slides and project them with an old projector or observe them with the help of an hand lens, to induce a feeling of familiarity.
The slides processed are presented to the viewer as small windows looking into our inner world, to which you are invited to immerse yourselves to find out what is true and what is not or to decide that the question does not really matter after all.
When I got my hands on them and started to read, memories that I had removed resurfaced and I had to take note of the fact that many things I thought I remembered perfectly were actually wrong.
A sense of alienating familiarity appeared looking at those photographs that had nothing to do with me personally, but that portrayed my father in his life before my birth.
The reflection that ensued, led to the birth of Memoriamatic, an installation project that explores the theme of memory and questions the capacity of our mind to create and destroy the reality that surrounds us.
Using the medium of photography, which quintessentially lends itself to the ambiguity of "true" and "false", I built false memories - family pictures representing the life of a person, slides of events that may have occurred or that we desired - driven by my need to answer a question: can we shape our present by "tricking" the brain, by altering the past?
The photograph, drawing on common imagery from the family album and snapshots, becomes the metaphor of our genetic make-up, both of what we inherit in a more or less conscious way, and of what we can modify: an accumulation of true and false memories, perceptions and events which we can subject to active, long-lasting and paradoxically "real" manipulation.
Each photograph presented in this project is a real old photo taken from my family album, scanned and modified to recreate a possible but false memory. Then, I re-photographed the photos I made to have real slides that couldn't be distinguished from the original ones. The project is presented as an installation in which the viewer can take the slides and project them with an old projector or observe them with the help of an hand lens, to induce a feeling of familiarity.
The slides processed are presented to the viewer as small windows looking into our inner world, to which you are invited to immerse yourselves to find out what is true and what is not or to decide that the question does not really matter after all.
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