Traer a la Memoria

“What do those artists do who do not use the visual potential of the media industry to produce added commercial value, but rather use the screen as a free zone in which to experiment?” (Fricke, 1999)

As you grow older, your childhood memories become increasingly blurry and distant. Broken toys, forgotten games and your resistance to change make the exercise of memory towards simpler times increasingly difficult.

It is impossible to prevent the present from slipping through your hands; With each passing day, one detail goes with it and your mind replaces it with another. You think about everything you experienced back then, and everything you lost: the dollhouse, the teddy bear you slept with and all your hidden toys. Now they are nothing more than distant memories of what you once had. But are you completely sure that your memories are intact over time? Can you describe them with certainty?

Technical, aesthetic and conceptual development

The texts proposed in class helped me see this work in a more technical way, so to speak. Although my strong point was always working conceptually, it helped me organize my ideas better. On this occasion, I certainly had many more freedoms, but again I found myself in a new conflict; justify the existence of my work.

“Art, on the other hand, is not art if it is done well (…) “Creating values” is intervening in the personal history of the viewer. Creating a taste, giving it a new look… That has, or has had, its equivalence in the artist: from the moment art stops proposing itself as the production of beautiful, artisanal objects, it passes into the dimension of the unmade” (César, 2016).

How can I base the sensitivity of the system of a work, if not from the emotionally intuitive, familiar? What parameters define the conceptual nature of my work, and therefore its existence? First it was a poem, I thought about reciting a release from my adolescence and proposing a personal narrative. But what was left of that narrative?

That’s when I thought about the absence of memory, that blank space that our minds tend to fill in and alter. It seemed like a good idea to play with the concept of memory and the universal experience of growing up, since my main intention was to work in the most abstract way possible on an already used concept.

“This is how the machine starts to work: it becomes necessary to reproduce, the artist responds with his own need to hide something from the reproduction, the reproduction is perfected so that nothing is hidden from it… And that race, rushing towards the present moment, is rightly called “Contemporary."" (César, 2016)

I could safely say that this work is nothing more than a faithful reproduction of an aesthetic frequented on Pinterest, with photographs of past times intervened and phrases written on top. I could also have started the text by saying that this photograph is my authorship, and explain the way in which each detail was intentional, how the alteration of the photograph itself each time they try to generate a line within it.

I could even talk about what it means to me to respond to my name, but this play has nothing to do with that. But with you.

So tell me, do you still remember your face?

Literature AIRA, César. ([2013], 2016). “Sobre el arte contemporáneo” en Sobre el arte contemporáneo. Buenos Aires: Literatura Random House, pp. 5-6.

FRICKE, Christiane. (1999). “Nuevos Medios”. En “AAVV. Arte de siglo XX. Vol. II. München: Taschen, pp. 615