Urbanautica

TO SCULPT THE BUILDINGS OF MEMORY

by Steve Bisson

Photography is memory, fragments of the visible. The memory is present, or an actualization of the past. A printed photograph, on the other hand, is an objective representation of what was. We can interpret it, comment on it, build stories, especially in words, but the image is and remains. It may fade, turn yellow, like a rock painting eroded by time, but it remains true to itself. Like a stone that is placed to leave a door open or slightly ajar, towards the path from which we come. A possibility that we can take or not. Like it or not. The glimmer is there. The photo is indifferent to our purposes. As is the tool we use to achieve it. I will try to develop this consideration starting from some thesis projects taken from the 2023 edition of Blurring the Lines which focus on the definition of memory, delving into its meanings and roles.

Alexander Sharr (graduated from the School of Modern Photography DOCDOCDOC, Russia) measures his childhood memories, starting from a photo. "In an old photo from a family album, I am in a striped sweater with a cat in my arms and out of focus. Focus is on the calendar behind me — with peacocks and flowers — for 1995 and 1996. So I am about nine years old, and the photo was taken during the summer school holidays in the village of Kinelahta." Sharr says not to remember much from that time, only a few things: a red horse on wheels, how it neighs when you pull the cable; plastic palm trees with bananas and monkeys; dried pike head, my grandfather’s fishing trophy. I remember how my father and I went fishing on the lake and, scooping up water in my boots, walked home. I remember the smell of the forest I walked through and the blueberry lips at the end of the walk."

After the outbreak of the war, Sharr decided to go to Kinelahta again as an escape from what is happening, an escape from the crowd, an attempt to forget myself in the memories of a carefree childhood. Memories as a refuge. A concrete refuge in the dramatic uncertainty of the present. In the impotence of the future. He sais "Now, as a father, I went to the countryside with my ten-year-old son. I captured the time we spent together on my camera, our distant relatives, places and objects that used to be important for me and the changes that have happened to them."

© Alexander Sharr from 'Between Two Lakes'

The loss of loved ones pushes us to consider their absence or to trace their presence in memory. Chiara Solimene's work thus arises from the death of her grandparents in a couple of years. For Solimene, things become a possibility, and perhaps a hold not to be let go. "Perhaps the spaces and what we have learned to call “things” are a biography, a self-portrait of our loved ones, within which echo voices, sounds, smells, tastes, memories of times of celebration and sometimes of hardship, their never-ending stories." Photos are then a means to freeze the gaze on things. A piece of furniture, a certain order, a precise position of an object. "Objects are forms assumed by time" says Solimene (graduated from ISIA Urbino, Italy), remembering then is like living in the shadow of these forms. In their intimate proximity, which is not coexistence. We can suspend time but not fully control it, like our breathe. Memory is a dynamic and organic reconstruction of this state of suspension. An approximation of the past in some ways. So writes, again, Solimene: "In becoming past, time brings things with it into the new dimension of memory, things that in turn acquire the characteristic and charm of the ancient. Around them time is able to come to a halt thus making them available to a dialogue about the relationship between time and different cultures, between time and objects, thus between time and man. This suspended time that things are able to activate speaks, at the same time, of proximity, of contact with man, of the "inframince", a category within which Duchamp inscribed «all substances, states, minimal differences, sharings, passages of state on the edge of the imperceptible and distinguishable, real but not optical, not "retinal," which are grasped only with 'gray matter,' that is, with mental exercise» [Grazioli E., Fotografia e infrasottile, in Aisthesis, Firenze University Press, 2018].
An exercise, I add, that can help us in everyday life not to compromise, but to understand that the past is what we partly are and want to be. it is our memory and what we choose to do with it as visual archeologist.

© Chiara Solimene, from 'Le forme del tempo. Archeologia di memoria familiare'

According to Judit Spanyár (graduated from Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, Budapest, Hungary) historical events and the politics of memory play a role in the ideological confrontation. And this is quite relevant in today's highly political polarized Eastern Europe and as suggested by Spanyár "the deep divisions between political parties, the opposing tendencies, arouse strong emotions in people, which can spill over into the family environment." Memory is made above all of holes, of leaps into the void, of expectations, misunderstandings, broken ropes, and this makes its weaving precarious, fragile, questionable. "Many individual stories remain untold, with lasting consequences in terms of mistrust, lack of solidarity, weakening of social norms, common moral principles and a shared vision of the future."

This leads Spanyár to explore the negotiability of historical legacies and traumas involving unprocessed, controversial and unresolved stories within her own family. "The main motifs are relationships and relations that dissect questions of fallibility, responsibility and identity, offering possibilities of reinterpretation as a way out. In order to interpret, to turn towards each other, it is necessary to confront the events of the past, our own feelings, prejudices or guilt, even if it is difficult." Memory here moves from an individual terrain to a plural arena, where the comparison becomes the lawn to be cultivated. Either you leave the lawn to go wild, reclaim the spaces or you can create a garden. When we turn to history, is memory a public and shared design? Do images help us at all? How? Who traces the trajectories and boundaries of this social and moral mirror?

Urbanautica is a proud Blurring the Lines program partner—an international academic network boosting dialogue, fostering talent, and awarding graduations' works since 2016.

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