Urbanautica

THE WEIGHT OF REMEMBRANCE AND TIME SCLEROSIS

by Steve Bisson

"Strips of land emerging from the sea of amnesia, that\'s memory. Sooner or later, they will sink. So, sailing in time to explore their internal geography may be fruitful."

© Filipe Bianchi from 'Perpetual memories'

These considerations move around one of the main areas of investigation of the Urbanautica observatory and research topic: memory-tradition-identity. They develop open arguments and trajectories of understanding and nourish dialogues, thus expanding possibilities of further visual practice. Sometimes, stimuli can also come from requests to read portfolios offering further information on specific intentions and topics valuable to us beyond their visual formal yield.

© Filipe Biachi from 'Perpetual memories'

As the series by Filipe Bianchi an invitation to dive into the same existence of memory. Or better than remembering. Memorizing is a gift that animals also partly have; remembering is something else, as the word itself teaches; it brings a feeling back to the heart. The series evokes this ability of the human being to actualize experience (past), or more lyrically, to evoke it, to name it through language. Photography is a medium and, eventually, a support for remembering. An extension of this faculty, the author uses it, particularly in places where memory is exercised, like a cemetery. Memory here evokes death and decay, one of nature's few certainties. In this intersection between inexorable nature and the tragic need to remember, Filipe Bianchi's vision takes shape. But nothing truly remains; everything transforms, gives way, and memory slowly dissolves like a perfume in the air. It fades slowly. It migrates in the great flow of lives, in the constant metamorphosis of being. It can be digested and embodied and survive in the myth of continuous becoming, of the so-called future, and fuels the dream of an origin and a time acting like a conveyor belt flowing towards infinity.

© Filipe Biachi from 'Perpetual memories'

Sometimes this flow towards infinity is abruptly interrupted. Longarone, or rather new Longarone, was born on the rubble of one of the worst environmental disasters in history. A piece of mountain landslides into a dam basin, which resists the impact and produces an anomalous wave that hurls itself downstream with unprecedented violence, sweeping away everything in the existing inhabited area and human lives. All while people were sleeping. Fabio d'Arsie uses photography to relate to built space and, therefore, to represent it. The images in this selection help us to "reconstruct" Longarone and read about its renewed building and urban face, which projects us explicitly into the second half of the twentieth-century topography. It's evidence of the irreducible "sapiens" will that manifests itself in the mathematics of addition and in building even on tragic foundations.

© Fabio D'Arsiè

The dam with its concrete cantilever is still up there, squeezed between the Vajont Valley's rocky slopes, weighing on its inhabitants' memory. A new town which, despite the modern impetus of the reconstruction plan entrusted to Giuseppe Samonà, is, in fact, a memorial. A place of remembrance. So we ask ourselves whether memory can survive when collectivised or "monumentalised." Yes, it is possible, as long as it is not eroded by time like a cliff exposed to the indifferent furies of the ocean. Today, over 50 years after the destructive epilogue, there is still a lot of talk about that event, the causes, and little about the consequences. So, the memory is alive but more like an act of speculation of a history limited to aesthetic paralysis or temporal sclerosis.

© Fabio D'Arsiè

The practice of commemoration shows and speaks to us about how memory exercises its power on the masses. Quang Lam's work offers an excellent visual viaduct to its understanding by depicting the iconic history of the so-called Independence Palace of Vietnam. The building summarizes a hundred years of events that have marked the lives and memories of the people of Vietnam. A stormy past that he observes and investigates through an analysis of the archives as an exercise in visual archeology. Through photographs such as the "legendary" one by Malcolm Browne, which immortalizes the Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Ðức setting himself on fire in protest against the Saigon dictatorship in 1963. "No news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that, " said Kennedy. The music band Rage Against The Machine used it as the cover of the namesake album later in 1992. The re-educational path of this Vietnamese political landmark also takes shape from its visual representation and facade. And this reminds us of architecture as a manifestation of power.

The original palace, the so-called Norodom Palace, was built by the French colonial regime and mirrored the European stylistic canons of the era. The current one, designed by Ngo Viet Thu, winner of the Rome Grand Prix and inaugurated in 1967, has a modernist impetus, still celebrated today. Also called the "Reunification" palace, a title oriented towards a process of reconciliation of the bloody subdivisions of the country. Quang Lam's photographs show us how the building and its corridors "secretly retain the voices of the past and their whispers still resonate as an echo of the sea in the hollow of a shell." He adds, "Far from a nostalgic look, the strength of Photography goes beyond the visible, through its accumulation's power of traces which are actualized at each shooting as in a new performance.". Those rooms that preserve vestiges frozen as in snapshots figure, in fact, as 3rd reproductions of the past. Like many monumental places, the Independence Palace is somehow a factory of memories that cast their shadow on the dreams and ambitions of future generations. The struggle between oblivion and free will always shape those gray areas.

The present is a continuous reconciliation with the past. The choices we ponder reflect the collection of images deposited as sediments in us. This burden, we call memory, is nothing other than our identity, shaped by experience and therefore in flux. Some of these experiences weigh more than others, however. They are often like rocks that define our inner coast. Others are far away and may appear like remote islands in our archipelago. Strips of land emerging from the sea of amnesia, that's memory. Sooner or later, they will sink. So, sailing in time to explore their internal geography may be fruitful. Sue Vaughton does so when she lifts her anchor to return to her childhood ground 50 years later. On the island of Bahrain, in the oil town of Awali, where his grandfather moved in 1945, where her parents met, and where she was born and raised for some time. That's until her father passed away too soon. From there, she begins a pilgrimage with her mother across the world, following life circumstances often imposed. The question "where you come from?" becomes an unnecessary inconvenience. Rolling in the course of events along the river of fate, like a broken trunk, like an uprooted plant, sooner or later leads to a return upstream to the source of one's story. From this kind of journey, Sue Vaughton takes away remains, emotional traces, and fragments of situations in the form of images. These are hers, and they manifest intention and profound willpower. We may not understand memory, but we certainly comprehend it—a word, the latter, which means to take in completely, even without fully understanding everything.

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