Memory, 2011-2014, series of videos, 2:00 (each)
I got the idea of taking surface impressions when I was thinking about how we remember and are aware of experience (touch, senses in general) during a visit to some important sights. The borders / walls or areas that in some way preserve the purity of a nation or “the peace and spirit of a nation” (I put this phrase in quotes because a lot of lives were lost and there was a lot of aggression in each of them) were important for my doctoral research.
The walls that I have chosen have historical significance – they are institutions in the open (formerly active, now passive places). Instead of fascination with a place itself (matter), I am fascinated by the historical and political context of the place.
The impact of people on a place is also very important – what this place meant, and not the material remains (the membrane of truth – what is true now may not be true for the next generation). I question how a wall loses throughout history the true significance as a border or barrier. The wall almost becomes an abstract phenomenon, without prior sense within the new, redecorated space. Visual stains (frottage on paper) suggest that it is something “taken” from the matrix, “a record of the real surface”. White sheets of paper are used like white flags in the process of negotiation in relation to the border – the wall.
Some walls that I have chosen are tourist attractions (phase of admiration – the Great Wall of China, the Berlin Wall), while access to other walls is completely forbidden (“the skeleton of one period in history” – the Atlantic Wall – Netherlands), and one wall is 600 years old, but has only recently been discovered (the Seoul City Wall). They got me thinking about the access to information and the impression of the past on the present.
By transferring touch onto paper I do not transfer words, but something much more – the real memory of a place that becomes abstract, like history is abstract in our reality, because we can never experience the reality of the past.
