The tragedies of the twentieth century demonstrated that the scale of ruination runs parallel to the scale of our collective conscience. The ascent of memorial sites, rituals of remembrance, and record-keeping, displays both our active participation in the definition of a collective memory, as well as a shared effort to be absolved of our collective accountability.
War, never absent from the course of globalisation and history, has in current times returned to the European mainland. In a region still deeply scarred from the moral ruins of genocides, we are witnessing the resurrection of hubris, of blindness, and of the greed of a mankind which is yet again stumbling over its concept of ethics and of God. Witnessing renewed radicalisation, dehumanisation and othering, we should conclude that our shared and collective memory has begun crumbling at its foundations and it is safe to say those foundations had already been shaking for a while. But in the current face of forgetfulness, in the compliance to time and in the submission to a past as is – a past absolved from consequence – the urgency is now to advance from the current state of perpetuated muteness. Truth conceals itself not in what is spoken, but in the absence of words. And what can mankind see without sight?
My practice aims at a closer examination at what lies at the core of collective memory and the processes facilitating catharsis, through an investigation into visual and literary archives. This process narrowly traces the lines of thought set out by Jacques Derrida in his seminal essay Archive Fever. The author bridges the concept of the commencement and the commandment (Arkhe), to the house of magistrates (Arkheion), those who alike archives command and act commencement. Our current wars are wars of information and their first casualty is truth. Remembrance has thus never been more of a radical political act than it is in the face of today’s post-truth condition. In Derrida’s sense those who command the archives hold sway and power over our liberty of catharsis and change. They thus dictate, as history has shown since times immemorial, our collective understanding of those processes which must occur for the moral act of remembrance to begin taking place. Through my projects I attempt to form a common voice that resonates to what is both near and ancient, thereby overriding the traditional linearity of narrative and subverting the power of the Arkheion, the edifice. My work situates itself within recreations of places and scenarios in which original definitions were conceived, but where understanding is still taking shape.
Through the insertion of absences and through the careful editing of language I underline the discrepancies which occur between meaning and intent. This takes place on a literary and photographic level, consciously choosing mediums which derive their fluency from verse and the poetical. In the use of physical materials, my preferences tend toward bare and crude forms, existing in their unshaped, stripped state, yet devoid of definition.
This makes for a practice ever-evolving. Free from the confines of definition, my focus is set on uncovering a greater narrative that transcends beyond historicity. This pursuit is accompanied by the writings of Simone Weil, who situated her own being into suffering, so as to be able to take the form of the struggle beyond her.
