Memories are malleable and prone to distortion. With time, trauma, and mere recollection, the remembrance of the past becomes an act of reimagining. ”
Memory’s role to create one’s identity, becomes more and more important with time. But how can you trust something that deforms and falsifies your reality? “In essence, all memory is false to some degree. Memory is inherently a reconstructive process, whereby we piece together the past to form a coherent narrative that becomes our autobiography. In the process of reconstructing the past, we color and shape our life’s experiences based on what we know about the world”1 Memory and image-making alike, distort our perception of our individual and collective past.
Snippets of the past that once seemed blurry become a tangible object that can be felt and perceived. The phantom becomes a reality present in the world, and can thus be seen, touched, smelled... The memory becomes then a thing.
This is a deeply personal project that comes from an urge to understand the mechanisms through which memory gets lost and distorted, as well as the potencial role of photography in this processes. Due to trauma I have experienced how most of my memories from a certain time of my life seem to be blocked behind a wall and only reimagined through images and stories from people of my past. Since becoming aware of this, I have been researching about the way trauma and time make our memory mutate and become something completely different to what it originally was. Events are told differently by the variety of people that were present there. Our own experiences and personalities intervene in this change.
1. Daniel L. Schacter, Scott A. Guerin,* and Peggy L. St. Jacques. Memory distortion: an adaptive perspective. Trends in Cognitive Sciences October 2011, Vol. 15, No. 10.
Memory’s role to create one’s identity, becomes more and more important with time. But how can you trust something that deforms and falsifies your reality? “In essence, all memory is false to some degree. Memory is inherently a reconstructive process, whereby we piece together the past to form a coherent narrative that becomes our autobiography. In the process of reconstructing the past, we color and shape our life’s experiences based on what we know about the world”1 Memory and image-making alike, distort our perception of our individual and collective past.
Snippets of the past that once seemed blurry become a tangible object that can be felt and perceived. The phantom becomes a reality present in the world, and can thus be seen, touched, smelled... The memory becomes then a thing.
This is a deeply personal project that comes from an urge to understand the mechanisms through which memory gets lost and distorted, as well as the potencial role of photography in this processes. Due to trauma I have experienced how most of my memories from a certain time of my life seem to be blocked behind a wall and only reimagined through images and stories from people of my past. Since becoming aware of this, I have been researching about the way trauma and time make our memory mutate and become something completely different to what it originally was. Events are told differently by the variety of people that were present there. Our own experiences and personalities intervene in this change.
1. Daniel L. Schacter, Scott A. Guerin,* and Peggy L. St. Jacques. Memory distortion: an adaptive perspective. Trends in Cognitive Sciences October 2011, Vol. 15, No. 10.