Ars Memoriae
-The Art of Memory-
Let me tell you a story about other stories
About the stories we tell ourselves, and how by telling them they become real.
Our world is made of stories, we are made of stories, and yet we hardly notice. They seem transparent.
What differentiates us from other animals is that our language is creative and not merely descriptive.
Our communication has the role of assigning meaning to the world.
We create things by agreeing they exist.
Though we may know some facts, facts alone are not enough to our minds.
We like creating relationships between facts, finding patterns, jumping to conclusions.
So many things are made up. Ideologies, identities, histories. Around every core of truth there are virtually infinite layers of meaning that we have weaved.
Different narratives come to form one huge network of meaning. People tell stories about themselves, societies tell stories about their past.
Personal and collective stories constantly interact, altering one another.
Our memory is based upon narrations of the past which explain our present, and build expectations for the future.
The past, as we perceive it, is not fixed. It changes as our stories change.
And what actually happened, though still important, lacks weight.
Yet we strive for permanence in this ever-changing world, so we create things to keep our memories for us.
A photograph that holds the image of a dear person,
a few words on a gravestone to describe a life,
monuments of people or events considered to be important,
heirlooms passed down from our ancestors,
museums to bring order to a chaotic past,
ancient findings in modern cities.
Objects are permanent, unlike our thoughts, though still susceptible to the passage of time.
We have the objects, what about the stories?
Some Roman emperor left this as a sign of his reign in the region. For the locals it became "the Stone" and a different story was told about its origins.
After centuries had passed and the emperor was forgotten, the locals believed that it was made for Alexander the Great. Mystical properties were assigned to it. Generations of women scratched its surface as they thought that drinking from the raspings would help them get pregnant.
It was given a new identity.
A skull belonging to the species Homo Heidelbergensis, ancestor of the Neanderthals.
Who was this person before becoming an exhibit? Well, we'll never know, that much is obvious. It is a skull and not a person, but not because of his death, rather because the story of his life that would make us see him as a person is lost.
Now this specimen has a new function as it contributes to the narrative of a museum, of a country, and of humanity that desperately wants to know its origins.
Religious icons are presented in a non religious setting. They are admired as pieces of history or art, but people no longer pray before them, as they are not lying in an environment in which such an act is expected.
We are fascinated by the human form. We keep reproducing it in materials like stone or paper, from ancient times to the digital age.
There is always some tenderness in the depictions used to memorialise people.
We want to remember the appearance of people, as if by forgetting it they would be truly gone.
In public spaces, signs of the past can be seen everywhere, yet usually they pass unnoticed. They become part of the environment, thus neutral.
How many people actually pay attention?
What we have to keep in mind is that memory is linked to oblivion. Memory is but an echo, a distortion of an event. Some elements fade, while others are being emphasised.
We fear oblivion, we fear that what we perceive as important won’t have the same value in the future or will be lost. We fear to confront what we already know – that something new and unknown will come.
But loss has its own importance, as it opens up space for the change to come.
There is beauty and fluidity in memory. Permanence is an illusion, decay is the law. The past is everywhere, and not just in abstract terms.
We only have to look.