REMINISCENCE BUMP

installation

cm 250 x 250 x 30

15 boxes with my private diaries reduced into small strips of paper, a diary (the last one) and a video showing the destruction action of the diaries.

My work, which has always been devoted to the idea of retaining, preserving, collecting what risks being lost, undergoes an apparently opposite development with this installation. 

Always used to writing diaries and personal memories (especially in adolescence), I realized how my memories could become an uncomfortable past. So, with an awkwardly heroic gesture, in a completely private and dilated performance, I destroyed all my private diaries and reduced them to a gigantic mass of thin strips of paper. For once I had the feeling I could decide what to remember and what to forget.

After all, are we sure that a diary helps memory? Doesn't it involve the risk of replacing memory with a written account? When we transcribe our autobiographical pages, do we not turn reminiscence into a literary narrative and less and less into a vivid experience?

What remains of these reflections is ordered in 15 cardboard boxes and one last diary that can be browsed by the public, which contains a random selection of memories retained from previously destroyed diaries, memories that will take the form of short, disconnected sentences. 

 

 "Memories have a very strong tenacity, but like dreams, they thrive in the dark, they survive for decades in the depths of our minds as wrecks on the seabed. Bringing them back to light can be dangerous".

(J.G. Ballard)