El factor emocional de documentar el olvido. Mutilar fotografías, testamentos y cartas de amor como proyecto artístico

Abstract

In recent years –even decades– a large number of visual artists have focused their researchand their creation projects on reflection on the past, on memory or on archives. This type ofpractice has crystallized in different categorizations such as the art of the archive, the artof memory, the practices of recollection, posfiction or the new documentary. A good part ofthese proposals could be included under the umbrella of what Bourriaud has called postproduction; a way of doing in which artists would behave not as creators per se, but asremixers of pre-existing content to which new readings are inferred. My work as an artist focuses on the manipulation of photographs from the late nineteenthcentury, as well as other documents such as manuscript wills and love letters, which areirreversibly altered, mutilated. This process, contrary to the archival logic, is governed,however, by the same impulse: to recover memory, to know the past and to put order. By altering the vestiges of other people’s lives I try to find out what my time is, whosecontemporary I am, what is inherited, and what part I can decide. It is a question, then, oflooking at the margins, of fighting so that the small, imperceptible or anecdotal things arenot lost, those that history does not care about. My search has to do with knowing what canbe learned from other lives, from other intimacies, from other ways of communicating andliving, while building my own subjective memory.