Igino Schraffl
A Memory-man in the Warehouses of History
 
in “Fabbriche”
catalogue of the exhibition
Venice, 2000
  

The mnestic function, an essential constitutive element of human mind, assures individuals and community that identity which is the only element of continuity within the general process of flow and change. The consequence is a general need, strongly felt in times of crises, for search of identity in the past. Through memory, data collected are transformed into a complex of infinite partial memories that identify an individual as a member of a group, part of a collective memory and, hence, of a history. This process leads man, through the mediation of language and symbolic representations, to the awareness that to exist also means to be capable of memory.
Therefore, it is intuitive that it makes no sense to forget, because one would risk to destroy, together with the images associated with pain, a part of oneself, a part of one's identity. This was clear already to Bernard de Clairvaux (1091-1153) when he suggested not to forget, but to rearrange memories within a kind of theatre of memory, so as to be able to watch them from another point of view, thus succeeding in modifying one's emotional mood. Generally speaking, monastic tradition handed us down a meditation technique consisting in moulding mind through the construction of a "map" of places of memory, whose materials had to serve to derive the associations needed to formulate new thoughts. Places built inside the mind in this way were used to create memory archives capable of reproducing themselves and generating. Passages of the Bible were used to built up a grid of loci (Jerusalem, Paradise) and the relevant images were inserted into geometric schemes
(e.g. a ladder, a wheel). Meditation allowed achieving the concentration needed to overcome the tendency of mind to stroll within the sensible world.
The results of such meditation practices contributed to make up a wealth of images for the memory of the community which drew from there to give images new meanings and functions. Halts and places along religious paths (processions, pilgrimages, passion plays), but also gardens and libraries could function as meditation machines by appealing to memory in a continuous play between body eye and mind's eye. In Jewish mystics and oriental meditation similar processes are well known*.
In a modern art of memory like the one to which Maurizio Pellegrin’s work belongs, beside that there is also a somehow implicit rediscovery of mnestic techniques and relevant productions that reveal a material and symbolic dimension typical for remote cultures. To indicate only one example, the lukasa tablets of the Luba people in South-eastern Zaire, up to recently considered as simple handicraft manufactures and collected as such, were finally interpreted as "theatres" of a memory whose system works in a spatial sense, i.e. a certain physical sequence of places in space allowed to join images and words in mind and, hence, to play an infinite series of pieces born by the production of ever new associations. A tablet studded with pearls and concretions may represent the Luba territory and within this, at a different level of reality, various places inhabited by spirits, the king's court etc. or even the human body. Using these very memory systems, maybe by running through the different "places" with the finger, one may remember the myths and epics of the origins, the tribe's migrations, history, morals. The mnestic system generates words, narratives, non-verbal languages. In rites and dances this strengthens body language and music, and the users are initiated, having travelled through the world of spirits, as part of the class of "memory-men", the trustees of wisdom*.
Also Pellegrin’s works, though with a different level of complexity, seem to be capable of functioning as mnestic tablets, but the aide-mémoire function is here assigned to objects of use of a technicalized world.
This modern memory-man, by a kind of interiorized digging process, brings to light an infinite matter of objects as archaeological findings. In fact, memory does not work with an archive-like mechanicalness, but withholds and deforms contents, cancels and reconstructs, conceals what it does not want to lose too easily.
Our time, characterized by the reorganization of archives, museums, libraries and, in any case, of recovery of any kind of memories, shows a widespread crisis of identity, mainly collective, that imposes to redefine and revitalize particular memories by accumulating them to an even excessive extent. Within this general framework, the artistic operation shown here would seem to accomplish the positive function of producing memory in order to fill up the gaps and silences identified as absence of memory or conditions that prevented its production, rather than to indicate a shelter in the past. In this sense, making art consists of creating a context for objects, that allows establishing a relationship between them and man.
While the caves, lofts and warehouses of Venice represent archaeological sites for his mnestic excavation campaigns, the museums where these interventions and installations are performed may be compared with the antiquaria where selected and catalogued findings find a shelter. But an artist is not a museographer and, in fact, at the concrete level of creating art, he does not try to reconstruct a context, as a historian would do, but constructs its form by means of the materials of memory?
In our lay and technologicalized time, the operation of preparing mechanisms of memory like those described before is matched by the continuous construction of mental data bases, using materials of the collective past, which make this artist take on the role of an agent of memory.
However, an art of memory is always inevitably tinged with nostalgia, and the objects drawn from the past awake feelings, also because the hope to transcend the present can become true only by making the past continue.
In these works the artist narrates or, better, orders the world in a phenomenological sense. Thus, these works become a mix of reality and fiction, a space where images and thought can meet, giving rise to a phenomenology of thought represented through images. However, image seems to pretend to represent objectivity because at the moment when the icon appears, it is given for granted that contingency disappears. Within an aesthetic experience the representability of the world reconstructed through images becomes evident.

Notes

* Cfr. Mary Carruthers, The craft of thought. Meditatio, rhetoric and the making of images 400-1200, Cambridge University Press, Camrbridge 1999.
* Cfr. Mary Nooter Roberts and Allen F. Roberts (eds.)), Memory, Luba Art and the Making of History; New York 1996.
* Cfr. Mary Nooter Roberts and Allen F. Roberts (eds.)), Memory, Luba Art and the Making of History; New York 1996.