Memory-Map is a work about representations of time and place through memory, leading to the formulation of a psycho-topological chart putting in relation inspiring places, events and affects.
This work consists of a personal mental map that borrows the design of a classic underground map, with its reticulated, colour-coded symbols and visual aids.
This map covers a half-factual, half-fictional territory that is derived from the physical arrangement of the places it aims to represent; but this geography is distorted, altered by personal memories. The diagram uses in fact actual place-names mixed with fanciful and personal associations, telling of a personal system of affects where inter-relations are evidenced using a network reminiscent of transport links, organising cognition and fantasy along spatio-temporal dimensions, and providing a vehicle to cope with past and present experiences of geography as well as beliefs and expectations about places as yet unvisited or never to be visited.
Each line either corresponds to an outstanding trip made litterally, or connects to the symbolic or the imaginary1. The name and key to each line suggests an underlying plot, laying out a grid of potential events where place is rewritten as potential story.
On the chart, the idea of having the same place belonging to several lines also stresses that our perception of places and their relative hierarchy is likely to change according to our personal context: childhood places, long ago our only kingdom in the world, now only constitute an affective margin, more and more remote in time, if not in space.
Like memory and our experience of places, this map is very much selective and introspective. Its subjectivity invits the spectator to to confront their own perceptions in order to better decipher it.
Exhibitions:
- April 2007: Mapping, Bury Art Gallery (Greater Manchester, UK)
- June 2006: Digital Soup – New and Improved, the Truman Brewery (London)
1 See the text “places-names: the name” in Swann´s Way by Marcel Proust