The Vertical Horizon (Towards an Ecology of Memory) | One Year Life Strata | The Refuge

We have never been so aware that our present will be a memory in the future. 

Our age is experiencing a confluence of breakthroughs in our understanding of memory, from neuroscience to digital memory. All these changes are creating a deepening awareness of memory in our society, but this awareness comes together with a growing fear of forgetting and being forgotten.

The goal of my artistic research is twofold.  On the one hand to create a reflection and awareness about our irrational fear of forgetting and our obsession with the past. And on the other, to think actively about how positive forgetting could be, in individual and collective terms, as a way to overcome our fear. 

One Year Life Strata is a new media project that emerged from an experiment Maria Molina did in 2015. After impulsively recollecting her daily life with a camera during a full year, the experiment became an interactive project that offers a novel experience on digital forgetting and data visualisation. The project intends to open a reflection on the indiscriminate use of digital memory and the value of forgetting. 

The interactive installation is composed of three screens and a data topographic section, of the full year’s images, printed in 3d.  

The Refuge is an experimental film (in development) driven by a main question: What elements of our identity continue when memory disappears?

In The Refuge a granddaughter becomes obsessed with her grandmother´s dementia delirium, making her wonder if her illness revealed a buried self she never knew. The dialogues between the grandmother and granddaughter -some remembered and some imagined- lead us through the granddaughter’s exploration about what part of the self remains when memory vanish.  

In this experimental film, documentary language and fiction are interweaved to create a labyrinth of mirrors, full of questions about memory and forgetting. 

Year

2017