memory as intimacy
“All great drawing is drawing by memory (...) Even before a model, you draw from memory. The model is a reminder (...) The model is a reminder of the experiences you can only formulate and therefore only remember by drawing. And those experiences add up to the sum total of your awareness of the tangible, three-dimensional, structural world. A blank page of a sketchbook is a blank, white page. Make one mark on it, and the edges of the pages are no longer simply where the paper was cut, they have become the borders of a microcosm.” (BERGER, 2007, p.102, 103)
Reflecting about forms of intimacy, I realized that one of the most intimate aspects of life is memory. This subject always surrounds my mind, especially as someone who overthinks and is deeply nostalgic. Even though humans are formed not only by personal memories, but also by collective memories as we’re part of a society and of different societal groups, I believe that the process of remembering is somehow personal, as it happens inside the body, and it happens in different manners for everyone.
I thought of something I’ve read some time ago, that even if two people were born and lived their whole lives in the same circumstances, they would still have different perspectives of life, consequently owning different and personal memories. Our point of view of the world depends on what we focus our attention on. It depends on our presence at a certain moment of time. It is an intimate process, between us and life.
The act of drawing is permeated with memory by itself, too. During one of our reading group meetings, I wrote down a sentence that impacted me, that the drawing/line can be viewed “as an indicator of something that is gone (the memory of an encounter)”. It is the body moving away from the surface; it is the line that my body created moving away from the image that I’m portraying, creating a distance between me and the figure; it is the line that suddenly stops, because my body is getting distant from the material. An encounter that lasts the time of the process of the drawing and/or of the embroidery. Different times, but all placed in this short encounter. The encounter between me and the person represented in the work is also present. I like to think of it as an intimate moment as well.
John Berger shared a similar perspective when he wrote: “(...) the lines on the paper are traces left behind by the artist’s gaze, which is ceaselessly leaving, going out, interrogating the strangeness, the enigma, of what is before his eyes, however ordinary and everyday this may be. (...) if the drawing succeeds, he stays there forever” (BERGER, 2007, p.47)
Berger also brings the idea of ephemerality when he writes about the experience of drawing his father when he passed away. “Because the faculty of sight is continuous, because visual categories remain constant, and because so many things appear to remain in place, one tends to forget that the visual is always the result of an unrepeatable, momentary encounter” (BERGER, 2007, p.67). I believe this can be related not only with the theme of memory, but also with the process of drawing.
By sharing my own memories, or my own desire to remember, I’m sharing my intimacy. Recently I’ve been told by a colleague/art critic from my undergraduate, Rodrigo Ferreira, that my work is deeply vulnerable, and asked how I felt about it. Before that, I hadn't notice I was bringing a sense of vulnerability to my practice. It made me happy to think that people probably can connect or create dialogues with my work with more ease, as I believe that to be vulnerable is to be open for human connection.
About the relationship with time, Berger says that “We use photographs by taking them with us, in our lives, our arguments, our memories; it is we who move them. Whereas a drawing or painting forces us to stop and enter its time. A photograph is static because it has stopped time. A drawing or painting is static because it encompasses time” (BERGER, 2007, p.70).
To think that drawing not only contains the previous experience of looking, but it is complete by the act of looking at it attentively once it’s done, makes me think of how powerful it is as a medium to explore memory and intimacy. As someone who uses photography as a base to my work, and who perceives photography as a tool to record memories, the perspective that drawing also encompasses time makes me feel like I could, once again, relate subject and practice.
"Memory tends to occupy a number of threshold or liminal positions: not only those borderlines which exist between subjectivity and objectivity, the outer world and the inner world, the self and society, but also the boundary that exists between forgetting and remembering, the tensions of which have enormous implications given the potential for a purposeful use of memory to transform the present into a better future" (RADSTONE, 2009, p.6).
“Our past is situated elsewhere, and both time and place are impregnated with a sense of unreality. It is as though we sojourned in a limbo of being” (BACHELARD, 1958, p.60). In-between past and present, in-between remembering and forgetting, in-between exposure and private; I like to think that my work exists in this threshold territory. My memory is my intimacy. An expanded memory, by sharing my intimacy, by opening space for further reflection and connection with other people. The details I kept with me being shared. Our intimate moment.
References
BACHELARD, G. (1958) House and universe, in FARR, I. (ed.) Memory (Documents of Contemporary Art). London: Whitechapel Gallery.
BERGER, J. (2007) Berger on drawing. London: Occasional Press.
RADSTONE, S. (2009) in GIBBONS, J. Contemporary art and memory: images of recollection and remembrance. London: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd.
Process of installation for Intersecting Lines, February 2024