Memogram

The starting point of my work Memogram was my own family’s archive of black-and-white silver-gelatin photographs, taken before I was born. I reveal the radical procedure of destroying the photographs and melting them down, so that pure silver can be extracted from them through further chemical processing in the laboratory. Using an interdisciplinary and multimedia approach, I then turn the silver obtained from family photos into a metal coin. With its weight of approximately one gram, it is both worthless and priceless, for the value of the coin as a new representation of family history is not measured in money, but in memory. Within the framework of my own family history, I observe the medium of photography as a mnemonic tool, which serves as an agent in preserving memory, but at the same time encapsulates mortality and transience. Photographs as objects evoking memories may withstand a long time, but certainly not forever. Reducing them to the element of silver means they remain an object that evokes memories, but which this time around lasts forever. 

Third Mythology

Third Mythology is a work in progress I develop around the idea of photography as a trigger for memory. I explore whether the mere existence of visual evidence enables the transmission of concrete knowledge about the recorded event through time. I also investigate what we can actually learn from the photograph itself about a broader context of the recorded moment, and how that knowledge depends on the ritual of coming together around photographs.

I took three color photographs from my family’s album, taken during my early childhood, of which I have no recollection of my own. In them, I recognise myself and some close members of the family, yet the events and places remain unknown. The possibilities of interpretation of what is depicted depend on oral tradition, that is memory and experience of the person present at the time of photographing – my mother. Based on these three photographs, I struck a conversation with the mother and made an audio recording of her memories and impressions of the events depicted in the photos. I burned each of the photos and stored the remnants in glass containers.

Recording everyday life using the medium of photography in itself implies the establishment of some future mythology. In that sense, my mother’s memories, triggered by a ritual leafing through the photographs, can also be considered a kind of mythologem, a mental construct that serves to maintain a myth. Their oral transmission to me, who have no authentic memories of the original events, I consider a third level of mythology. It creates an infinite number of new mental images inside a listener’s mind.