In our desire to preserve the memory of certain moments, we constantly resort to the act of photographing fragments of everyday life. Thus, the medium of photography becomes a tool for documenting our personal stories transformed into visual narratives, woven from memories of lived experiences. A few years before the photographic series Archiving to Forget was created, artist Ana Marija Marinov often took pictures of her partner wanting to capture moments of an intimate relationship. After the relationship ended, the author’s safe position, hidden behind the camera, became a highly vulnerable one as she turned the lens towards herself, inevitably making herself the subject of photographs, exposed to examination by (un)known observers of her self-portraits.
Immersed in the reality of a (post)pandemic time, the artist began a photographic project, in which the daily act of taking photos became her way of maintaining mental hygiene. Although the first self-portraits followed a predetermined concept, over time, she points out, “aesthetics gradually lost its importance, and I started to indulge in zealous archiving”. Thus, in one year’s time, a total of 260 self-portraits were created, in colour, using 35-millimetre film, while the artist, guided by a reverse logic of documenting reality, created a rich photographic archive which, paradoxically, she does not care to remember.
The exhibition Archiving to Forget exudes the author’s courage, who, in the act of exhibiting nude self-portraits in a public gallery space, literally and metaphorically lays herself bare in front of everyone. Observing her own body as a repository of unconscious memories, Ana Marija Marinov shoots self-portraits in order to establish a dialogue – with herself. The different tonalities in the photographs demarcate the discrete phases of their creation within a given time interval, while the recorded physical changes trace the complex psychological processes caused by the experience of traumatic events. This creates a visual narrative delineated by the physical and emotional space of the author, who contemplates her mother’s attitude towards the loss of an opportunity for motherhood, at the same age when she herself makes a conscious decision to terminate her pregnancy. In addition to a selection of the author’s self-portraits, the exhibition is comprised of a photobook that enables a closer connection with the artist’s thoughts and feelings. A return to the private archive created during a challenging chapter in her life also allows a release of the artist’s conflicting memories in order to free up an invisible space for new ideas and experiences.
Tena Starčević
