That was in Africa!
Or could it be Scotland?
See those hippos by the lake?
Or maybe they’re cows…
Sheila is the name of my late grandmother, who I originally wanted this series to be all about. She lived a fascinating life - eloping to marry my grandfather in 1953 in Tanzania (he was working there as part of the British Colonial Service). While living there, there was a polio pandemic sweeping the world in the late 1950s. My grandmother contracted polio during her pregnancy with her second child, my uncle, as she chose not to be vaccinated, due to the severe risks it could cause to her unborn son. She was seriously unwell with the disease, and left paralyse, all bar the use of one arm.
An appropriate story for the times we were living in. Yet as I started going through my family archive with my mother, it became more obvious that her memories from her childhood were confused. I became fascinated by the study of memory - something so fundamental to our identity, yet it is malleable and unreliable. I started to question the way we, in the West, are conditioned to see linearly. I wondered, what if we saw our memories as an amalgamation of the past and present - multiple exposures challenging the cleanness of a technically excellent photograph; transparent layers where the past is always peeking through and surrounding the present.
Photography has almost no reality; it is almost a hundred per cent picture…
I don't mistrust reality, of which I know next to nothing. I mistrust the picture of reality conveyed to us by our senses, which is imperfect and circumscribed.
Gerhard Richter
“The memory that helps make us up is a veritable patchwork quilt stitched together from the ever-growing mountain of discrete, multicoloured memories. What will be stitched into the quilt and what will be discarded, or what will feature prominently on that quilt and what will form a background, will depend greatly on how we sew our memories together and how others — from those who are closest to us all the way to our culture as a whole — sew them together for us.
…reality is too complex for any of us to perceive even a simple segment of it fully, let alone remember it truthfully.”
Miroslav Volf (2006) The End of Memory - Remembering Rightly in a Violent World
“In order to tell the story of your life, your brain needs to conjure up a world for you to live inside, with all its colours and movements and objects and sounds. Just as characters in fiction exist in a reality that’s been actively created, so do we. But that’s not how it feels to be a living, conscious human. It feels as if we’re looking out of our skulls, observing reality directly and without impediment. But this is not the case. The world we experience as “out there” is actually a reconstruction of reality that is built inside our heads. It’s an act of creation by the storytelling brain.”
Will Storr on the Neuroscience Behind the World We See
“I feel, almost physically, the current of time slowing down in the gravitational field of oblivion. It seems to me then as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space, as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to find our way to them at last, just as when we have accepted an invitation we duly arrive in a certain house at a given time.”
W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz
“the pattern of life is far more poetic than it is sometimes represented by the determined advocates of naturalism. So much, after all, remains in our thoughts and hearts as unrealised suggestion.”
Andrey Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time
“the pasts constructed as proxies for that lost realm are anything but fixed and solid: they vary from viewer to viewer and year to year, as recent events crowd our chronological canvas, and later perspectives supersede earlier…
The past renders the present recognisable. Its traces on the ground and in our minds let us make sense of current scenes. Without past experience, no sight or sound would mean anything; we perceive only what we are accustomed to. Features and patterns become such because we share their history…
[In China,] Memory is prized less in perishable monuments than in imperishable words that recall a vanished past.”
David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country - Revisited.
