Private eye/private I
My photo album tells the tale of my family, relatives and friends, our celebrations, holidays and birthdays. They are not unique pictures. They are in everyone's albums. It is not even a through documentation of my life, but nonetheless, a priceless document describing a story, which I myself, could not tell.
Minneskartotek 640821-7187/Memory File 640821-7187
What did you do on vacation last year? The brain starts to assemble pieces; where was I, with who, what did we do, how was the weather, how did I feel?
The frontal lobe picks out the time, in the temporal lobe there is a picture and in the occipital lobe we find more detail. Feelings and mood are stored further back in the brain. All information jells together to create a memory.
Researcher speak about three different types of memory; procedural, semantic and episodic. Memory that does not demand a conscious process such as riding a bike or driving a car is stored in the procedural memory. The semantic memory stores pure facts such as language and mathematical knowledge. This is where we find the songs we know by heart, telephone numbers and the code to our banking card. The episodic memory can be divided into two parts, short term and long term. In the short term category you store information such as: I am almost out of toilet paper and that you have a parent-teacher conference next Wednesday. These are memories that do not need to be stored for a longer time. The episodic memory stores personal events. It is time and space related. The episodic memory can be woken by smells, sounds or tastes for example Marcel Proust's Madeleine cookies.
It is often several different factors that contribute to memories arising within you; perhaps an autumn day when the sun is low ad lights the room in a specific way, you may remember a special event that happened in your childhood.
De glömda/The Forgotten
You find them in shoeboxes and drawers, at flea markets and thrift shops. Piles of photographs from personal photo albums, portraits of people, reserved, formal and forever captured at a special occasion such as a wedding, a baptism, a confirmation or birthday.
In these boxes lies the forgotten. They all have their own stories , their own fate. I examine them ask myself if their lives have been good or difficult. No one can no longer tell their stories because we have forgotten them.
The forgotten is an installation, consisting of some sixty photographic portraits that I found in thrift shops in Stockholm. The photos are transferred to a lithographic stone.
Memoria
A memory can change; the actual event can become more beautiful and more amusing as a memory or on the contrary more difficult and boring than it actually was.
When we remember something from the past, we may remembering the last time we thought of that memory and not the time when the actual event occurred. The original memory becomes difficult to preserve, the memory becomes more and more distored until finally it may disappear completely.
A Study of Private eye/private I