Marble sculpture with inkjet print on fine art paper, mounted on stainless steel
15 x 21 x 8 cm

Transforming Memories

Text by Tiago Casanova

One of my acquaintances once wrote on Facebook that “an image is only an image for those who have no memory”1. This sentence perfectly sums up my current research on memory and archive, and on the binomial reality/fiction, in which I have been questioning, for example, the role of photography as an alternative memory process, how people archive these memories and the difference between the interpretation of a memory by its own producer or by other viewers. 

The object created results from a three-dimensional deconstruction of the portrait of Wenko Wenkoff, a Bulgarian opera singer that lived in Austria and performed at Vienna Staatsoper and Volksoper in the 1940’s and 50’s. The photograph, bought in a Vienna flea market, is one of hundreds of prints made at the time to promote the singer and the opera house. Today, the singer is practically unknown among Austrian society, but his images still circulate although under a certain level of anonymity. I am interested on how an image, any image, may represent so much for a certain group of people or in a certain time, and then mean nothing to someone else or in a totally different era. In fact, we create an idea, a fictional idea, of this person — especially when we do not know who this person was, and we keep doing it even after we learn something about him. A photograph can only mean reality for the person who lived the captured moment, and it will always be fiction for everyone else. This deconstruction is intended as a metaphor on how we never see the entire contents of an image: it always represents a fiction, never a concrete reality.

1. Pedro Jordão on Facebook