Recuerdo nacer por un tobogán

As human beings, we have an infinite number of cognitive capacities, including memory. The power to remember. The memory capacity of our brain is something changing and in movement. It is not something that works like a mechanism or a machine. There are things that we can remember with ease and there are others that, over time, become blurred.

My grandfather was born on 18 December 1922 in Kolozsvár, Romania, a Jew and a communist. He survived the Holocaust and emigrated to Buenos Aires, Argentina. His biography is something that has been so present in my life that I have come to generate mental images of his chronicles as if they were my own memories.

The production of these fictitious images of memories that I have not lived is what gives rise to this work. To give importance to all that memory that is not part of my history, but that lives in my memories as if they were real.

The intention is to narrow that connection by linking my memories with their history, to find those pieces of memory that are part of my identity, but not of reality; false memories, images of fictitious memory that tell part of the chronicle.

Materialising the memories through painting and creating the appropriate medium so that these images that were mental become part of the family memory. 

This has been an evolving work, starting with the investigation of the family archive, to explain the history of my ancestors, to find the way to use all this information to create new content. Resulting in small pictorial works as a materialisation of memory. 

One of my objectives at the beginning of the project, to analyse and learn about my grandfather's family history, in this case, has allowed me to construct part of my own chronicle, reflected not only in the process of working on the project, but also in the resulting pieces. 

Thus, the art pieces are images of non-real memory created from the evolution of the family archive and as a bridge between family history and my biography.

In 1992, when my grandfather was 70 years old, his sister Magda was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. For this reason, I have made 70 pieces. Referencing the exact moment when Magda's identity and, therefore, my own history, began to blur due to the loss of memory, a state in which she lived and which conditioned her last 18 years of life and all her artistic work. 

They are small pieces, reminiscent of the formats in which family archive photographs are printed. Pieces that capture false memories of my own experiences (or non-experiences), my mental images of family history stories, and moments when what is real and what is imaginary come together. 

Painted images that not only show memories that I have not lived, but that are part of a set of memories, that comes from my thoughts and imagination, but that need to be captured and shown so that they are known and recognised, and thus become part of the memory of the family archive. 

A life project, which allows me to continue generating artistic pieces of memory until I no longer have it. A journey to the past and to the future, part of which was exhibited in the Bosc building at EINA in early July (2021). And where the whole process followed during the project made sense, generating the space and the appropriate medium to exhibit the works and create a collective memory. 

This has been a project that has allowed me to see my history many years before I existed, to analyse and get to know all those experiences, not only have they inspired me, but they have made me know myself a little more. 

The paintings have opened a whole conceptual and pictorial path for me as an amateur artist, allowing me to leave what I already knew, painting through photographic samples, to do it with samples of mental images, a real challenge, being these very unclear and very changeable. 

This project has given me the possibility of being the work itself that has taken me to where I have arrived, through small decisions a great path has been built that has made me reach a life project, something that allows me to build a story parallel to the true reality, but that inevitably forms part of my daily reality. 

Giving weight to what we think, remember and believe we have lived is something that forms our identity and it is important to know and learn from it. 

So, what supposedly began with the intention of being a family homage, has ended up being a process of personal knowledge through family memory.