Memory is an ephemeral interpretation of times past, always doomed to be flawed, always doomed to be incomplete, always doomed to be crippled by forgotten information. While our memories will never be perfect renderings of things past, the search for truth will always be a worthwhile adventure.
In The Contemporary Art Modern Project’s showing of Fragmentos Rescatados, Lucia Warck-Meister deals with the concept of memory, be it its relationship with nationhood, its deprecation in the face of historical revisionism, and its frailty in part due to the ravages of change and time.
Amongst the abstract thoughts privy only to mankind, collective memory is unique in its ability to creep into identity. Countless examples exist: the liturgical stories we use to guide our lives in global religions, the filtered recounting of nationhood fed to the global youth in elementary schools, the story of how your mom and dad fell in love and fatefully conceived their children. These memories inform who we are and what we believe about the world around us; because of their centrality in our paradigm of thought, one would imagine that these memories were durable, steadfast, tangible items, that they are realities of one’s life. Such a status would make life more simplistic and direct.
The reality is that the truths that lie beneath collective memory are always in flux, and oftentimes these memories leave out incredible amounts of detail in the name of simplicity. As such, it is an easily achieved, yet high stakes task to contradict such memories with factual information. Much like a historian, Warck-Meister does just that with La Capitana, a piece that reclaims the historical significance of Maria Remedios del Valle. Remedios del Valle was an Afro-Argentine revolutionary fighter who is often forgotten in the core curriculum of Latin independence fighters.
By unveiling details of the past, Warck-Meister pulls into question the dogmatic memory production that nation states often spew for its constituency in the name of culture building and unity. Such mythos is often found in other countries throughout Central America, South America, and the Caribbean. Warck-Meister herself makes reference to the rigidity of these commodified memories with her use of material; the porcelain and shattered glass in Moon Wings were both once fluid, malleable materials. However, as heat and pressure were applied to each, they cemented into these rigid structures that break before they can bend. Just like these materials, the memories that were once fresh in our minds cement with time as we further disassociate with the experience of the past itself, and gravitate more and more towards an abstraction of the past that is rehearsed in our minds.
Like other historians, Warck-Meister is able to use a solitary figure to expand into many other macro-level topics, such as the significance of women fighters in revolutionary struggles all throughout the Americas, the minimization of Afro-Latinx figures in national histories, and the murky ways in which newly founded Latin american countries remunerated their revolutionaries once they themselves cemented into national institutions. Warck-Meister’s medium, however, is not the essays and historiographies common amongst academia, but rather a minimalist, impactful mix of non-traditional and traditional materials. In some pieces, the aforementioned porcelain and shattered glass sit front and center, creating a magnetic use of texture, negative space, and pattern. In others, mixtures of silicon and charcoal create a duality of while and dark, while also applying a layering effect.
The global study of history has seen a widespread reimagination of national mythology, with sweeping changes in the way we understand our past taking place within just a few decades. In a domestic context, we have distanced ourselves in from the idea that religious refugees who left England were peaceful by default, or that the American Civil War was fought for the sake of slaves’ lives. The truth of the matter is that Puritans often employed violent and culturally insentitive tactics in the name of religiosity against local Native Americans, and the morality behind the American North’s opposition to slavery had more to do with ensuring opportunities for small farmers to spread west and not compete with plantation owners. Like the talcum that graces the floor in Warck-Meister’s El numero del infinito, that which we considered to be truths about ourselves was easily wiped away, as if done so by the gesture of a hand, once we are confronted with new details.. The next great American challenge from a cultural perspective is how we come to terms with these new memories about who we were and how we choose to allow them to form us into who we are.
Memory is an ephemeral interpretation of times past, always doomed to be flawed, always doomed to be incomplete, always doomed to be crippled by forgotten information. While our memories will never be perfect renderings of things past, the search for truth will always be a worthwhile adventure.
Statement and curation by Mario Andres Rodriguez.