The Future is Memory
The Future is Memory. Memory is a continuing act of creation. So wrote the neuroscientist Rosalind Cartwright as she studied dreams, the human activity par excellence for reinventing the archives of our lives. If memory is a creative act, we can think of it as a laboratory for building the future, as a substance to weave images for new landscapes, relationships, and happenings.
Attics, cellars, closets, and trunks closed and never opened again, boxes full of dust from which sprout forgotten faces, (un)buried emotions, places disappeared or changed on maps, past lives still pulsing in the undergrounds of our present: rediscovering the images of memory is a creative act but also a desiring act, a loving gaze for something that no longer is and, at the same time, isn’t there yet. And so there is no future without memory, the very vocabulary of our language for conveying new worlds; nor is there a memory without a future, because the act of remembering cannot close itself in the nostalgic dimension of the past without an open gaze to the future. The 16th edition of Archivio Aperto is dedicated to the future of memory: which forms narrate the past, redefine it, or even forget it? What images to remember together, to perform the collective act of (re)creating the world? The Future is Memory.
