VEILED MEMORY

VEILED MEMORY was a performance conducted when the exhibition IN MEMORY came to a close. Here Aninat & Swinburn read the pages of the catalogue that corresponded to each exposition represented by the head stones, in order to tear out the relevant page, fold it and place it in the space in which the head stone had been. This doing was an oratorio in which the artists created a new expression which spontaneously became a group of isolated sounds that lost their meaning if heard simultaneously and out of their original context. By putting emphasis on the intonations and silences, the language spoken gained a theatrical character, in which the words, like sounds, projected themselves into the space. This ritual revealed the gallery to be almost an ideal space in time which seemed to stop, but also one that converted the spectator into an intruder.

“At the close of the exhibition EN MEMORIA, we burst on stage and we occupied it, to make the performance MEMORIA VELADA, associated with identity and memory of the Animal Gallery, perpetuated on the tombstones. These were removed from their place, exposing every niche or grave, to be resituated elsewhere stacked on each other, next to where owr stone was inscribed “EN MEMORIA”, which reflects our own memory. In this new appropriate scenario, at each open grave, we read aloud and in unison some words taken arbitrarily from the texts written by artists about their respective exposures. These quotes, taken from the catalog of the Animal Gallery, were deposited in each niche on the paper in which were transcribed. With this act we appropriate the message of each artist manipulating his way and re-enrolling in the tombs of their samples.When events in the last day of installation, when it was removed, performance time revealed itself in our sample, duration, assuming this transience as a conditioning factor of the meaning of the work. So, finally, we proceeded to remove the headstone inscribed “in memory” to replace it with the dates of beginning and end of the installation, thus registering our sample as part of the memory of the gallery and realizing, with this gesture , of its own death. Following our strategy, creative and like other works, tombstones and remains in memory have dealt with later in new facilities, presented in various exhibition spaces. In this shifting from one place to another we always quote previous works, which together with its objects have increasingly become fragments of our own collective memory as art.“