Memoriae

This presentation brings together personal experience and collective historical knowledge. An exhibition using two meaningful objects from Mário Mendes’ ancestors, a limestone sphere (decorative/architectural element from the artist’s grandparents’ house) and an old toy (a plastic turtle from the 1960s).

The metonymic nature of objects and images from the past frequently manifests itself when these get installed in the field of art. This reuse is a particular repetition that uses the originals, emphasizing in that way the present those objects and images from the past. A process considering the face-to-face component of the object as a way to summon the viewer and to circumscribe the contextual approach.

A discourse on what memory is and how it manifests itself will be one associating different times and understanding the operations that constitute mnemonization. From that same prelection we can extrapolate that individually, memory is a museum in each of us, just like we are our past and the way we repeat it's matters, using difference. A repetition that will be the very own imminence that combines historical experience and affection, and in which an individual experience is the basic element constituent of collective memory. That basic element possesses a face-to-face nature, but manifests itself in silence,

Mário Mendes

‍

Objetos

The objects here presented belong to a private sphere, originally placed in front of books on a shelf inhabited over time by objects, in a gesture that is continuous and devoid of any sense, apart from an occupation of the space found to be. If, on one hand, some objects were placed there intentionally, others show up from just being left behind by chance by one person or many people that hung out in that space. Lacking any function, besides occupying space and memory, these objects have two kinds of grandeur: objects collected all over the world, disregarding all their intelligible parts; and objects given to the world. Not meaning to annihilate the contingent memory of the objects, it is disregarded, remaining only the selective memory of some objects or accepting the appearance of others by chance.

The passage of these objects from the private to the public sphere is not meant to add anything to them, it is just an unfolding of an innate and replicable gesture.

This gesture can be found in any of us, waiting to be shared.  

Pedro Carvalho de Ferro