mapigilthings

The individual becomes aware of himself and his relationship with the external world through his capacity of learning. Memory is an essential part of the learning process, without it, experiences would get lost and human being would not be able to acquire knowledge. Remembering is a way of retrieving or localizing the information that has been stored.

What would happen if we could access that storage?

There is a phenomenon, which often follows amnesia. It is called confabulation, consists in inventing facts that have never existed and understand them as if they were real. This fact happens because our brain has a “button” that can erase parts of our memory. In terms of behavioral disorders, this “button” works in an arbitrary way. As the brain, is an organ that doesn’t admit empty spaces, when it searches for memory that has been deleted  without any command, brain recognize it, and fills in those hollows which information that has been created by its own fantasy.

To create this phenomenon brain doesn’t let the individual realize his own consciousness and environment, so it starts building a world, in which fiction and reality are at the same level.

I have started this project using a graduation class photo of 1963 with students, who were 20 years old. I have changed each of their portraits, deforming their heads and making each photo look more childish.

Now, all of them are in their sixties, although their lives have played out in different ways, they still remember their university years and meet all together in diverse celebrations. It seems as if they were trapped in that period of time, or if they had necessity to recognize themselves again.

In these paintings, the time factor fuses in some kind of age cocktail of each character, immersing the audience in a time machine.

Portraits are surrounded of a new scene and different objects and shapes which all together rebuild a new iconography, giving the character a new invented identity, in which reality and fiction are indistinguishable. There is no separation between real history and tail, not even between the I and the other.