Je me souviens de mes souvenirs

Artist Statement: 

Je me souviens de mes souvenirs - (I remember my memories)

The Intent: Remembering the Memory

Je me souviens de mes souvenirs (I remember my memories) explores the friction between the original experience and the act of recollection. Using a custom-built algorithmic pipeline, I process my travel archives through a digital "latent space" that mirrors the instability of human memory. The visual output is not a literal recreation but an algorithmic reimagining governed by my own physiology; video sequences of my own ocular movements act as the control mechanism for the generative engine. By peering into the works in this exhibition, the viewer witnesses the mind’s restless attempt to render the past - an eye moving frantically as images are reconstructed and voices from the past resurface, providing a literal window and "ear" into how we remember our memories.

The Artist as Recording Mechanism

This exploration is rooted in my role as a biological recording mechanism during my travels - from a 30-day walk through Southern France to solo treks along the Haute Route and the GR20. Carrying a camera as a prosthetic extension of my own sight, I captured thousands of images not as traditional photographs, but as raw data points. I sought to "scan" my environment, critically observing patterns, textures, and color fields as a temporal record of my movement through the landscape - a high-fidelity map of experience designed to be deconstructed. While these files have since aged into a digital archive, they now function as catalysts: the seeds used to elicit a memory-forming experience.

The Mnemonic Vessels

The work is housed within three Mnemonic Vessels - physical sites that hold the weight of adventures now passed and act as the necessary architecture for the digital reconstruction of my journeys. Each vessel is equipped with a localized soundscape - an amalgamation of audio journaling and field recordings captured along the way - providing a sensory grounding to the shifting digital visuals.

• Painted House - serves as a vessel for a journey through Thailand, its form echoing the traditional architecture of the region.

• Traveling Trunk - adorned with my family crest and a hand-painted motif referencing my grandparents’ luggage - bridges my personal history with my ancestral past, housing the visual data of my walk through Southern France.

• Telescope - functions as a long-range lens into my most recent solo explorations of the Fisherman's Trail and the high Alpine routes, peering into the vastness of the recollected landscape.

  
  

The Resting State

To counter the frenetic nature of the video components, the exhibition includes a series of minimalist works on paper. These pieces represent the "resting state" of the mind - the silent void from which memory emerges. A single, vibrant circle of color sits within this space, acting as the seed or genesis point of an idea - a suggestion that memory isn't just the "frenetic" part - it’s also the quiet, void-like space between the flashes of recall. They offer the viewer a moment of recalibration: a quiet breath between the echoes of a journey experienced in the field and later reconstituted through the sensory tools used to visualize the act of remembering. 

In essence, these works explore the internal physiology of the "double memory," asking what it feels like to inhabit a past that has been captured, encoded, and ultimately reimagined.