CADA PALABRA ALGUNA VEZ FUE UN POEMA. CADA HILO, UNA IMAGEN

Site-specific interactive installation, mixed media, 2012

Why do we forget? Why do we sometimes remember to have forgotten?

This installation was made for the exhibition Alzheimer at Parque Cultural Valparaíso, a contemporary art centre built within a former prison. Its title draws on Emerson’s phrase “Every word was once a poem” — extended here, in my own reading, toward the thread: each thread, too, an image. I take the phrase as a way of naming that intermediate zone of memory where oblivion resides: a region that appears empty, but remains full of memory.

Each thread that composes the installation marks a barrier to past events that memory has marginalised — traces I try to make visible, to somehow bring into presence. Each thread is the projection of an image, and holds a story that can be told, or that can remain in silence.

Presented as part of ALZHEIMER, Parque Cultural Valparaíso (former prison), Chile, 2012.