Memory of the City

Abstract

The project discusses the relation between photography’s capacity to both objectively document fragments of material reality (measuring parameters such as colour, scale, light, and shadow), and to evoke subjective experiences, as acting in the field of memory, in dialogue with what is already known. Through a multitude of photos of urban settings, the project explores the use of the photographic medium as a mean to produce urban narratives. The illustrations argue that multivalence of interpretations of history and memory is not possible only through text and verbal transmission, but also through the image. Facts and personal memories in each shot are brought back to multi-dimensionality in a reiterative process of overlapping several exposures of different spaces. The process successively creates new visuals that contain layered graphical information of both temporal and geographical variability of the urban environment. Results take the forms of new independent and non-yet-existing urban landscapes. Each of them is at the same time apparition – jamais vu – and a postcard from awoken dreams. And both serve as premises for the future memories of the city.