MEMORY PALACE 2.0 pleasure_and_sadness
at Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix in London, United Kingdom, 2024
ARTIST STATEMENT
My second London solo show at Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix, Memory Palace 2.0: pleasure_and_sadness is an on-going project aimed towards the preservation of important moments, places, and people in my life through new lens-based technologies. Inspired by the ancient Greek mnemonic technique, the memory palace or method of loci uses a memorized space and distinct features as a way of organizing and storing information in the mind, so that one can simply venture to that location and find the information there. Knowing that my house was going to be demolished, I turned to using 360 degree video, augmented reality, and photogrammetry to try and create a virtual memory palace. These techniques are in use through academia, commerce and industry including the preservation of archaeological dig sites, 360 degree virtual tours in real estate, and land surveying and development. The circumstances of losing my home made for the perfect intersection of these technologies and I aimed to use them towards a more human end by using them to explore a narrative and emotional dimension, and adding to the greater lens-based practice of preservation and documentation.
The project combines hours of 360 degree spherical footage shot during the pandemic with many more years worth of smartphone photos and digital camera footage, allowing the past to hold the same space as the present and making memories tangible. The resulting 360 videos each encompass an important space in the house, showing various moments over the first year of the pandemic as well as smartphone and digital camera footage laid within the space. As well, the Memory Palace AR App allows the user to interact with digital prints of 3D models, and Layka’s old sweaters to let people interact with the 3D models in space, and view videos of Layka wearing those respective objects, with the augmented reality animating those objects, making clear the weight these objects hold.
Though losing that home was very difficult, this wasn’t the first time I had experienced the loss of a cherished home, as my childhood was spent going back and forth between Canada and Chile and living in an apartment in my grandmother's sprawling property. From the time I was a baby until I was 7 years old I would spend up to a year at a time living in Chile, with my grandmother Alba and aunt Lucia upstairs, my aunt Monica and uncle Pancho, and cousins Carolina and Francisco living across the yard, and their maid Ines who we loved, and family barbecues and many wonderful memories surrounded by my mothers family.
After my parents divorced, visits became years and years apart. I went back in 2003, staying with my aunt and uncle for my 14th birthday. My grandmother was still alive and living in her house with my aunt, and although the house was grand, it had decayed significantly. She passed in 2005 and the house that was the center of my family sat as an abandoned ruin until it was sold in 2010 and became the site of a condo tower. I visited again in 2013 but the house was gone and my aunt Monica was years into a long battle with liver cancer, though ultimately she would pass in 2018. It wasn’t until 2022, once Memory Palace was installed, that I was able to go back to Quilpue and visit my family again though there was now a concrete wall blocking me off from what used to be my home. My aunt had passed, and the place and time that was my home had never been further away.
After returning from Chile with 360 videos and 3D scans of my family’s homes, I began to gather photos and videos as I did before, except I found a video I recorded in 2003, documenting and narrating my passage through my old apartment, and into my grandmothers house where her and my aunts were gathered. As I had been working with using video stills to create 3D models of my old home in Edmonton, the next step was to apply techniques of photogrammetry to my family's old VHS tapes. The results are unprecedented, leading to the creation of a large scale 3D model of my grandmother's house, her portrait from 2003, and a portrait of my uncle Pancho in 1993. Since the late 90s only a handful of academic papers have been authored about using photogrammetry and VHS footage to create 3D models, but it has never been done at this scale resulting in 3D models and images that, while low resolution, have all the warmth and fuzz of VHS.
The gallery is divided into the recent past upstairs, with VR headsets showing two Memory Palace 360 videos, The Yard and The Living Room, as well as prints of my old home and Layka’s AR enabled mementos. As the viewer moves to the downstairs gallery, the viewer literally descends deeper into the artist's past, with panoramic prints made of VHS stills, the 3D models of my grandma, her house, and my uncle, as well two more 3D scans from my mist recent visit to Chile where the first step in this project is documented in a video projection featuring the pivotal 2003 VHS that I recorded and narrated myself as a teenager.
Though this all began with one of the most difficult times of my life, the results have allowed me to reanimate the past and interact with it in new ways. In this tumultuous era of social upheaval, oppression of the many by the few, and the destruction of the important places of our past and present with no regard for the future, there are still new methods to be found and new technologies that might yet let us interface with the past, but preserve what little we still have left.
Memory Palace 2.0: pleasure_and_sadness runs from July 18th to September 14th, 2024 at Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix in London, United Kingdom.
This project is generously support by the Edmonton Arts Council and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts
Download the Memory Palace AR App for Android
Download the Memory Palace AR App for iOS