A memory can only ever be experienced in one direction: backwards – or so it seems. With Take a Memory Barnas attempts to disrupt this linear sense of recollection. Looking out at the landscape and the rolling hills of Vidigueira through the large windows, the first line of her poem, Take a memory up the hill, placed on the glass, invites you to attempt the impossible: to experience a memory forwards. If language has its limits, it also has the capacity to exceed them; through it, and through imagination, the physically impossible becomes conceivable.
A memory exists in the space between the concrete and the abstract: between the lived moment and its recollection, which is always also an interpretation, never the thing itself. You try to hold on to it, yet it slips through your fingers. Yet, we cannot say that a memory is only one or the other. In the spirit of Spinoza: everything – an action, a thought, a memory – is merely an expression of the single true substance of life. This movement between forms becomes tangible as you walk back from the hill toward the exhibition space. Another line on the window asks: Do you remember?
Barnas’ work invites us to engage carefully with our memories, to attend to how they are formed and continuously reshaped. It is a brief resistance to the fleetingness of time.
Take a Memory is on display at the restaurant of Quinta do Quetzal.
Curated by Aveline de Bruin
The project is made possible through the generous support of the Mondrian Fund.
