12/9/2012
Engrams
22,48 m2, Paris
Working on the assumption that bodies, things, and places might, similar to the brain, have a memory that materializes in a discreet, interstitial, and non-linguistic manner, the exhibition challenges the question of a biography of organic and inorganic matter by trying to articulate it plastically.
Pierre Derrien, Alessandro Di Pietro, Ji-Youn Lee, Sergio Verastegui
curator Simone Frangi
In neurophysiology an engram refers to a biological memory trace in the brain. Working on the assumption that
bodies, things, and places might, similar to the brain,
have a memory that materializes in a discreet, interstitial, and non-linguistic manner, the exhibition Engrams
challenges the question of a biography of organic and
inorganic matter by trying to articulate it plastically.
Using a principle of production that’s based on the reworking of recovered items, the project aims at taking into
account the flow of material memory and the fast development of its role of testimony. Engrams reconstructs - in
a fragmentary and non-anecdotic way - the life of certain
places by activating the narrative potential of its “discarded materials”. It questions the authority of physical matter and its biographical overload: the objects manipulated
by the artists are impregnated with traces of memory
which can’t be ignored as they wait to be reanimated.
In setting up a dynamic system of transfer and osmosis between the interior of the gallery and the exterior
of the urban environment, Engrams calls up a series of questions centred on the impossibility of
a neutral and impassive artistic practice. The exhibition approaches the question of traces in different ways: sedimentation, ephemera, fragments.
In a sense Engrams is meant to be a “recording” strategy, a temporal, non idealized and physical medium to challenge the prevalent logic by discretely filtrating into the city’s social environment through the analysis of the items it has chosen to abandon.
Simone Frangi
(translated by FRANK’S)
Image: Alessandro Di Pietro, 18, scanned surface, digital file, 2012
For more information please contact:
Margherita Poli margherita.poli@2248m2.org
Opening Thursday 13 September 2012, 6pm - 10pm
22,48m2
30 rue des Envierges 75020 Paris