TATIANA SOUTHEY-BASSOLS

Objects often become vehicles to preserve and activate memory. Through the act of collecting rocks, I have attached meanings over time contingent to place and circumstance. In autumn 2012, I collected my first rock (marble) from the Estremoz Quarry in Evora, Portugal. This rock, a luxurious commodity in some contexts, is locally a useful addition to construction needs, used for workmen’s kitchens and bathrooms. In my experience, the quarry becomes a theatre, in which the manipulation of the found materials highlights the separation between the ground ‘visitor’ level and the reality of the miners below. A theatre reflects a space that is produced through repetitive physical and psychic movement, resulting in the multiple possibilities of reception of the performance. Deleuze suggests ‘in the theatre of repetition, we experience pure forces, dynamic lines in space which act without intermediary upon the spirit’ (2001:10). My perception of the miners repetitive movement in the void changes as we move. We used the marble blocks as the perimeter for inhabitation, becoming seats and ladders to inform this informal construction. In the act of using our own bodies to transform the space, our perception simultaneously transformed giving new meaning to the scarred landscape. Other rocks from around the world followed, locations including Dungeness (U.K), Naples (Italy), Burgos (Spain), and Porto (Portugal) each with new meaning and signification. Whilst differing in textures, they stem from the same source, meeting at different points in time. The juxtapositions of different readings of the same material reflect how objects contain meanings beyond what we associate with their origins.

 

The methodology of incorporating the location from which I am writing informs the critique of the object (the rock). The intimate encounters within the internal space of the print room become a facilitator to re-write the landscapes that I have traversed, reconnecting the collected fragment back to the landscape.

 

My perceptions differ as modes of recollection and future projections, which alternate. This includes the etching room at Westminster School and the Slade (UCL) print room. Through my interactions with the collected objects and experiential recollections, my aim is to realise the notion of ‘intertwined time’ discussed by Benjamin in relation to Proust in which the past alludes to the future.