Memories
Bachelard points out that memories are static, and the more firmly they are fixed in space, the more stable they become. The time that is recalled is always immobile.
Memories are vivid and precious, but always prone to deflection, rewritten by the emotions and positions in the people who possess them. In Leopard's Trace, Woo Hong writes that memories are like shadows that cannot be cut down and preserved for collection, but can occur and disappear at any time and belong only to the present moment.
The translucent eyes and hands in Julia Maiuri's paintings emphasise this Rashomon of memory - eyes looking into hidden corners of the room, fingers crossing over to us and pointing to something or someone in the space - as if to suggest that there is always some truth lurking beyond memory. Her work is inspired by the fact that her parents have two very different narratives of the night they met.
Baudrillard, Jean, and Alain Willaume. “21.” Essay. In Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? London: Seagull Books, 2016.
Sachs, Isabel. “‘My Creative Process Is Informed by a Combination of Personal Experiences, Mythology, Found Images, Music, and Movies.’” Floorr. Floorr, June 13, 2019. https://www.floorrmagazine.com/issue-20/julia-maiuri.
Nostalgia: Y2K style
In the pre-2000 era of Chinese society, the past had not become a wholly alien and heterogeneous thing that people could revive through their memories, due to the lack of accessibility to the Internet or further complex reasons. The past and the present of today have become incompatible parts. Today we are at the point of intersection of disconnection. We are already aware of the cut-off from the past, but on the other hand, it is not yet so alien that we can still recall enough of it. In this embarrassing situation, the need for a concrete incarnation of memory arises. Thus, the y2k style was born.
The basic reason for nostalgia is" to bring events to a standstill, to stop forgetting for a while, to fix the state of changing things, to make the invisible past tangible". The desire for nostalgia nowadays has given rise to an awareness of remembrance and a desire for archives.
Archive
"Freud makes an important distinction: ‘Every effort was made to preserve Pompeii, whereas people were anxious to be rid of tormenting ideas like his.’ Here the association proves paradoxical. The formative phases and events of human childhood, archaic memories, and feelings are preserved, like artifacts in the tombs of ancient civilizations, but by the mechanism of repression. Repression at once erases and encrypts traumatic memories. They are buried and thus preserved like relics in the unconscious which is, as Derrida has helped us to recognize, the Freudian archive.21 Analysis is not only excavation; it is at the same time something more shocking: exhumation. In this double form, analysis does not, however, aim at merely re-archiving relics in the psychic museum."
Humans build museums in order to preserve them forever, and I have always felt compelled to build archives of experience in my own body. Separation with anyone can happen at any time and all I can do is after that secretly copy the habits of my friends that I notice and absorb them into myself like a sponge so that they become mine. As I go forward in life, interacting with strangers, it's like taking all my old friends with me. This way I feel peaceful and not alone; I am an archive of my past.
All Men Are Mortal
A fictional novel by Simone de Beauvoir. A man who is immortal explains why immortality is a curse. When he has just achieved immortality, he feels proud and utterly free, as he says: "The past is gone from me, I am no longer tied to things: no memories, no love, no duties." While with the loneliness of long years, the things that were valuable to him disappeared forever, he did not dare to love people nor could he love his children, because to him they were already dead. He is jealous of people who will die, as he puts it the future of death is what creates the living present. Reading this story at a time when I was mimicking life as an immortal awakened my taste for existentialism.
Vortex
The viewer is left with nowhere to escape from the naked, straightforward stare at ageing and degeneration throughout the film. The heroine, suffering from Alzheimer's, vainly searches for a sense of control in the routine of everyday life. And when death comes, the things that were real and cherished in lives seem to turn to dust all at once and are easily blown away. Death is the ultimate loss of the meaning of mundane life.