What images remain in a people's collective memory? How to even begin to think about memory today, between the cloud, social media and generative AI? And yet, the most interesting question remains: if it were still possible to take the time to reflect and make choices, what would each of us choose to remember?
In the long gestation of Memory Palace, the starting point was a text that the artist began writing in 2024, a fictional narrative punctuated with references and quotations (Borges, Bashevis Singer, Krasznahorkai, García Márquez). Through an accumulation of dialogues and observations, non-linear genealogies begin to take shape, with a mythical origin in Mesopotamia, those of the "peoples of the forests, lagoons and steppes" who, before Babel, spoke only one language. To analyze traces of the passage of time and construct his video work, Cogitore assembled a heterogeneous corpus of images linked through emotion: 400 hours of amateur footage drawn from public and private archives in Europe and the United States, dating from the period of the "economic miracle" following the end of the Second World War. Added to these emotional archives are short sequences created using generative AI that was fed the archival elements selected for editing. These images fill gaps in the human archive and contaminate the narrative, producing peripheral anomalies that are difficult to immediately identify.
The "home movies" bring together moments of joy, emotion and connection. Mostly filmed by men, they project the optimistic vision of the heirs of European modernity, enriched by its wars and pillaging. What remains after perpetual violence? "You know, inside me, there are so many of us, and no peace ever reigns." Moving back through time, the story of violence is repeated over and over again: "Hell is real. It moves across the surface of the earth. And in each of our children, it makes its way." Exhausted by this story, who would not rather remember the story of peace, perpetual peace? Close your eyes, feel, remember. Or let the angel of oblivion do its work to the annihilating strains of Cantenac Dagar.
Kathryn Weir
