UV print on PVC foam board
90x90cm
As a seemingly objective and documentational medium, photography—including both the initial act of photo-taking as well as subsequent photo review—has since its invention always played a substantial role in externally storing and recalling memories based on visual representations. However, while looking at pictures displaying personal experiences from one’s own childhood, it commonly seems impossible to connect with these autobiographical scenarios or to recognize the depicted person as oneself, a prevalent situation in the context of photographs taken throughout early childhood, during which the inner awareness of one’s existence as a time-based entity with a complex, chronological storyline—the so-called concept of autonoesis—has not yet evolved neurologically.
Additionally, associating these external narratives with one’s current identity becomes especially difficult under the aspect of infantile amnesia, a phenomenon expressing the lack of memories and specifically of distinct episodic recollections from these first years of one’s life. According to neuroscientific research on the topic, while the memory-processing areas of the brain are not yet fully developed during infancy, partial memories of sensory input or vague still images may later on transform into coherent autobiographical narratives. However, how well-defined can these memories actually become? Or are our apparent childhood memories actually mere imaginations of what might have been, constructed subconsciously on the basis of external cues and representations?
In a metamorphic process, the amount of pixels within the artist’s baby photo was continuously reduced and subsequently recalculated to its original image size, the reconstruction error leading to a visual distortion—emerging both due to the previous compression steps and the randomized overlay of these different versions—acting as an analogy of the unsuccessful attempt of recovering irreversibly faded childhood memories in their full clarity.
(2024)