[re]establishing forgotten sites
EXPLORING AUTHENTICITY & IMMITATION
When exploring my family home's formal dining room, which hasn't been used for years, I was drawn to the detail in the fire place. Traces of smoke tinge the backing and specs of ash lie on the tiling below. These remnants prompt memories of roasting marshmallows on the hot coals.
A similar fireplace sits in my bedroom, same detailing and structures, yet this fireplace is just for decoration; it has no chimney and thus cannot be used. Pinecones rest where the coal should be.
“We leave traces of ourselves wherever we go, on whatever we touch.”
Lewis Thomas (1990). A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays
Traces left behind on the white walls from the previous tenants of the appartment
Recording the marks and scuffs on the wall created some sort of speculative narration about the previous tenants; they threw their shoes against the walls of the walk-in-wardrobe, they had a desk that sat below the window, now outlined in grey, and they hung their favourite artwork above the television.
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Can a trace be honest? How do we begin to speculate the authenticity of an memory?
Fabricated traces of new scenarios
From left: the original version of the oil painting Ecce Homo by Elias Garcia Martinez; and the attempted restoration by Cecilia Giménez.
Recreating an object by casting the original allowed me to dictate the similarities and differences between the original and the imitation. Side by side, the physical similarity is uncanny.
How is the percieved value of an object impacted through mass-production and reproduction?
How are we able to distinguish the authentic from the imitated?
In exploring the functions of an orange, and testing those functions on an imitated orange (made of plaster), I found that there were few that I was able to do on the latter. I was able to recreate the actions "zest" and "peel", yet the outcome was starkly different. The peel crumbled, and the zest became a pile of grated shards.
Why is it necessary to identically recreate something that already exists?
Could reproduction be defined as a physical representation of the memory of an object?