Key Concepts, Definitions, and References.

 

 

Affective Assemblage

 

The piece that I present here is a kind of "affective assemblage," according to the terminology used by O'Sullivan and collected in the Sara Andersdotter's Thesis "Chocking on the madeleine." I use still image, video, sounds and objects with which I look for push the viewer of their perception habits and produce an "Encounter."

 

Attention - Perception

 

Such an encounter, or 'accessing' of the event, might involve what Henri Bergson calls attention; ¨The suspension of normal motor activity which in itself allows other 'plans' of reality to become perceivable. The attention supposes, in principle, a transformation of the mental field, a new way, for the conscience, of being present before its objects.¨ (P50 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Spanish Ed). 

Perceive, according to Merleau-Ponty is not to experience a multitude of impressions that entail memories capable of completing them; it is to see how an immanent sense emerges from a constellation of data, without which it is not possible to invoke any of the memories (P44).

 

 

 

Therefore, this should not be just a set of random elements. It is necessary to generate a space that allows detonating a process of interaction of memories and emotions.

 

 

 

Layers - Recollections - Memory - Remember

 

Layers as a metaphor of Memory

 

 

It is not the same recollection as memory. Recollection is an accounting word, we can collect it, while the memory is something more abstract impossible to quantify and very difficult to define. Bergson considers memory not as a chronologically organized archive but as a compressed whole of experiences and events.

 

Remembering on its part involves an action a process of penetrating in our memories. ¨To remember is not to put under the gaze of consciousness a picture of the past subsisting in itself, it is to grasp into the horizon of the past and progressively develop its encapsulated perspectives until the experiences that it sums up are lived again in its temporary situation. " (P44 Ponty). In other words, remembering involves entering in the memory. So that whole experience can carry memories and emotions separately or in a kind of pastiche. 

I personally like the etymology of remembering in Spanish. The word "recordar"(remember) comes from the Latin "recordari," formed of re (again) and ¨cordis¨ (heart). Remembering means much more than having someone present in your memory. It means "going through the heart again."

 

 

 

Affect

 

The implication of affect in aesthetic experience is what underpins the power of art to make us feel and act differently (p63 Kristeva Reframed by Estelle Barret). For Kristeva art or aesthetic experience is a practice that constitutes both a subject (a sense of self), as well as an object that has the power to transform meaning and consciousness. She views the production of a work of art as continuous with the production of the life of the individual, as a dynamic and performative process that moves between and across embodied experience, biological processes and social and institutional discourses. (introduction Kristeva Reframed by Estelle Barret).  Kristeva theorizes affect as an aspect of pre-verbal processes at work in aesthetic experience, and this emphasizes the distinction between affect and emotion. Affect and Emotions are two different things. Emotions are collections of nonverbal responses, which can be observed externally by physical responses, whereas feeling or affect is an internal experience which is poised at the threshold between being and knowing  (Damasio 1999: 42).

 

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There are too many personal interferences that the artist cannot take into account. The artist is not authorized to instruct the observer. "We do not have to transform viewers into actors or ignorant into learned. What we have to do is recognize the knowledge that works in the ignorant and the activity of the spectator "( Jaques The emancipated spectator p.23 Spanish Ed.)

 

That he is not an actor as Rancière defends does not mean that he does not have an active role, at least as I see it. For it is at the end the viewer through the process of understanding what is exposed to it, if we as artists manage to awaken his attention, he will activate a series of mental and physical actions.

 

What happens is that I can not see what the spectator sees. Bergson affirms that we can only see what we have already seen.

On the other hand, the recollections are not static; they are modified by emotions and by a series of external factors that we filter. Some studies suggest that remembering and imagining awaken similar regions of the hippocampus, in addition to, these two different functions share neuronal processes.

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Thanks

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I would like to thanks Rodrigo Uceda and Guillermo Campón for their invaluable help during the editing of the video and the audio respectively.

Jane Pickersgill for her work sewing the fabrics of my installation and for how much I have learned with her working together in the collaboration that we have carried out "The Nature of Materials."

I would also like to thank my partner Loles Sanchis and my parents Jose and Mari Carmen for all the support, hours of listening and advices they have given me during these two years of Master that now conclude.

Finally, I would like to thank all my tutors, Edwina Fitzpatrick, Ian Monroe, Jessica Voorsanger, and Mark Fairnington for all their work and dedication in trying to become better artists.

 

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