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| Monuments for a Walk [artist book] 2011 digital print on Fabriano Rosapina paper | |||
Influenced by Frances Yates’ The Art of Memory, which explores the ancient rhetorical device of using architectural space as a mnemonic, I have documented a walk to and from work in Venice, over the course of two months. Monuments on the streets triggered memory and thus navigated my way. A monument, from the Latin monere ‘remind’, might be anything from a statue to pastries in a window. Architecture can be thought of as an exteriorisation of psychological space. When we don’t know a city, it feels uncanny (from un ‘not’ + the Indo-European root of canny and can: 'to know’), and only once we commit it to memory can we interiorise it and gain a sense of inner order. Place names on buildings and bridges can be mnemonics too, and when foreign, often provide links to disparate and unanticipated ideas. Therefore the content of the Venetian mnemonics might equally be Venice itself or somewhere else and of another time altogether. Monuments for a Walk is a book containing 100 photographs of architectural mnemonics. The book can be read forwards, or rotated and read backwards, depending on whether the reader wants to view the fifty photographs of my route to work in the morning or the fifty of the return walk in the evening. Concertina pages depict diversions in route and times in which I got lost. The book is colour-tinted where colour is integral to the particular memory. Monuments for a Walk was made possible with the help of the Arts Council of Wales at the 54th Venice Biennale of Art. |
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