Blood Remembering
© Juan Fabuel
year: 2010
technique: water, stones and photography. Archival pigment print on dibond
sizes: 98 x 125 cm - 64 x 80 cm
Blood Remembering began the day my father told me he would love to visit Rome once he recovered from his illness. He died a few months later, leaving his journey unfulfilled. The loss left me with many indescribable feelings, some revolving around the concept of 'unfinished.' This sensation of not being able to complete certain things in time left me in a very fragile state of mind. No one should leave things unresolved.
Some time later, I read fragments of Rainer Maria Rilke. He reflected on the aesthetic need to travel in order to accumulate experiences and memories that shape the life of an artist. This thought, which he referred to as Blood Remembering, made me think of art's potentiality to finish what was left incomplete.
I would be the one to travel to Rome; I would be the one observing the city in his place.
The project consists of a series of self-portraits in different locations around the city of Rome, evoking the notion of a travel diary. These images exist at the intersection of performance, visual arts, and autoethnography. By gazing at the scene, I emphasize the distance between the camera, the identity-less subject, and the observed.
Every journey involves certain things that must be remembered and others that must be forgotten. The necessity to safeguard such memories, away from the protective forces of oblivion, accentuates who we are in a particular moment of our lives.
I materialized these thoughts in the second part of my project through an ice installation. I used ice bricks containing frozen photographs to symbolize this desire to hold on. Each brick held a frozen image belonging to someone else's journey, sourced from flea markets around the city, and the water used to freeze them was rainwater collected during my stay in Rome.
My intention was to add a dynamic dimension to memories already frozen on paper. As the wall of ice melted, it left behind a flooded gallery filled with rainwater and photographic memories, now glued together—challenging the viewer to take the next step.
I wanted the viewer to dare to touch the remnants of my journey. Attempting to unglue the photographs with their hands meant tearing the paper in a random way. Destroying those photographs meant tearing the memories apart, because, in a sense, we cannot control the things we wish to remember. This action, taken by the viewers, completed my project.
In the end, it was all about letting go—even of the things we wish to keep frozen for ourselves.
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