Memory

As if some scary memory hidden away in some corner of my subconscious had put it on the alert against some imminent danger, my sense of smell was suddenly triggered in a quite exaggerated way a few years ago and a whole load of nameless odours invaded it as if a forgotten reality were all at once flowering before me. But the contact of the unnameable that prompts me to stretch my nose with the nosiness of dogs doesn’t keep me trapped in the world of presences, but very often brings back to me the smell of recollections lost in the thick mists of time.
For example, when I go to my parents’ house, even at the front door I know if my mother is at home, and with her scent — which is as old as I am — many others come back to me. I recall from one day when she was scolding me — for what, I can no longer say — the delicious scent of magnolias, which she must have been cutting in the garden, that completely saturated her. Memories, for me, have escaped the realm of more or less idealized narratives to become smells that I really sense, as if I could lift the lid off the jar of memory.
It seems perfectly clear that all of this must impregnate my work in some way or other, and I am happy to know that once they have left my hands, the people who acquire them and take care of them on my behalf still sense their smell. I recall it in my memory as I pace back and forth, barefoot, in my favourite corner of my studio.

Pep Agut
February 2009

A walk along a path in the forest.

A path that leads nowhere but to itself: it is circular. A walk that starts at any point on the path and ends and is left at any other point.

Because the path is always the same: it is a well-known fact that a circle has neither head nor tail.

A walk with my camera along a path in the forest.

Always the same.

The successive framings with the camera bring together in the film a succession of memory moments that I wanted to repeat.

Every moment of memory evaporates, as smells do.

Only the memory is left. Memory of memory.

Memories that pile up, mixing together one on top of another like smells. I would have liked to repeat them. I would have liked to rediscover that smell that I have lodged in my memory since I was born.

But it is not possible to step into the same memory twice.

In Bipolar what is shown above all are these moments of vacancy or breakdown of memory.

The double projection of the negatives of the images of the forest and those of the words that go with and are superimposed on them constructs an unbroken line in time.

Something that seems absurd, in reality, if you think about it. I mean, it seems absurd to draw an unbroken line. Like the line of my path in the forest, loaded down with camera, smells and memories, without being able to get out of the circle.

It is art that allows us to perform pirouettes of this kind in our lives, because art always looks at and shows things that are not seen.

Like smells.

Like memory.

Art brings us closer to the invisible. Perhaps because it always clothes itself in its own nakedness. Clothed in smells and memory, it makes it possible for a moment for us to feel we are bathing once again in what, in fact, happened a long time ago.

Pep Agut