Appropriations and memories
Joan Fontcuberta & Youssef Taki
from September 12, 2024 to October 12, 2024
Appropriations and memories presents a series of works by Youssef Taki and Joan Fontcuberta on the preservation and access to memory of our generation and how the democratising dream of its universal access conflicts with what type of memory is preserved, as well as by whom and how it is accessed.
On a superficial analysis, Vladimir Vernadski and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's notion of the noosphere may seem as a reality forged by the internet or the cloud as a universal, democratic and profuse memory of humanity, accessible to anyone from anywhere. But nothing could be further from the truth. Youssef Taki's External Memories project or Joan Foncuberta's Googlegramas lead us towards very different paths.
In his work, Taki recovers migrant stories that have been distorted, hypermediatised and dehumanised by the media in order to reconstruct the digital memory of migrants and displaced people who are forgotten. Migrants tend to lose or erase them due to the absence of a place to keep this information because of inaccessibility to traditional storage media or simply to a computer. Yousef Taki collects and restores hard disks and external drives from old computers, recovered from flea markets and second-hand shops, in order to restore them and turn them into a useful external memory from which to rescue the information they contain, which we can now access in this exhibition.
Foncuberta's L'Origine du monde ("The Origin of the World") is a googlegram, a photographic mosaic created from the Google search engine that locates all the available images according to a search criterion determined by certain key words in order to reconstruct an iconic image of our culture, in this case, Courbet's L'Origine du monde. With this device he reveals to us the ways of accessing this infinite memory fund, fed not always consciously by ourselves, and how both the logical accidents of the search engine and its censorship, hierarchies and filters end up imposing their own reality on each search, reconstructing our memory.
Ramón Mateos.