Paula / Patrick  and Carpe Diem Art and Research invite you to the exhibition

Unfolding Memories

In his essay 'Unpacking my Library', Walter Benjamin talks about the phenomenon of collecting books. He refers to the idea of collecting rather than a collection, and the memories that surge towards any collector as he/she contemplates his/her possessions. ‘Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories’, he explains. Certain objects hold a variety of meaning, and there are some that store it in a more powerful way than others. Memories are recreated and re-animated by these objects, they transform into self-references, self-portraits or mirrors; they remind us of something special about ourselves, something that we’ve experienced before and reappear in a different shape. (Along come a senseless desire to acquire, and through the repetition and accumulation of these experiences, collections of books, objects, images, or artworks are built.) 

Taken from the curator’s suitcase, the works included in Unfolding Memories have travelled from Portugal to the U.K. The exhibition gathers prints in limited editions of 30 made by artists who took part in the exhibition’s programme at Carpe Diem Art and Research in Lisbon. As in a retrospective or biographical analysis, they refer to past exhibitions where site-specific interventions existed for a limited period of time. Like the objects that disturb and produce changes in a collector’s memory, they appear as a series of artist’s impressions about their past and ephemeral interventions. They are a sort of footprint or trace of something that occurred but no longer exists – a collection of permanent, storable and tangible objects that recall the past, including its temporary events. As intimate as a journal –an open journal for others to read – the work is placed in the space of a private and domestic house. Unfolding Memories explore the ways memory can be stretched out, and the means by which it can be transformed and produce new meaning. Paula

López Zambrano

Saturday 22 March 2014

3pm to 9pm

Flat 2, 432 B Kings Road, SW10 0LJ

London, United Kingdom