4orota 5onka/tys 6 7889

A Very Short Thought about Memory and the Preservation of Relational Art
Memory is not necessarily the capacity to store information, knowledge or event such interpretations undermine its potential, keeping it within a linear structure and misinterpreting its outcomes! Memory is neither the ability to contain nor can it be contained it is instead a process of linking, relating elements to each other over a wide rang of temporalities! The process fallows a pattern yet its structure does not necessarily fall within cause and effect it develops more than one connection at a given time which, in turn, all influences each other creating further links! The process evolved like a virus, yet it does not necessarily grow! "nstead each link or connection created is a potential, a possibility for a connection! Memory is thus the potential of and for connections where connections have the ability to be, but are not simultaneously! Memory is then perhaps where the interaction occurs, it is the action that is started not the process! The action activates the potential from a given point, activating memory which then spreads until something within its research grabs ones attention! #ithout a presence there is no memory without memory there is no interaction! #ithout interaction there is no memory! #ithout memory there is no potential without potential there is no need for presence! "t is perhaps in this sense that relational art can be conceived as an inevitable artistic practice! $idgia %lark&s practice works between the fine dynamics of macro' and micropolitics! As identified by Suely Rolnik in The Bodys Contagious Memory: Lygia Clarks Return to the Museum, it is hard to keep the dynamic between dichotomous yet indispensable and dependant spheres (environment) without them cancelling either one out and the same can be said about memory! *or Rolnik memory is the key to keeping the balance between the institutionali+ation of %lark&s work and its purpose! "t is through ,memory'building- that he intends to ,revive the potential- that her work had in its time! .et while this seems, at first hand, an effective approach it still falls within the institution! "n a way, %lark&s works activate memory and to free+e a selection of them seems the same as display ob/ects that relate to the events! The built memories are here caught outside the dynamics of what %lark&s works seemed to be about, where memory is constantly being destroyed and rebuilt, where it is in a never ending rethinking and reworking! The built memories have instead become ob/ects! 0nce ob/ects, these once memories become archives and loose their relational potential! 1ven though they are deemed original ob/ects of a genuine e2perience3act, they are only symbolic remains of %lark&s practice! They do not keep the memory from being forgotten for %lark&s work is /ust as individual as its patients3participants and as temporal as these individuals& lives! #e can only remember that such work once was or is being enacted, yet as a memory it fall within an ambiguous space where we neither can deny its e2istence nor identify it as such!