REBUILDING THE MEMORY SPACE is the title of Nadiya Svirsky's 2021 BFA thesis: a cross-disciplinary body of work, pictured here in an imagined digital installation, accompanied by a written text that lands somewhere between a Thesis document and a personal essay.
ReBuilding the Memory Space
1.When I Say Memory Space...
2.Remembering is Preserving, Destroying, Rewriting
3.Superstructures and Anchors
4.Tunnels, Stairwells, Portals
5.From Empty Ruins, A Myth, or, Why I Make What I Make
1. When I say Memory Space...
When I say memory space, I am talking of memory as an architectural realm, separate from the physical world.
In contemporary psychology, memory is separated into three types; Episodic, Semantic and Procedural Memory. These classifications were coined by psychologist Endel Tulving in 1972, referring to the distinction between knowing and remembering: knowing is factual recollection (semantic) whereas remembering is a feeling that is located in the past (episodic). The kind of memory I am concerned with is not a short-term memory that enables us to complete quotidian tasks (procedural) or remember how to speak languages (semantic) but rather a more long-reaching memory, one which gives shape to our formative experiences and provides a framework for the conceptualization of our lives, our upbringings, our root systems. Here, and from here on, I am talking of Episodic Memory. Episodic memory is said to be the store of the autobiographical events in the life of the individual and is organized according to the time, space and other qualities of the specific event or events. I visualize episodic memory as an interstitial realm between our physical reality, our experiences and our sense of self. I have come to consider memory as a vast phenomenon that becomes a place, or realm, unto itself over time, through accumulation, bricolage and erasure of numerous experiences, layered over one another; a domain that is separate from the material world and physical experience. This realm is the subject of my fixation, a realm I yearn to immerse myself and others in through my work.
2. Remembering is Preserving, Destroying, Rewriting
Episodic memory is fickle in that it is both slippery and impressionable. This is because it is perpetually constructive rather than fixed; a memory does not get sealed and fossilized or stored in a tamper proof, leak proof cabinet in our minds. Instead, the memory is permeable, susceptible to bleeding into the surrounding memorial material of our minds. Every time we recall a memory, we reassemble it, tainting it with cross-contamination from our surrounding material, leaving marks of other experiences and episodes on it before it returns to the unreliable archive of our mind once more. Experiences get layered over one another, painting a picture of our past that starts to feel less specific, less linear in time. Think of a place from your childhood, one you have revisited both physically and mentally. Is it clear? Could you recall accurately a specific experience you had there from one point in time? I think the accuracy of that remembrance declines in correlation with how many times you have had similar experiences, how many times you've looked at old photographs of that place, how you’ve felt every time you recalled this instance.
The abstraction of episodic memory is largely inevitable. It is subjective, and it is inherently meaningful because the ways in which we come to remember things reinforces our beliefs about our experience, builds them into more symbolic structures that have more space for meaning-making.
3. Superstructures and Anchors
A defunct structure is a moving anchor; I am interested in architecture and familial sites as potent carriers of memory, history and attachment.
I grew up in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine. There are certain landmarks from that city that have etched their marks into my memory, my sense of the place that I was born in, a place that has moved on without me in it. I cling onto these landmarks as the space between my life there and here, here and now widens.
One such landmark is the Hotel Parus/ Парус (Sail); a building that I have made work about last year in a series of multi-plate etchings. A landmark feature of the Dnipro waterfront, an unoccupied enigma, a distant memory of Soviet Modernism. I was too young to know what that meant back then.
More than 40 years passed since construction started on the Hotel Parus yet it has still not opened for business. Some blame the fall of the Soviet Union, others cite poorly managed funds. After the collapse of the USSR, looters became rife and stripped the building of anything of value, including windows and doors from their frames, copper wiring and other building materials. The hulking form of Parus is a dominating presence on the shoreline of the city. An intended symbol of Soviet success turned symbol of failure, then wreckage, free advertisement space, collective eyesore, and finally a canvas for reclaiming and redefining cultural identity on an otherwise useless and dysfunctional building.
The Hotel is a time capsule. The Hotel is a record of history. The Hotel is a shape-shifter in the eyes of the people who witnessed it erected from the ground and those who now witness it sinking back into the bed of the shore, unable to act. The Hotel is an anchor in my mind, mooring me to the city I lived in, the city I could have lived in.
Another such landmark is the defunct Soviet-era restaurant called Mayak/ Mаяк (The Lighthouse). Built in 1979, the structure stands from a tall vantage point, overlooking the Dnipro river and the Monastyrskiy Island. The appearance of the building is in line with the wave or soviet brutalist and modern architecture that went up in Dnipropetrovsk in the late 20th century. A style that sought to make buildings look like something out of science fiction, maybe. Perhaps that is why they have lodged themselves as strongly as they have in my psyche; a restaurant that looks like a fortress, a shoreline hotel that looks like a sail, a circus that looks like a spaceship. Made of concrete. Built to last.
I do not know when the restaurant closed down or became defunct, as a child I never thought to ask. Like the rest of the abandoned iconic architecture in the city, it remains standing with only the seemingly minor interventions of the wearing of graffiti, the elements, time. It reminds the city of it’s ambitious, forward looking Soviet past, and of the disintegration of those ambitions and lost futures. These structures are kept erect, anchoring the citizens of the city to its’ past, but they are not preserved. The anchor moves with each passing generation. To some, the Mayak is a place where they once dined and danced. To me, and others like me, it is something more like a historical ruined fortress that I got to witness after its fall into disuse and disrepair. Aptly named, it remains a lighthouse in my memory, becoming more mythologized the more I ponder its significance as an anchor point to my birth city.
In these structures, I can see the un - fixedness of both personal and collective memory. I am reminded of one of my favourite essays by Hito Steyerl entitled A Tank on a Pedestal: Museums in an Age of Planetary Civil War . In the essay, Steyerl begins talking of a video in which a WWII-era tank in Konstantinovka, eastern Ukraine (which had for decades stood as a historical monument to WWII) is driven off the pedestal and repurposed by pro-Russian separatists in the ongoing civil war conflict in Eastern Ukraine. Steyerl uses this as a jumping off point to talk about the way in which the entry of some cultural artifacts into a museum/monument/pedestal is not a one way street - instead. Tanks put onto pedestals may take fire again. A building which once was a hotel may turn into a billboard which may turn into a reinvigoration project of nationalist ideology. Steyerl talks of how history “acts, it feigns, it keeps on changing. History is a shape-shifting player, if not an irregular combatant. It keeps attacking from behind.” I find this essay helpful in articulating the notions around monuments as both backwards looking and forwards looking structures. I feel its influence in the way I consider ‘monuments’ within the memory realm.
4. Tunnels, Stairwells, Portals
If decaying monuments act as landmarks within the liminal world of memory, it makes sense that the access point to this world comes in the form of portals; old stairwells from a childhood home, subway tunnels that feel anonymous yet familiar, hallways that connect across time. Such imagery is experienced both more intimately and more universally; it is a largely common experience to view scenes of empty hallways or tunnels and feel a pulling sense of deja vu. These spaces carry within themselves an inherent liminality, for even in the physical domain they are spaces of in-betweenness and transience rather than destination. In me, they have long evoked the feeling of being in between time, in between the physical and allegorical realm.
I feel that I am continually drawn to these signifiers of transition and in between-ness as a result of my own transience; an immigrant child with nebulous ties to several homes, sensitive to the roots I've retained and gained in heritage, sensitive to the paths that I will also never walk again. I see this sentiment evoked in the brilliant work of Do Ho Suh, particularly in Staircase III. Staircase-III is one of a number of works Suh has made based on his personal memories of architectural spaces, both of his parents' traditional Korean house in Seoul and his own Western-style apartment in New York. ‘'The space I'm interested in is not only a physical one, but an intangible, metaphorical, and psychological one,'’ Do So Huh has explained in media.
In this regard, our interests align.
5. From Empty Ruins, A Myth, or, Why I Make What I Make
The decayed memory, rewritten, reconstructed over and over takes new form over time. It becomes more abstracted, less specific and rooted in reality; more symbolic and mythologized. A stairwell becomes a portal to a different time, and a different feeling. A restaurant becomes a wreck; in memory it is reassembled as a fortress. I feel compelled to visually depict this process though painting, printmaking, casting, layering… The same way that the psyche assembles fragments of memory into a sense of meaningfully potent history, I assemble, translate, erode and re-amalgamate fragmented images referencing memory. Working with images through painting is often akin to re-remembering and building over - I am consolidating fragments of memories and layers of experience and meaning about a single place or subject into one image, which becomes more abstract and multidimensional - a kind of memory bricolage that becomes more than the sum of its parts. Working with images through printmaking allows me to open up and expand the layers of imagery and create varied editions of prints that are able to express multitudinousness of meaning. The repetitive and process-driven nature of printmaking lends itself well to the repetitive, fragmented, layered and repetitive nature of the formation of these memory realms.
Sometimes I try to go in the other direction; to stop the erosion of a memory through deliberate, meticulous rendering when I am afraid too strongly that both memory and its physical site may be too fragile and slip away from me forever. I think of these pieces as my attempts at preservation of memory, in contrast to the work that I make that actively mythologises and abstracts it.
I need to do this because I need to feel tethered. I often think about the arrangement of stars into constellations… what were once, before human perception and projection simply arbitrary clusters of gas, light, space matter; they have become grouped in relation to each other, formed into symbols and stories that appeal to our human need for purpose and meaning. This is what I feel when I am assembling pieces of memory, layering experiences over one another, hoping to see a lighthouse or a shrine or a constellation emerge. I am making connections, forming new neural pathways. I make relics of detritus and myths out of the arbitrary.
