I have been exploring how to use collaged text to create new mismemories. What can these jumbled phrases bring to the theme of memory, forgetting and re-remembering? How do we translate the potentially disparate words to create a story, a new memory? I am questioning where the fragments of memory exist, creating a glimpse of the past. The smell of the summer thunderstorm or the taste of porridge evokes that millisecond of that time, as William Kentridge has said, ‘making time visible’.
The act of cutting up words from children’s books is similar to cutting away those fragments of that time you may want to change or forget. Reassembling the words into a new story/ memory gives me the power to adapt the past to my liking, changing the history. This manipulation questions the truth of personal history. We can all create our own truths and new histories, thus creating the actual memory. The mismemory.
Footnotes for the Panther. Conversations between William Kentridge and Denis. 2017. Fourth Wall Books, Johannesburg, South Africa.
