In L’invention du quotidien (1980), Michel Certeau raised the need for a new approach to objects, to material culture, which, as artefacts, have a close relationship with our identity, but which are particularly closely linked to our memories. More precisely, with our way of remembering and the different ways in which we articulate our memory.

Through the works in this exhibition, Lluc Margrau shows the unconscious longing to be reunited with one’s past. In the same breath, artistic artefacts are transformed into representational artefacts, which means establishing deeper links with the analyses of micro-history or, in other words, with the elements of everyday life. Alain Corbin added to the concept of memory a new look at sensitivities and social imaginaries. Margrau’s works thus project not only memory but also emotion. Through their materiality, the artworks are transformed into semiophores, i.e. elements that lead and reveal meanings – in this case visual – that lead us to a better understanding of “symbolic strategies”. Works in which common life stories happen to be those that communicate the experiences and emotions that are those of the artist himself, and at the same time those of those of us who establish our own codes of memory with the form, material and space that we communicate through works of art.

With his personal poetics, Lluc Margrau commemorates the emotion of a life lived, an experience remembered or an emotion remembered. A process that is personal and inescapable, but at the same time universal. From the perspective of emotions, the understanding of memory, its meaning and value, is revealed to us as necessary in the process of investigating what is inherited, but also what is lost, since it allows us to appreciate how they have been preserved, destroyed or mutated.

In our society, questions of memory have become a historical concern and an artistic and theoretical approach, in the so-called “memorialist turn”; an obsession with memory in its various facets: instinctive, stored, individual, collective or cultural. This obsession with “historical” memory, from an analysis that is not historical but anthropological, finds its response in the accelerated changes experienced in a short period of time, translated into the configuration of what Zygmunt Bauman (2000) has called “liquid modernity”, characterised by fragility, volatility, insecurity and uncertainty of realities and concepts. A change in the face of which people need to anchor themselves in the past. In the face of technological changes, the speed of social mutations, natural, urban and territorial transformations, it is not surprising that artistic objects have an aura as expressions of a materiality that anchors us to our reality: the present, the lived and the remembered.

Through the works in this exhibition, Lluc Margrau leads us into the polysemic content of the concept of memory, in its double meaning: a reflection on how global, humanist culture has ceded its prominence to the “concrete and social universe”. “. We live in an ephemeral society, produced to be consumed quickly and thrown away.

In our current consumer society, objects no longer have a soul, they are just disposable things. The producers of these artefacts are also aware of this, they feel no connection to the object produced once it leaves the factory. Similarly, the consumer has no emotional or symbolic attachment to the object he buys and has no qualms about getting rid of it. The products have no soul that survives after use.

Thus, in Margrau’s works, the emotional gaze on the object establishes a dialogue between the viewer and the material. Halbawchs spoke of the plural dimension of memory, because although memories are always individual – which leads to the admission of the individuality of memory based on memories – remembering is also a collective act, conditioned by social frameworks that function as reference points. Thus, memories find their meaning when they are related to the conceptual structures created by the members of the community: culture, art, literature or music.

This is why Nessum Dorma alludes to the aria with which Giacomo Puccini closed his opera Turandot. “Let no one sleep!” It alludes to the mystery of the emotional, of feelings. Feelings in which love becomes a substantial element of the reality of being. But music is also the memory that takes us back to childhood. If in Citizen Kane Orson Welles uses the resource of wooden toys to allude to the lost space of childhood, Rosebud, Margrau’s allegorical sculpture, recalls the spaces of the jukebox and the chorus that is constantly repeated in our memory, like a mechanism that gives us back childhood and the warmth of the family, full of smells, sensations and longings for our loved ones. The lost and longed for toy, the music of our memories or the smells and shapes of home are an inescapable part of the construction of our life stories. But humming, rhythmic and repetitive music has often remained in our collective imagination as a reflection that represents childhood recovered through the memory that the melody evokes. The lost childhood thus becomes an object of contemplation, and those who contemplate it do so from both individual experience and collective reflection.

In one of his Lutheran letters, Passolini wrote that objects seem to be those things that surround us in an unreal silence, because they really speak and we cannot avoid them. Objects accumulate their own memory, through which they transmit the passage of time and the transformation of their form, through the unalterable marks that are projected onto their materiality. Paper plays an important role in this exhibition. On the one hand, it has historically been the medium on which we project and communicate our thoughts: letters, missives, etc., but it is also the faithful ally of our secrets, feelings and personal memories: diaries, memoirs, etc. In Conversations on Paper, paper offers its own memory through geometrically projected forms. A plural memory that is not only mechanical, but also physical, as paper becomes more and more of itself, recycled in a perpetual cycle, revealing and containing its own memory.

Intimate and personal experiences, the memories of the workshop, conclude Collection 2. A series of 35 pieces in which steel constructs the experience of everyday life and is a reflection of the living space, but at the same time an imaginary construction of the pages of our personal diaries. Here too, objects take on a speaking presence through their form. Materiality and form convey expressions, sensations and, above all, the everyday nature of experience. In The End of Modernity, Gianni Vattimo spoke of the need for a “dehistoricisation of experience”, alluding to the capacity of memory to establish more comprehensible links with aesthetic and creative processes that are difficult to separate from the processes of vital emotionality. . Indeed, memory is not the result of a past subjected to a single and definitive historical narrative, but rather the result of a temporality open to multiple rewritings of our past.

Looking at Margrau’s artistic work triggers a process of reflection on how we tell stories and what questions, beyond the artistic object itself, we need to explore in order not to be carried away by the demands of the present and its rapid, sequential and unreflective way of looking at images, which often excludes history. Not history with capital letters, but those small and multiple stories that accompany us and are part of who we are today. Our own life stories.

Ester Alba

University of Valencia

Memory and imagination