Memorias
I think.
I think a lot.
I think a lot, and for long periods of time.
I connect ideas and thus they amalgamate. And thus they transcend, at least within me, and become strong. They make sense and cement my life.
It is hard for me to identify the moment in which an idea begins to take shape. Ideas are an eternal summation of moments, life moments. Everything, absolutely everything I experience, from lesser things to the most trascendental, becomes a part of me, even if unconsciously. In this sense I am a unique summation, and hence, so are my united ideas.
And so my mythology is shaped. I build it with ideas that I do not want to forget, that I want to be ever-present, that I want to tell.
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When I think about tapestries I think about textile pieces hanging from stone walls, insulating a room, making it cozy and intimate, filling it with stories, with memories, with meaning. De Champeaux when referring to the Bayeux tapestry, says about this piece that it records events. From then on, and throughout his recounting, he refers to tapestries in general as storied. I find this conception beautiful and illustrative of this project, from its embryonic stage.
At the same time, the conception of the tapestry, piece generally made of wool, as insulating a room, protecting it and the beings within it, is beautiful to me. The welcoming feeling these two notions create when coalescing is foundational for these memoirs.
Memories become myths for their transmission. The symbolic as catalyst of recollections, of ideas.
‘But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is how it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it feel this way to you?.’
Kazuo Ishiguro
Montevideo, September 2021
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(Even though strictly a tapestry is a piece woven on a loom, the ideas presented also apply to textile wall- hanging pieces not produced in their entirety on a loom.)
References
De Champeaux, Alfred. (1889), Tapestry, Londres, Published for the Committee of Council on Education by Chapmand and Hall (Charles Dickens and Evans, Crystal Palace Press).
Ishiguro, Kazuo. (2017), Nobel Lecture, Svenska Akademien.
A gathering of owls
Montevideo, October 2021
I always felt a particular attraction towards owls.
I started collecting them, of all sizes and materials possible. Clearly, the sentiment was strong. As a kid I never questioned this, they were part of me and that was all that mattered. Growing up, it was so intrinsic to me that I also didn’t stop to try to understand it. I always drew them as well. The quick sketch, while I talked on the phone or waited for something, was always of these amazing birds; among trees, flying, their front, profile, or back.
Now I’m on this new path, and almost without giving it real thought, the first piece is a tree with seven owls perched on it. It’s something I drew last year, in the first months of this pandemic, and while it’s not the only thing I drew, for some reason it’s the one I chose for this first piece.
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The owl in connected, in a symbolic way, to the renovation of life that within myths is implicit in death. (…) It conveys the wisdom of evolution that every creature must renounce its time petition in order to let the next generation live.
(…) These early associations of the owl with female fertility and regeneration, as well as death, suggest that Athena’s positive qualities are stranded in the goddess’ oldest wisdom, for whom death is the land of life to the same extent that darkness is the bed of day.
(Adapted from 'El libro de los símbolos’.)
References
Martin, K. [Ed.]. (2011). El libro de los símbolos. Reflexiones sobre las imágenes arquetípicas. Barcelona, España: Taschen.
