Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert

The Thingness of Memory (2019-2022)

A collaboration project with: Omiros Panayides

This artistic experiment is our futile attempt to penetrate the photographic surface, or the skin of the photograph, and arrive at its bare bone, in order to get a glimpse of the structure of memory. We are attempting to visualize what Heidegger calls the “thingness of the thing” or, in our case, the thingness of memory.

To explore the photographic surface, we used a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM); a cutting-edge technological tool used mainly in biology, medicine and engineering. It’s a type of microscope that produces images of material samples by scanning their surface with a focused beam of electrons. While light microscopes (and photography) use light for imaging, electron microscopes use electrons that are reflected or knocked off the surface of a sample. What the resulting image contains is information from the interaction of electrons on atoms in the sample that describe the surface topography and composition of the sample.

After excavating our own personal analogue family albums, we chose ten photographs (five each) that have a special meaning for us. Then, we carefully removed the subjects of our affection – our fathers, mothers, grandfathers, brothers and past selves – by cutting them out. As the original photographs were unique and irreplaceable, the act of destruction was distressing. This action wounded the original, unique photograph, and removed its essential element that made it meaningful for us and which served as the material sample that was scanned in the SEM machine.

The SEM can reveal the structure of things to such an abstraction that the thing completely disappears. In effect, the representations of our loved ones disappeared into what we call a topography of memory, an abstract landscape where memory exists. These images become a metaphor for the materiality of memory and provide a space where one can imagine, travel and re-invent what is missing.  Each cut-out photograph is presented next to its respective SEM generated image, which brings to mind the contrasts between what a photograph represents and its thingness, between measures of closeness and distance, between reality and memory.