You have a new memory

Galerie Mazzoli is pleased to present You have a new memory, Marie Lelouche's first solo exhibition in Germany.
Technology is at the core of Marie Lelouche’s practice, a bulky roommate and an indispensable accomplice at the same time. Lelouche has equipped herself with the most advanced technology: a 3D scanner she uses in order to take soundings of public spaces and accumulate what we could superficially define as "memories". It is precisely the word "memory" that calls her attention and originates You have a new memory. In this exhibition, she eviscerates it and examines it as a living body, endowed with its own individuality.
"You have a new memory" is a message with which technology breaks into the private sphere, forcing us to deal with memories that sometimes seem anything but our past. Cold and anonymous slides, digital memories appear distorted, even false, creating a feeling of dissonance. This awareness prompted Lelouche to investigate the mnemonic mechanisms of the human mind, discovering that it works in a way which is equally fallacious.
Recent studies have shown that we store memories using two parts of our brain: one merges the connections, the other, almost paradoxically, split them, recording isolated elements. These elements then emerge differently, based on what — unconsciously — we want to remember. Some are pulled out, others archived. Whenever we remember, we build a different scene, we produce a memory that is detached from its source, an element that, in a way, appears to be false. A new memory. A new reality.
Lelouche embraces this theory, and her work is always connected to the assumption that memory, either in physical or digital form, is an unstable magma, an unreliable description of the past that leads to the formation of new images.
For the exhibited works she draws on her personal archive of 3D scans of surfaces, corners or details of public places. Anything but anonymous, public spaces and urban furniture always called her attention. Common, as they create a common social and mental ground, and yet very personal, as they are perceived differently by everyone. Memories without a referent, representations without subject. An archive that never had the purpose of being remindful of anything. In this sense the French artist’s action cannot qualify as an archival process, but rather as a form of transformation that mimics our mnemonic process, metamorphosing a dormant memoir into something entirely new.
These scanned fragments of space create a set of abstract forms. She printed them on PVC and hung them as totems to create a forest of finally liberated, new memories. So independent that they even have their own identities — Elis, Andrea, Yuma and Céles.
After a first glance we come to discover the presence of three seemingly abandoned smartphones, on which enigmatic texts are flowing. The phones act as the voices of Elis, Andrea, Yuma, and Céles, which are discussing the nature of memory, in some cases by chatting with each other, in others by delivering monologues. This is the climax of a seemingly disorienting situation: in these rooms, images are no longer memories, they have lost their indexicality undergoing a transformation. The new identities of such images, however, are making an effort to understand memory and display their mnemonic potential, and especially their ability to remember images like them. We plunged into a paradox, which is at the same time as close to reality as it can be. Starting from a research on the role of technology and the functioning of the human brain, Lelouche comes to propose her visual statement. It appears distorted or dystopian, but it references accurately the reality in which we live in: a multidimensional place where human memory does not correspond to truth, and where human memory and digital memory do not match, yet they coexist.
That veil of Maya covering the phenomenal world is the only reality. Staying with Schopenhauer, Lelouche expands, cuts, multiplies the veil and makes living matter out of it. The space dividing things from experiences, experiences from memories, and memories from us, is indefinite. Lelouche's research is positioned exactly at this liminal point, which she makes physical.