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Exercises of memory: Alejandro Schianchi

Thoughts on the horror, thirty years after the coup

Alejandro Schianchi. Untitled (2006)

‘I wonder how people remember things who don’t film, don’t photograph, don’t tape?’
Chris Marker

The memory of a machine, of a support, of an image and of the people. A history that trespasses the memory of the past by forgetting the present. The situation, real and transitional, is stored and fixed, thus becoming a false memory of the constant becoming. The machine as objective witness of a history reveals its subjectivity, questioning its so-called “technical reproducibility”. The error, the failure, and the accidental make it possible to envision the substance of the matter we deal with, and they will all evidence the fragility posed in the face of passing time and the will of oblivion. The work has a TV set from the 70’s (black and white) connected to a VHS reproducing audiovisual information on automatic repeat mode. The permanent friction of the magnetic tape with the head of the video recorder will generate a variation of the image with the passing of days, and probably some other kind of failure as well. Both artifacts are fused together and deprived of their casings, emphasizing the technical mechanisms that make it work.