Exhibited at the art event Apa Ini Apa Itu in Lepang, Bali, December 2009
+ at the International Water Fest in Bandung, August 2010
Concept
When a person is away from his familiar environment - and out of his comfort zone - he is better able to observe his life. At a distance, from a remove, he can then create opportunities for change. ?Memory Cycles? is an autobiographical work. In my life, three important journeys mark the beginning and the ending of life periods, which all consist of eleven years. A number of great symbolical meaning; in the Lowlands, this number represents the Fool in Tarot. The Fool is often the harbinger of a new period in life. The structure of the video is a triptych and even though it's a sequence of cycles, it isn't exactly a chronological report. Memory doesn't work that way. Therefore I didn't want to restrict myself to using photos only from those specific periods. The making of the video was an intuitive process. I chose to take a naive approach to the video and animation, avoiding slick editing. I chose not to exert total control over the flow of the images. That's why unexpected things happen which give the video a sometimes quirky appearance. I couldn't tell you why one eye of a gecko is falling like a tossed coin ending up in the eye of another gecko, who was hiding in a bucket. Or why the tomato emerges from the Sicilian soil, transits via a rocky shore into the Dutch sky and disappears. Or what that man is doing in between the little boat on a bamboo stick and the sea where my mother and I were swimming in 1975. But I do know why the orchids are cast away and why the raft lands in the child?s arms. ?Memory Cycles? consists of multiple layers in which seemingly incidental things take place. The result is a dream-like voyage with symbolic meanings reflecting the life cycles. You'll see things floating, growing, falling, escaping, changing.
The haiku of Sally Farrar explains it in a few words:
Shifting and sifting
drifting through undercurrents
memory cycles
The soundtrack of Miguel Barella provides tension and release. Like the screen itself I didn't give any directions, therefore it became a collaborative, interrelated work.