Engrammes — 22,48 m² Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 14 → October 27, 2012

In neurophysiology an engram refers to a biological memory trace in the brain. Working on the assumption that bodies, things, and places might, similar to the brain, have a memory that materializes in a discreet, interstitial, and non-linguistic manner, the exhibition Engrams challenges the question of a biography of organic and inorganic matter by trying to articulate it plastically.

Using a principle of production that’s based on the reworking of recovered items, the project aims at taking into account the flow of material memory and the fast development of its role of testimony. Engrams reconstructs — in a fragmentary and non-anecdotic way — the life of certain places by activating the narrative potential of its “discarded materials”. It questions the authority of physical matter and its biographical overload: the objects manipulated by the artists are impregnated with traces of memory which can’t be ignored as they wait to be reanimated.

In setting up a dynamic system of transfer and osmosis between the interior of the gallery and the exterior of the urban environment, Engrams calls up a series of questions centred on the impossibility of a neutral and impassive artistic practice. The exhibition approaches the question of traces in different ways: sedimentation, ephemera, fragments.

In a sense Engrams is meant to be a “recording” strategy, a temporal, non idealized and physical medium to challenge the prevalent logic by discretely filtrating into the city’s social environment through the analysis of the items it has chosen to abandon.