Episodes of the Depressing Condition known as Nostalgia
2018
UNSW Galleries (NSW)
Seventh Gallery (VIC)
A Love Letter of translation - a response by Bea Rubio-Gabriel
Images Aaron Christopher Rees
Nostalgia is the inclination to look back on something with fondness, to reminisce with affection and to long for something passed. It’s a state of emotional polarity, where tender sentimentality for the past incites a melancholic realisation of the present.
These foregone memories become a construct of various references; of sounds, smells, materials, images and words which our minds try to conjure into a vivid recollection. We invent technologies to help us remember and capture snapshots of these memories through a mechanical eye.
Increasingly, we are constructing and navigating experiences through the lens of digital media, where memories are not only recorded, but are activated through the interplay of moving images, audio and texts.
In Episodes of the Depressing Condition known as Nostalgia, these material references of a place and time are re-constructed and layered together to translate a personal experience. Developed during a residency in the Philippines, the work reminisces on a past experience whilst simultaneously interrogating the contemporary condition as one which is multifarious and fractured by the remnants of colonial impositions. Through the collision of languages, image and sound the work rejects a Western propensity for homogenizing historical and cultural perspectives, in turn purposefully utilizing the digital encounter to embody a post-colonial mode of memory-making.
Mary-Louise Carbone, 2020
the glands of his skin sweating weakened
his dreams are infected by the deteriorating and refracting
language of the regiment.
As the germologist’s fever intensifies,
he is plagued by the images, colours and sounds
of his former and future material body.
This work was developed during a residency at Green Papaya Art Projects and Los Otros Film Lab in Manila, The Philippines (2017) supported by the NAVA Freedman Travelling Scholarship.
