Architecture of Memory: Dreams of the Alcázar
Not only our memories, but the things we have forgotten are “housed.” Our soul is an abode. And by remembering “house” and “rooms,” we learn to “abide” within ourselves. Now everything becomes clear, the house images move in both directions: they are in us as much as we are in them.
The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard
Through the use of visual fragmentation, abstraction and layering, this full-scale reconstruction of Diego Velázquez’s enigmatic and ambiguous 1656 painting Las Meninas and thirty-two related mixed media studies, present the study of space, delving into a world where familiarity and unfamiliarity intersect. The ephemeral depiction of this large room in the Royal Alcázar of Madrid, shifts in focus from the referential geometry of Velázquez’s studio and setting for his painting of the Infanta (with her coterie of handmaids, chaperones and companions) to the space unmoored from a specific time, place or event. Interior architecture, well known yet vague due to the absence of the figures, becomes a carrier for memory, nostalgia, and reminiscence, recalling the intangibility of the past and the contemplativeness of our place in the present. The barren interior allows for an analysis of the painted space, our psychological relationship to it and to our mnemonics of space and recognition of our current surroundings.
Karen Amiel in conversation with Ana Borlas-Ivern
Exhibition music composed by André Baum and based on the Spanish Phrygian Scale common in the music of 17th Century composers Santiago de Murcia, Domingo Hernández and Lucas Ruiz de Ribayaz.
Link to exhibition music: https://andrebaum.bandcamp.com/track/dreams-of-the-alc-zar
