The installation makes use of, the better to criticize, certain museographical formulas that institutionalize and normalize our controlled approaches to the past and its “events”. If The Image and Its Double has managed to foreground a question about the supposed fraud involved in Buñuel’s film, and about the truthfulness or verisimilitude of the stories now told by the hundreds of photographed testimonies to small events or minor circumstances that we all keep on our telephones or computers, the question this epilogue raises, perhaps too glibly given the scale of the task, seems rather to be about documentable time; about times whose retention and classification are the aim of policies that set out to archive and rehabilitate memory, now enjoying a period of expansion and even a boom.[1]

[1] The expression comes from Andreas Huyssen, who argues that since the 1970s memory has “become a cultural obsession of monumental proportions across the globe”, claiming that “Europe and the United States have, since the 1970s, witnessed the historicizing restoration of old urban centers; the development of whole museum villages and landscapes; various national heritage and patrimony enterprises; a new wave of museum architecture that shows no signs of receding; a boom in retro fashions and repro furniture; mass marketing of nostalgia; a popular obsession with “self-musealization” by video recorder, memoir writing, and confessional literature; the rise of autobiography and of the postmodern historical novel with its uneasy negotiation between fact and fiction; the spread of memory practices in the visual arts, often centered on photography; and the increase of historical documentaries on television, including (in the United States) a whole channel dedicated entirely to history, the History Channel”. “Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia”. In Public Culture, Volume 12, Number 1, Duke University Press, Winter 2000, pp. 21-38.

A peculiarity of this installation is the feeling of quietude or timelessness that the mountainous landscapes in the videos bring to the montage. Is this the result of a static quality deliberately induced by the operator of the recording equipment? Or does it rather come about because absolutely nothing perceptible to the human senses or even the camera’s eye (which is the technical projection of the seeing eye) happens on and around these splendid massifs? The detail places us in a time that is not that of cultural history or the smoke of the mere events which troubled a historian of the longue durée like Braudel. An indifferent time, inaccessible to the temporal experiences of the subject and the museum logics of preservation that are also echoed in other objects forming part of the montage, such as a tooth whose form is outlined against a light box, a bull’s horn protruding from the wall like some old hunting trophy, and a monumental agave leaf with the word “Romy” carved into it, displayed in a see-through glass case in emulation of some natural relic—the petrified body of an extinct reptile, for instance. Over all these objects looms the rope that hangs down, weighted by a drill bit, from a corner of the ceiling  (A Lonesome encounter with melancholic corpses, 2015)