The Art of Connecting Memories

Motifs of the sky, the stars, and faraway galaxies have long been the objects of people’s imagination, spawning countless tales since ancient times. These same motifs have also sparked humanity’s spirit of scientific inquiry, best exemplified by human exploration of the moon and the launching of space stations.
This multifaceted nature of heavenly bodies is also present in the works of Amélie Bouvier. While highly poetic, her work highlights the fragility of personal memory and our longing for the sky while, at the same time, exposing the subjectivity and violence of science and colonialism.
Titled “I Have Always Looked to the Sky,” Bouvier’s exhibition at the ACAC was held as an alternative to her artist-in-residence, which would have also culminated in an exhibition. With three of her past works prominently on display, her show was structured in a way that incorporated her research on Aomori, which she conducted remotely.
“Nature Variability” is an enlarged print of a monotype on a long piece of fabric that immediately attracts the viewer’s attention as they enter the exhibition. The use of monotype to illustrate chance and improvisation is linked with Bouvier’s fundamental interest in the uncontrollable quality of nature.(*1) The 4-meter-long banner hangs from the ceiling, guiding the viewer’s eye line vertically and inviting them to “look to the sky,” as it were.
“But Keep Your Feet On The Ground” is a video series played on four monitors installed on the gallery floor. The video shows planets in the solar system being invaded, torn apart, and dug out by a pair of human hands. The film insinuates the violence inherent in the human desire to explore the universe, to conquer new frontiers on the outer reaches of space that are there for the taking. It hints at an imagination triggered by an inability to go and see the planets for ourselves. At the same time, the grainy quality of the often out-of-focus images reminds us of the haphazard uncertainty of human behavior.
At the back of the gallery, her diptych work “Eight Minutes Ago” is on display. One of the two video works was inspired by the photographic glass plates in the Harvard Glass Plate Archive, which employed many female employees under the directorship of Prof. Edward Pickering in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. (Employing women for this kind of work was unprecedented at the time.) At present, the archive houses about 500,000 glass plates used for astronomical research, on which these women, so intimately involved in the research, scribbled countless notes. However, many of the plates have been lost, damaged, or otherwise deemed unusable according to current standards. Most are no longer used as research materials and are destined to be forgotten. Bouvier’s film focuses on these notes as artifacts of the researchers and the photographic glass plates manifestations of their memories. In her other video, Bouvier records her father’s recollections of the sky and the night. The narrative moves back and forth in time and space as if lost in a daydream. His story is a unique world, rich in detail, one that would have disappeared had Bouvier not captured it. In her diptych, Bouvier asks how we can record, for posterity, both the richness of individual memory and collective memories that have been categorized by or omitted from the zeitgeist.
The space set up in the center of the gallery seems to be her answer to this question. It functioned as a social space where the audience could interact with her work and was a means for her to conduct research on Aomori remotely. On the table, Bouvier has placed postcards and questionnaires she made. The postcard is a collage of the Aomori meteorite(*2) that fell on Aomori City in 1984. The two images that make up the collage were taken from different angles and in different conditions. One image is brownish with large dark spots formed during atmospheric entry, while the other is grayish in color and has fewer dark spots. It is evident to us nowadays that photographs do not capture the objective truth. This collage of two images with different textures, in particular, seems to expose the subjectivity and cognitive dissonance of people who enter the fields of science and technology. It also contains elements of fiction, suggesting the fallibility of human memory and the richness of stories based solely on memory.
A questionnaire sits beside the postcards on the table with two questions to fill in. The first is intended to ask for details and memories from viewers who know about the Aomori meteorite. Those who do not know about the meteorite can use their imagination to write about what they think happened. The second asks about the connection between the viewer and the sky. Of the 200 responses we received during the exhibition, some included memories from when the meteor struck, while others described moments they spent looking at the sky. The number of people who knew about the meteorite, however, was fewer than we had expected. While the Aomori meteorite may be preserved in the Aomori Prefectural Museum of History, its existence has gradually faded from memory. This device seems to be one of Bouvier’s answers to “Eight Minutes Ago”, another attempt to shed light on an event, collectively remember it, and pass it on to generations to come.
The responses were translated into English and sent to Bouvier, who says she will use them to make an artwork in the future. A work of art is, first and foremost, a record of human activity. Now that the memories of the Aomori residents, who occupy a small corner of human history, have taken form as works of art, it gives me hope for a brighter future that these memories may be passed on. Perhaps the people of Aomori may even once again remember the meteorite as a result of the exhibition.

*1 From the artist talk held on October 18, 2020.
*2 The Aomori meteorite is part of a private collection entrusted to the Aomori Prefectural Museum of History, where it was on display in the permanent collection until October 2020. (The museum has temporarily closed as of October 20, 2020.) Bouvier used image data provided by the museum.

Test by Yukiko Kaneko