Mnemosyne; mnēmosynē 

The Julio Fine Arts Gallery is pleased to announce Mapping Mnemosyne, an exhibition of The Mnemosyne-Initiative, highlighting a comparative view among fourteen international artists, who developed artistic concepts in the connection between mapping and memory in the material culture today.

The title of the project, Mapping Mnemosyne - Where am (I /We/ You)? hints at intersecting routes of memory: while Mnēmosynē means "memory”, and refers to the mother of the Nine Muses in Greek mythology, mapping devises memory to places rooting in the past, present, and the potential of future concerns.

This exhibition tells stories about memories imprinted into our bodies - individually and collectively - that carry the weight of histories and places. Since early times of oral poetry, memory was not only a utility to memorize through repetition and storytelling, but give arts a space and voice for creative expression. Today in times of forgetting, false truth, and conspiracy theories, more than ever the reconnection with the concept and deity of memory Mnemosyne helps to understand where am I/ YOU/ WE?

In the present state of calamity of wars, social injustice, gender inequality, and political insecurity, the works bring together constellations of interrelated issues and create a temporary map of our existence.

Since 2020, 14 artists from across the world formed The Mnemosyne-Initiative. They connect with a deity to enter creative zones that trace, recover, and repossess past histories, reveal places that have been overseen, detect topographies almost forgotten, and bring to light the geologies and bodies from the past. While memory appears to be fragmented, and there is always a personal side of memory, artists set form to multivocal narratives of that connection between past, present, and future concerns. Their truthful engagement tune and chorus with conflicting societal and political topics and realities.

The exhibition draws lines between the Fluidity of Topographies, alternative Narratives of History and Time, the relationship between Body and Identity, and the deep connection between Tracing and Materials in the material culture of the visual arts. In the center of the exhibition, two sculptures balance between beginning and end and vice versa of a repetitive and systemic pattern in history.

Mapping is offered here as a useful metaphor for contemporary lives beset by the chaotic intrusion of “information” pasted on our consciousness. Moreover, as a political and philosophical stance, mapping, with its implied pathfinding measures, is vital to reconnecting fragmented memories as “Bilderfahrzeuge” (image vehicle) that travels across borders and cultures in time.

Aby Warburg (1866-1929), historian of art and culture, developed the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, tracing protracted visual themes and patterns across time, from antiquity to the contemporary culture. His research is inseparable from attention to the contagious energy of movement of “Bildwanderung” and internationality. Together with Fritz Saxl, Warburg spoke of the “Wanderstrassen der Kultur” [pathways of culture] upon which “Bilderfahrzeuge” could travel across all borders.

 (Axel Heil, Margrit Brehm and Roberto Ohrt in: Abby Warburg, Mnemosyne Atlas, ZKM, Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, 2016)

~Artemis Herber
Mapping Mnemosyne curator

Background image: Yiannis Christakos, Note for a Landscape I, 2019, Pencil on Paper
Image above: M. Zoie Lafis, Coil, 2023, Silk