Hyperthymesia blurred, imprecise or random suggests a new way of focusing on identity and is a new scene of a work in progress around memory, remembrance and oblivion.

The artist Noé Bermejo reflects on the bounds of memory and on borderlines between the fiction and the reality of our own memories. A methacrylate structure with the shape of an engram (the graphical representation of the neural pathways which our brain sets in motion to evoke a memory) holds a full collection of empty photo frames, mirrors and other photosensitive material, creating an evocative and disconcerting play of light and shadows, presences and absences which shows us the fragility of our memories and how delicate is our identity and our own life storage.

In this artwork in progress, which is a part of the project «Memory, Remembrance, Oblivion»,  the artist collects more than 500 photo frames to build an intended metaphor of human memory as an archive and a physical space for storage but also like a complex and extremely delicate machinery generating changeable, ephemeral and recurring pseudorealities.

The photo frames (without portraits) of curved and straight lines question the visitors who approach. When revolving around the structure, doubts about what those frames contained arise. What happened to made them lose its supremacy, at home, on the mantelpiece, on the hall cabinet? What happened so that the hierarchy of familiar pictures was dismantled, to make them disappear? The memory of this frames could belong to anyone, also to oneself and the look becomes active trying to come back to some place known, but from a game board as wide as can be the ability for internal research (and of doubt about the “me”).

The hyperthymesia is a psychological phenomenon consisting of an unusual exaltation of memory. An ability which enables an improvement in the function of evocation linked to autobiographical memory. People with this hyperfunction are able to remember almost every detail of the experiences they have lived, but oddly enough (or maybe not), they have not developed their photographic memory. This is another paradox or the umpteenth irony, non-obvious, which connects with the use of humor in the work of Bermejo, but now this happens through a creation which works like a single body but whose inside and its ability to produce and send every kind of message to those who move through it meets the target of questioning some of its core issues: identity, the “me”, oblivion.