A moving image work in reaction to Oliver Messaien's Quartet for the End of Time as part of Modern Music Days, Saturday 11 February, 2017, Teatru Manoel, Valletta.
“What the artist as collector, can reveal to the historian is the intrinsic contradiction in the objects: the contrast between function and the aesthetic values, the value of an intimate historical document, the possibility that a fragment re-intensifies a memory. This type of history does not necessarily have a line organisation.”
Small Amnesias is an attempt to rediscover beauty in the memory of the forgotten.
It interweaves found[1] archive footage and extracted[2] poetic text to recontextualise meaning[3] and challenge the common notion of external beauty as the only genesis of happiness and joy.
Through the clashing of contradicting values, the work successively challenges and exalts the central theological theme in Oliver Messaien's Quartet for the End of Time, that of religious devotion as the only hope in the tragedy of war, aspiring to unearth a further disquieting inner beauty.
[1] Medical and scientific footage from Prelinger Archives, Creative Commons.
[2] Text extracted from Beauty is the Mystery of Life by painter Agnes Martin, who explains that pure beauty can only be found when the artist is distanced from life and is devoted to an unhindered aesthetic abstraction.
[3] Philosopher Walter Benjamin’s concern with history and the articulation of its significance to the present can be traced from his early writings, through to one of his final works, “On the Concept of History” (1939-1940), where he imagined the artist (and also the critic and historian) as an interpreter of history, establishing a “unique experience with the past”.