shaun wilson research: Uber Memoria Series 1

19 December 2006

Uber Memoria Series 1

Series 1 of Uber memoria is comprised of 150 video paintings that explore the nature of locational memory through the moving image. Much of the artworks combine reconstituted 8mm family home movies c.1954-58 filmed in and around the same locations that I returned to 50 years later in Southern Germany and the UK. Travelling from Australia in October and then again in November 2006 to Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Schwaebisch Hall, Berlin and London, the works positions twenty different figures in mnemonic pretence mimicking the same kinds of poses found in religious paintings inside Saint Michael’s church, constituting a connection between the near present (memories of the visit to Southern Germany) and the past (deconstructing footage taken of the same area in the 1950s).

This merger of art and film constitute a filmic Romanticism that evidently probes the nostalgic facet of memory through places in both the visiting of locales filmed in the 1950s and also within the original film itself. As I go back to the places of my family’s home movies, the new works - most of which are slowed down to 10% speed - represent both the emotive and philosophical junctures with which film and memory coexist.