FRESH20 Catalogue - Flipbook - Page 20
HELGA
MAINBERGER
GREETINGS FROM A DISTANT FRIEND
“What you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed.”
- Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
A large part of our identity is a complex web of memories from our experiences and
connections to the people and places around us, and as such we expect them to be
correct and precise. But research tells us otherwise. Every time we recall a memory, we
modify it according to our current emotions and influences.
We transform our memories over time. We forget the mundane, the unimportant and
some of the not so pleasant details of our past. We may even refashion some of them
from experiences we haven’t even experienced ourselves.
This work is about the uncertainty of our memories. It emerged after a major personal
event in my life triggered questions about my own identity.
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