Event 2 - Mnemoawari

This Tuesday I attended Eli Joteva's show Mnemoawari. The title of the show is composed of two words: mnemo, which means memory, and awari, which means awareness. Since the show overall is pretty abstractive, my feelings and understandings of the show are only personal, and may not accurately reflect the author's intentions of creating it.
The Event Outline

The show is consisted of four parts. The first part of the show is a futuristic style painting of a ball full of light, titled "The Dream Auger". Dreams have surreal powers over the reality, and the light ball appears to me to have spiritual essence. It is also worth noting that the subtitle of this part of the show is “Can you remember a future?”. While a "memory about the future" seems contradictory in itself, the idea behind such concept can be justified by a view of reversing the time axis which all of us experiences. Such a view could also guide us to understand other parts of the show.


The Three Ice Sculptures
The second and most important part of the show consists of three ice sculpture balls that melt through the elapse of time. Throughout the entire show, the ice sculptures would gradually melt, and the inner sculpture made mainly out of sand and aluminum would appear. Besides ice, sand and aluminum, the sculpture balls also contain various organic material, such as flowers, fungi and seeds. If the “Dream Auger” entails depiction of an afterlife, the three melting sculptures shall definitely be seen as the reversive depiction of a life process. As the ice melts more and more traces of life appears. Ice is the solid form of water, which is the essence of every life on earth. The ice sculpture is dead, but the process of melting is a process of dehydration as well. By the time the ice are fully gone, the essence of life would be gone too. Or in the sense of time reversal, when the ice is gone the life has turned to its initial stage.

The third part of the show is a VR headset, through which the participant can observe from inside of the ball. I would regard this part as reflections of an embryo inside the mother’s body, where life is about to take place.

The last part of the show consists of three virtual sculptures projected to the walls downstairs. Those virtual sculptures are the exact images of what the three melting sculptures would look like when the ice have fully melted. The are not directly approachable (since they are located downstairs), which is similar to the inapproachability of our past. The past can only be relied on our memories.

What make us aware of our own existence are our memories. Without memories our own existence would not be known by ourselves. The journey from afterlife to beforelife is also a journey of awaring the fragility and transcience of life itself, which only appears to us as our memories. This is what I have learned from the show.


Proof of Attendance

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