Pascal Böhme & Ema Karisna

 

Distorted faces, distorted memories. This must be the closest depiction to how somebody who is gradually slipping into dementia must feel. Fading memories, maybe not even the pertinent ones, but only short, random and momentary flickers of the past remain. And with time, even these begin to deform themselves into grotesque images before dissipating into nothingness; blurs and spots sweeping through your mind like white noise.

 

The screeching music exemplifies the expanding distressed despair one must feel when realizing that what once came naturally and without effort, recollection, becomes increasingly difficult. This process seems to almost be worse than the end result, because you are aware of the shortcomings of your abilty to remember, in comparison to merely having a blank mind. The inner battle between will and abilty is one of the most strenuous and unsettling ones an individual can be faced with. The frustration and anguish one feels during this battle can be paralyzing, to the point of silent surrender.

 

A once smiling face becomes a grimace, a once positive moment of your life is overshadowed by the awareness that it is dissolving. Only knowing deep inside that this was a pinnacle instant of your existence, but not being able to determine why, because the substantial aspects of it have obliterated into nothingness. The ambition to preserve the intangible elements of life, such as emotions or personal experiences, more times than not, remains unfulfilled. There is usually no form of measurement of how truthful, how pure or how all encapsulating a memory is.

 

The medium of photography assumes the ability of objectively preserving a moment, but as exemplified in this dissolving film material, it is also subject to the forcess of time and decay. Photography is not able to uphold the level of unaffected purity it promises. Nothing tangible is immortal. Immortality can only exist on a metaphysical level. And even for this there is no guarantee.