•••

In the first chapter of The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, we learn that adults lack imagination: they cannot see the elephant inside the boa in the drawing by the Pilot. The further along we read, it becomes obvious that this loss of imagination is not irreversible if one has curiosity.

Human history has a very complex understanding of curiosity. In myth and religion, it is often appointed as the root of all evil. Was it not curiosity that led Eve to bite that apple, or what made Pandora open the box? “Curiosity killed the cat” is a common English saying that clearly gives out a warning: mind your own business, or else.

Yet when it comes to art, isn’t curiosity the true starting point for all creative endeavours? Were we not curious, would we bother picking up the pencil, the guitar or the camera?

The artist Filipa Frois Almeida journeyed through her memories, trying to catch up with the ones she cannot quite reach any longer. If you have ever tried to remember something from a long time ago, you might have noticed that the older the memory, the less beneath the surface of it can you dive. This begs us all a question: Are we still curious enough to keep trying to find the answers, even if it means failing?

As my conversations with Filipa Frois Almeida carried on throughout the past year, it was obvious early on that in developing “Homogeneizador de memórias” she has let loose her curiosity, allowed her sense of wonder to guide her into experimenting in a way that resembles the pure joy of a child’s play. Her accounts of the different methods she tested were not reports about work, they were stories of fascination, of a game she had been playing recently. The results serve to remind us that like our individual memories that entangle together, we too are part of a shared experience from play to loss to rediscovery.

It is somehow reassuring that the artist’s wildness was allowed to flourish when creating work — or should we say play? — about something personal she had gone through at a very young age. Especially when someone is faced with tragedy, it is not a small victory that they do not lose touch with their inner child. The humble beginnings of this project, the small mistake that lead to an extraordinary world of personal and artistic discoveries, reminded me of what Samuel Becket wrote in 1983 in “Worstward Ho”:

"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Noora Manty about homogeneizador de memórias

•••

estado límbico is a site-speculative fairytale, which proposes a method of joyous meddling with spaces and things of the past — stubbornly stuck in the past — and of affirming the possibility of telling their story in other, playful, almost child-like ways in which only futures exist. A novel story can be told by a simple gesture of re-ordering and re-configuring the established order of things. It is also a highly political method, which fits with the overarching program of the Robida Collective, the host of the residency which resulted in estado límbico.

Modelling Future Ruralism, Aljaž Škrlep, estado límbico