An Unconscious Archive

“Where is this place? Have I been there? I set up this fire! I remember! I had also taken a picture of it! Wait… who is this woman? What is she doing?” Documents can be destroyed. “You were standing next to me on this hill. Weren’t you? But what actually happened if it was not you standing there?” Memories can be suppressed. “How could one prove an absence? I shall recollect the past! I need a testimony I can rely on! I must demolish these buildings. Hate their Kafkaesque look!” The series An Unconscious Archive attempts to look into the multiple layers of consciousness. It sees consciousness as an inescapable archive (in)forming one’s subjectivity, but on which one has little choice, if at all. It is in this sense that this archive, amounting to one’s sense of self, is ‘unconscious’. The unconscious archive brings together fragments of events that need to be made meaningful. Photography can help. Photography uses visuality as a means of entrapment. What does visuality trap? Possibly real shapes. Probabilities of being. Disfigurement and enhancement. The combined effect of eye and machine on the entities comprising one’s environment. And other things. The archive’s purpose is to trace, incorporate and process partial memories and excerpts of dreams as well as intentional interpretations of the past. The archive is always a tentative response to this question: does an event reconstructed by the subject carry a more effective actuality than reality itself? Does the unconscious archive that accumulates the detailed experiences of our being miss the difference between the virtual and the actual?