Extinguished Experience
(Untouchable Memories)
Summer 2004
33cm x 31cm x 5.5cm
Description
Moths, wasp and photographic negatives pinned on pieces of handmade felt in butterfly display case lined with map collage and translucent fabrics.
Themes, Comments and Storylines
Display behind glass – only the container, not the contents can be felt. DO NOT TOUCH – the policies of gallery & museum display, the touch taboo. Collecting experiences as objects.
"The souvenir is the complement to the exciting experience. In it is marked the increasing self-alienation of the person who has inventoried his past as dead possessions… Relics come from corpses, the souvenir from the extinguished experience."
Walter Benjamin, quoted in Esther Leslie, Souvenirs and Forgetting: Walter Benjamin’s memory work, in Kwint, Marius, Breward, Christopher, Aynsley, Jeremy(eds) (1996), Material Memories: Design and Evocation, Institute of International Visual Arts, London, p.115