LUIS GUERRA

Study about what is missing, 2008

Performance: Luis Guerra

Photography: Olaf Knarvik

Camera: Heidi Nikolaisen

FLAGGFABRIKKEN

http://flaggfabrikken.net/

The study about what is missing was a performance developed after 3 months of residency at the Flaggfabrikken Center of Photography and Contemporary Art. During that period of time, I started to collect objects from the streets in a situationist condition, with the aim of building a precarious anarchitecture of memory. The objects that I found in the streets in daily walking base performance, in an open and disaffected way, were finally transformed into a long cord. This cord was, indeed, the main object, a tool for measuring my memory of the city. 

The cord, which was built by a series of objects like pieces of silver paper, paper, caps, wire, plastic bags, etc., would be used for measuring my own allegorical memory of my time in Bergen. I decided that the size of the cord would be the same peripherical size of the entire building where Stiftelsen 3,14 Galleri was. It is necessary to say that the Gallery was placed in a building which, before becoming a cultural space, was used as a Bank. A Bank transformed into a place for Social Capital.

The cord no longer exists. I tried to travel with it, but when I tried to enter the USA with it, the police kept it. My magic anarchitectural-object was lost forever. The object of the Study about what is missing was lost.
The day when the Study, the cord, was unfolded at the Gallery space, I performed an action singing 4 songs of Victor Jara, a Chilean folk singer who was killed by the dictatorship in 1973. Through this action, I was showing that our past remains within us, as a measure of our history. Our memory, the songs that I kept from my childhood, is preserved as a necessary measure for keeping the narration of the truth. That day I unfolded the cord, and I sang 4 songs that I remembered (4 songs that I still keep within me), to show that our past lives within our presence in presentation. Memory is a fragile architecture built by our own actions.

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