**RESEARCH NOTES 2009
Digital photographs taken at Allerthope Common Nature Reserve, Yorkshire in April and September 09
35mm slides taken in La Garrotxa, N. Spain in August 09
Video projections onto landscapes of glass spheres at 48 Gordon Square, London
"Place ... is something more often sensed than understood, an indistinct region of awareness rather than something clearly defined. Place is something known to us, somewhere that belongs to us in a spiritual, if not possessive, sense and to which we too belong. Place is thus space in which the process of remembrance continues to activate the past as something which, to quote Bergson, 'is lived and acted, rather than represented.' "
Excerpt from Place (Art Works), Tacita Dean and Jeremy Millar, Thames & Hudson, 2005
Images of the Human Hippocampus: drawing by Santiago Ramón y Cajal, 1901 and microscope image, 2005
"Proust also draws on concepts and analogies from the science of optics to develop an analogy of time and memory... 'the image (imperfect as it is) which seems to me best suited to convey the nature of that special sense is that of a telescope, a telescope pointed
at time, for a telescope renders visible for us stars invisible to the naked eye, and I have tried to render visible to the consciousness unconscious phenomena, some of which, having been entirely forgotten, are situated in the past.' "
Excerpt from Searching for Memory, Daniel L. Schacter, Basic Books, 1996
From Der Abend, Friedrich, 1820
"Very limited cues are sufficient to trigger a chain reaction that permits us to become aware of the rich and detailed content of a memory," Tonegawa said. "This phenomenon is called pattern completion because it reflects cellular processes accompanying memory retrieval in which reactivation of a pattern of cellular connections harboring memory is completed by very limited input." The hippocampus is divided into three sections. Tonegawa looked at cells in the CA3 region, in which individual cells work in a so-called auto-association network by sending signals back to each other as well as forwarding them to other cells. Mathematical models suggest that through the modification of cellular connections, memories stored in such a network can be efficiently accessed for the purpose of pattern completion. Activity passed between cells through these connections can replace information that might be missing in the input. In this way, the network is able to "fill in" or retrieve complete memories given only a subset of the original cues that were present when it was formed.
"When people get old, they complain they're losing their memory. In fact, in many cases they are losing their ability to recall memories," Tonegawa said. "It's the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon-if they had more triggers, they often can recall the facts." The same is true in the early phase of Alzheimer's disease. "It's not that they lost the memory. It's that they have a retrieval problem," he said.
Excerpt from MIT news item on memory retrieval, June 2002 http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2002/memory-0605.html
"Each screen of this installation shows a fragment, slowly constructing a study of a very specific place, yet endlessly spiraling elsewhere. Floating Coffins is, importantly, not Nouadhibou - it is a 'representation' of that place ... Sedira presents not a documentary, rather a fractured set of views that move across different groupings as the images combine and recombine, shifting and rearticulating registers of engagement. The screens operate in conversation with each other, no one being complete and all parts refusing to create a whole. In conversation, something outside of what is said is generated through the exchange and positioning of unresolved ideas in proximity to each other; this is a productive process operating across space and time."
Excerpts from Sea Change, essay by Lisa Le Feuvre from the exhibition pamphlet Currents of Time: New Work by Zineb Sedira at Rivington Place, May 2009. http://www.iniva.org/exhibitions_projects/2009/currents_of_time.
"When Auden wrote, 'A culture is no better than its woods', he knew that, having carelessly lost more of their woods than any other country in Europe, the British generally take a correspondingly greater interest in what woods and trees they still have left. Woods, like water, have been suppressed by motorways and the modern world, and have come to look like the subconscious of the landscape. They have become the guardians of our dreams of greenwood liberty, of our wildwood, feral, childhood selves, of Richmal Crompton's Just William and his outlaws...
Human beings depend on trees quite as much as on rivers and the sea. Our intimate relationship with trees is physical as well as cultural and spiritual: literally an exchange of carbon dioxide for oxygen. Once inside a wood, you walk on something very much like the seabed, looking up at the canopy of leaves as if it were the surface of the water, filtering the descending shafts of sunlight and dappling everything..."
Excerpt from Wildwood, Roger Deakin, Hamish Hamilton, 2007
