Re(collection)

Collection of text from Public intimacy by Giuliana Bruno

Canadian Pavilion - Shanghai Expo courtesy from student

Three-dimensional space, inhabited and set in virtual motion by the body, has formed the material of modern architecture; its representation in two dimensions, with the added dimensions of time, has been the work of film, filmmakers from architects. Sigfried Giedion coined the triplet “space, time, and architecture” ; Le Corbusier and Sergei Eisenstein sewrved the emblematic duo in this cross-medium relationship; Walter Benjamin sealed the marriage as a product of modern technological reproduction; and psychology reinforced it with the concept.

A garment, discarded. A texture holding a text. As part of an aesthetic collection that speaks of its wearer’s taste, the discarded garment enacts recollection, recalling for us the person who inhabited its surface - the lively body that animated it.

The architectural paths of the art of memory

Eisenstein’s imaginistic vision of the filmic-architectural promenade follows a mnemonic path. It bears the mark of the art of memory and, in particular, its was of linking collection and recollection in a spatial fashion. Let us recall that the art of memory was itself a matter of mapping space and was traditionally was an architectural affair. In the first century A.D., more than a hundred years after Cicero’s version. Quintilian formulated hisarchitectural understanding of the way memory works, which became a cultural landmark.1 To remember the different parts of a discourse, one would imagine a building and implant the discourse in site as well as in sequence: that is, one would walk around the building and populate each part of the space with an image. Then one would mentally retraverse the building. Moving around and through the space, revisiting in turn all the rooms that had been decorated with imaging. Conceived in this way, memories are motion pictures. As Quintilian has it, memory stems from a narrative, mobile, architectural of site:

Some place is chosen of the largest possible extent and characterized by the utmost variety, such as a spacious house divided into a number of rooms. Everything of note therein is carefully imprinted on the mind...... the first thought is placed, as it were, in the forecourt; the second, let us say, in the living-room; the remainder are placed in due order all round in the impluvium, and entrusted not merely to bedrooms and parlours, but even to the care of status and the like. This done, when the memory of the facts requires to be revived, all these places are visited in turn.... what I have spoken of as being done in a house can equally well done in connexion with public buildings, a long journey, or going through a city or even with pictures. or we may even imagine such places to ourselves. We require therefore places, real or imaginary, and images or simulacra which we must, of course, invent for ourselves.... As Cicero says, “We use places as wax.” 2

As Frances Yates demonstrates ion her study of the subject, the art of memory is a form of inner writing.3 Such a reading, in fact, can be extended all the way from plato’s “wax block” of memory to the wax slab of mnemonic traces, impressed on celluloid, on Freud’s “Mystic Writing Pad.”4 In cicero and in Quintilian, whose arts of memory are particularly relevant here, the type of inner writing that is inscribed in wax is architectural. Places are used as wax. With respect to this rendering of location, the architecture of memory reveals ties to the filmic experience of place and to the imaginative itinerary set up in a museum. Before motion pictures spatialized and mobilized discourse substituting for memory, in the end - the art of memory understood recollection spatially. It made room for image collection and, by means of an architectural promenade, enable this process of image collection to generate recollection. In this way, memory interacts with the haptic experience of place; it is precisely this experience of revisiting sites that the architectural journey of film sets in place and in motion. Places live in memory and revive in the moving image.

1. Marcus Tullius Cicero’s version of the at of memory is outlined in his De oratore, trans. E. W. Sutton and Harris Rachman (London: Loeb Classical Library, 1942). Marcus Fabius Quintilianus’s rendition of the subject is laid out in his Institutio oratoria, vol.4, trans. H. E. Butler (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1922).

2. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, vol.4: 221-223. 3. See Yates, The Art of Memory; and Yates, “Architecture and the Art of Memory,”

Architectural Design 38, no. 12(December 1968): 573-578. 4. See Plato, Theatetus, trans. Harold N. Fowler (London: Loeb Classical Library, 1921),

and Sigmund Freud, “A Note on the Mystic Writing Pad,” in Complete psychological Works, vol, 9 (London: Hogarth Press, 1956).