'Borrowed Memory' | table of contents
...crossing borders carrying boxes of history ... I navigate the short distance between 2 capital cities cross pollinating as I go ... taking this, leaving that, mixing together ... effectively raiding one place for the kind of treasure that the other lacks ... the Khmer Rouge were many things and efficient was one of them, burning or destroying in other ways every form of Khmer documentation on paper ... letters, official publications, books, magazines, newspapers, photographs, record albums ... all reduced to ash ... completely, absolutely erased from the land as if it never existed ... in order to rewrite history ... and they succeeded in the most terrible way...
...while Vietnam for decades experienced constant conflict, civil war, neo-colonialism and yet ... much of their culture and the records of their history survived intact ... miraculously ... the testament to that is witnessed in Saigon today, in the year 2005, with a surprising amount of historical documentation still available ... piles of it, bags of it, drawers of it, boxes of it ... this is the stuff of everyday life, the not too precious, the cultural debris of the regular person, the things that proved they were around, the evidence of being, stamped and signed documents, licenses, awards, passports, lists of thing to do, financial records, 45 and 33 rpm records, sheet music and especially ... photographs ... in abundance...
...borrowing all this history, this collection of memories that do not connect directly but all share the same time, co-existing, but probably never crossing ... I take these memories and rewrite the past, a certain version of the past, a particular history that is partly my romantic view of the images that are left, the lore, the rumor, the fascination ... I reconstruct a dream from the stuff of the real, the common place, the ordinary ... by gluing and stapling and painting memories in beetle-nut boxes meant to be placed on wooden tables, hung onto walls far from their source, these random images of history take on a new life, out of context, out of time, assembled together in a nonsensical manner they become coherent, a new sense is made, a new record of the past, not false, simply rearranged on a wall...
...this collection of new work is what I call "borrowed memories", it is a way of giving them back to time, now — this time, giving them new life, removed and liberated from closed bags, dark drawers, sealed boxes they now have a new lease, a chance to breathe again ... I am only the messenger, the transporter, the construction worker ... a busy bee spinning honey from the pollen of days past...