[ ]

“Souvenir Loops”, 12 film lucite, battery-operated viewers, super eight film clips looped, 00:00:20 each, 1998.

The double function of the souvenir is to authenticate a past or otherwise remote experience and, at the same time, to discredit the presence. The present is either too impersonal, too looming or too alienating compared to the intimate and direct experience of contact which the souvenir has as its referent. This referent is authenticity. What lies between here and there is oblivion, a void marking a readical separation between past and present. The nostalgia of the souvenir plays in the distance between the present and an imagined, prelapsarian experience, experience as it might be “directly lived.” — Susan Stewart, “On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection.

D. J. Lee adds, “Researchers-as-collectors take pieces of information out of one context and into another. The original context falls away as they make a new aesthetic whole, and in so doing, define themselves.” The Longing of the Collector, By D. J. Lee, LA Review of Books, September 25, 2014.

I had not read Proust’s “In Search of Time Lost” yet, but I noticed how my memories shifted with every recall. I try to just skim them, the few I care for, as I would a film review before I see the film. I worry if I don’t re-remember them occasionally I might lose them forever. These short films, about an everydayness I longed for, moments observed and captured from other peoples small non-events, reflected light splashing a wall, rain splashing on glass, still lifes with little or no movement, and other ethereal moments, field poems in essence, become my memories when I collect them. I encapsulate them in individual film viewers so I can preserve them, and experience them whenever I wanted to, without the risk they will change, degrade or be lost.