Sara Rman: Where It Remembers

Sare Rman’s project titled Where It Remembers refrains from simplistic definitions and straightforward explanations. Its components originate from a single space: a micro-location along a riverbank. The semi-urban landscape represents a junction between the suburbs and nature; on the one hand, it is marked by human interventions while being exposed to countless biological, chemical and physical processes over which humans have no influence on the other. Precisely because of its lack of clearly defined purpose, this liminal space is an open field, a place of transition and a refuge that does not impose or demand definitions. The artist has been returning to it since childhood, observing it closely and documenting its constant transformation.

 

The fundamental elements of the space are primordial – water, earth, stone, wood – but materials made and discarded by humans, such as plastic, glass, metal and fabric, can also be found among them. Their appearance depends on light, whether in the form of reflections on the water’s surface, the gleaming surface of rock, the soft play of shades in the river’s depths or the contrasting shadows of jagged rocks. Rman translates the physical reality of the chosen location into a visual language, layering, combining and manipulating digital and analogue techniques. Through an interweaving of photography, graphic art and sculpture, she creates her own surrealism, a vision of matter and its infinite variability. Among the works exhibited, we find, for example, digital photographs of stones printed on photographic paper that had been pre-treated with an acrylic spray affecting the quality of the print, to which a layer of plastic was added, molded in the shape of the very stones depicted in the photographs. Since the appearance of works depends on the lighting conditions in which we view them, the multiple layers create an infinite number of manifestations of a single work, which are always and at the same time never completely the same – just as in nature.

 

The artist deliberately and meticulously transforms selected materials found on site into reflections of reality. Among them are photographs of stone structures, a body of water and the sandy surface of a riverbank, all of which she printed onto viscose, laid the fabric over the stones in the observed space, hardened the fabric with polymer resin so it took on the shape of the stones, and then framed it with expanding foam. Their metamorphosis constitutes a transition from the physical world into the digital realm and back into concrete materiality, whose appearance may have changed, yet the reference remains the same. Material layers are interwoven with semantic ones; the impressions act as a memory that, despite the unstoppable flow of time, preserves the vitality of its original form. Although they may appear unaffected, the building blocks of the contemplated landscape are constantly eroding, evaporating, dying, emerging, shrinking, expanding, crumbling and accumulating in both a physical and symbolic sense – and yet they never disappear, they merely take on another form. The transience of human memory is utterly insignificant compared to the memory carried by spaces. Sara Rman simultaneously creates and constantly supplements a personal archive of space and memory in interdependence with the changes unfolding at their own pace in real time. Who – or what – then remembers, and where does it remember? A world inscribing itself into a person, inscribing themselves into the world, inscribing itself into a person, inscribing themselves into the world, inscribing themselves…

 

With her project Where It Remembers, which has found expression in a series of photographs, objects and an artist's book, Sara Rman explores a chosen micro-location, and its constituents and building blocks. In doing so, she does not remain merely an observer documenting the existing state, but actively intervenes in the semi-urban landscape, engaging with its materials. The metamorphosis of discarded, found and collected materials into works of art raises questions about origin and memory, which constantly shift their forms of manifestation. By combining ready-made objects with meticulously planned artistic interventions, the artist moves between the natural, the found and the random on the one hand, and the purposefully created on the other, suggesting that humans create space just as much as space creates them.

 

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