I’ve been collaborating with artist Simon Pope over the last few months and have been working on a project that aims to investigate the interaction between memory and location, and how this relationship can become fractured and renewed in psychosis.
The first event, called Gallery Space Recall, happens tomorrow in Chapter Art Gallery in Cardiff and everyone is invited.
Simon is particularly well-known for his use of walking as a visual art practice (and wrote the wonderful guide to exploring London’s psyche London Walking).
One particular form of delusion that occurs after brain injury seems to cause a rift in the normal pattern of understanding location, most likely owing to a disturbance in the brain’s memory structures.
Reduplicative paramnesia is the delusional belief that a place exists in two or more locations simultaneously and has been the inspiration for the project where we will try and get participants to hold contrasting and contradictory memories of a past location in mind, while experiencing movement through a current space.
The project also asks questions about the difference between delusion, psychosis and supposedly ‘normal’ mental states, and how they relate to our own memories of location and place.
By highlighting the universal influence of memory on our experience of the world, the project hopes to better understand the normal function of memory, and emphasises the common experience of the ‘mad’ and the ‘sane’.
Where is the line between delusion and reality when we only have our memories to rely on?
There are more stages of the project planned (and more events), some of which you can read about here, so we’ll keep you updated as the project moves on.
Link to details of ‘Gallery Space Recall’ event.
Link to Walking Here and There.
Mind Hacks 