Tungsteno. Memorie e falsi ricordi dall’Archivio Video di Careof

The exhibition takes its cue from the autobiographical novel by neurologist Oliver Wolf Sacks (1933 – 2015) entitled “Uncle Tungsten. Memories of a Chemical Childhood’, in which the author recounts, among many other episodes, the story of a bomb that fell near his birthplace, in great detail. A totally invented recollection of an experience that the writer believed he had experienced first-hand. Drawing on the heritage of Careof’s Video Archive, which has over 9,000 titles and is recognised by the Ministry of Culture as being of national historical interest, the exhibition thus sets out to explore the theme of cryptomnesia, or the creation of a false memory that is nevertheless considered an original creation.

Covering a time span of fifty years, the exhibition presents the works of twenty-six artists_ who from the 1970s to the present day – through “found footage”, period images, “home movies” and the creation of “fiction” – tell how memory, like the archive itself, cannot be considered granitic, but rather living, fallible, magmatic matter, and how the creative act functions according to the same logic.