How is memory constructed? What role does it play in creating and understanding a story? What mechanisms determine the construction of reality? There is a whole line of recent works in contemporary art that explore these aspects: memory and its ambiguities, authenticity, experience and its recording, how history is written and how it transcends, the notions of secrecy, rumour and oral transmission. Artists such as Mario García Torres, Dora García, Francis Alÿs, Christian Jankowski and Omer Fast, among many others, work from the idea of story and narration in which reality and fiction often intersect and dissolve.
An exhibition by Omer Fast can be seen these days at Caixaforum in Barcelona. Fast became internationally known with the video installation Spielberg’s List (2003), for which he interviewed people who participated as extras in Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List. Spielberg’s film was shot on location in Krakow and featured numerous local extras. Using a documentary format, Omer Fast collected these testimonies, in which the extras explained their experiences in relation to the film, but also in some cases to the real events, and mixed them with images of the original concentration camps, combining them with parts of the set that recreated them, so that different narrative levels were automatically created.
In Casting (2007), one of the two video installations shown at Caixaforum, the artist continues to draw intersections between reality, memory and fiction. Casting focuses on the testimony of an American soldier in the Iraq war. A fortuitous event, the shooting of a civilian and, in parallel, an unfortunate romance in Germany are the events narrated by the soldier. While we hear his voice (and see him on one of the screens), the central part of the installation recreates this story and enhances its fictional aspect, by placing the action in a casting.
In his book Storytelling. The Story Making Machine and Formatting the Mind, Christian Salmon argues that what we understand as reality is increasingly confused with fiction. The book shows how, alongside reality, a new order of storytelling is being constructed, a fictitious order that replaces reality and points to the existence of a financial management storytelling or a marketing storytelling. He himself explained in an interview: “If we talk about politics, it’s the same. Politicians don’t argue, they don’t open a debate, but a theatre, a story. Storytelling: they tell a tale. John McCain has written a book, Faith of my fathers, and Obama titled his Dreams from my father. Regardless of whether we like Obama more, the truth is that both present a virtual theatre, a chain of positions that obey the same codes: storyline, timing, framing, networking…”.
[Article published in Bonart, 2011]
