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* My intention was to separate the vertical from the horizontal compositions to make a point. To see the other ‘observations’ from this small UNESCO town, go back one post to “ferrara alla verticale”.

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I am usually hesitant about vertical compositions and I normally avoid them, except for some extraordinary situations. It is somehow unnatural for the eye and harder to explore. Some of you might disagree, but as I’m not normally shooting portraits or architecture I don’t see it fitting. Still, there are certain places that I’ve visited recently in Italy that push me to compose vertically. I find it challenging, but pleasurable. There are many elements which go into the composition (buildings, wires, people, shadows, columns etc.) and one must be very careful to find a balanced geometry for the eye to enjoy. For that matter, I’m glad I’m in Italy: it’s easy to find characters, especially when wondering about in the streets. It must be that that is why Fellini didn’t really consider himself an extraordinary filmmaker. It was not just modesty, but maybe a feeling that he is more of a documentarist…

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This is memory. This is my couch blanket’s memory of two people sitting next to each other for some time, of their moving about on it while sitting, re-shaping its surface with their every move. This is the memory of how those two people sat next to each other. After they left, the trace of their sitting on the couch – the complete memory event (from the blanket’s point of view) – endured until I decided to erase that memory and imprint a new one or reset the blanket to its initial position. It depends how we choose to look at it. If we were to be exact, no reset is ever entirely possible, because of the imperfections which accompany human skill and the inherent characteristics of the material itself. My couch blanket also has a long term memory. It stands witness to it’s being washed several times, of losing or ‘acquiescing’ new color (thank you Silvi for widening the spectrum of examples), of being hooked by different more or less sharp objects (it hasn’t been cigarette burnt yet, but we do not exclude this possibility, due this time to a determining event or to human attention or – better said – re-orientation of that attention for a short period of time to the ‘detriment’ of the blanket’s integrity). And because humans are there to observe and record the events through their own memory surface and/or choosing to externalize it to different mediums as the present case shows, the couch blanket acquires a history of its own (its-story), which varies from observer to observer and it’s defined by time and space (however subjectified these terms might be). In conclusion, every surface (including more complex ones as the human brain) has a memory, however transient or whatever its perceived expression. Memory is an attribute of things.

Now, this reminds me of what a friend of mine once said about human memory. She said: “memory is a great thing if you don’t have to deal with the past.” I think what she meant to say was that attributing value to memory is a human thing, but also that detachment from that given value means unshackling yourself from the past, which in its turn means more freedom of choice for the present. But that’s another discussion…

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*Stara Fužina, Bohinj, Slovenia

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