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The oceanic of memory

Marion Ellena's entire body of work questions the enigma of memory, and the way in which our memories are constituted, by recomposing the elements of an essentially elusive reality. Working experimentally on the very material of the image, captured, found and altered, the Venezuelan-born artist metaphorizes the fascinating neuroplasticity of the brain. In collaboration with the Centre de recherches sur la cognition animale (CRCA/CBI - CNRS/Université Toulouse III Paul Sabatier) in Toulouse, Marion Ellena has investigated the capacity of memory to regenerate itself according to the environment in which the subject finds itself.

But how can we approach the present if our past is a floating ark?

Where are we really if what we take to be our visual biography is an ephemeral construction of an often deceptive nature?

Using orphaned photographs recovered from public spaces or taken with her Smartphone, then transferred to paper before being subjected to chemical degradation baths, the artist questions the spectrality of images, their constitutive precariousness, as well as their capacity for remanence, resonance and adventure. The enterprise is both metaphysical - a concern with identity and the boundaries of the self - and profoundly dreamlike. Through the composite force of her images, and the energetic colors that structure them, Marion Ellena overcomes any possible melancholy concerning the disappearance of the past by drawing the viewer into the world of the sublime and reverie (...).

The artist's aesthetic is based on superimposition and transparency effects, with ghostly beings like dormant landscapes.

The photographed is duplicated, taken up again, photographed anew, and the poetic act here is one of both reappropriation and the desire to drift.

Memory is a mesh, a tear, a skull with a hole in it.

Exile is not to be deplored, as one might have thought when one has lost one's native land; it is simply an ontological fact, the very condition of the human being torn from the maternal ocean from birth.

We seek the amniotic warmth of the past, and with Marion Ellena, we discover a totally new, enchanting future.

Frank Ribery