MARION ELLENA
do you remember the color of my room ?
Marion Ellena (1992-) is a photographer born in Venezuela of a peruvian mother and a french father. She is currently working in Marseille on the theme of memory. Her artistic approach is based on a constant oscillation between past and present where photographs, witnesses of intimate past memories, are tirelessly modified and altered to extract their quintessence.
Marion Ellena is one of the laureates of the 1+2 Residence #2023. Her project entitled « Do you remember the color of my room? », developed with the Centre de recherches sur la cognition animale (CRCA/CBI – CNRS/Université Toulouse III Paul Sabatier) in Toulouse, questions the mechanisms of forgetting and memory formation, in the light of research on neurogenesis and neuroplasticity of the brain.
First, Marion explores the plasticity of memories through the materiality of photography, using visuals taken with a smartphone. These are then subjected to alteration processes that fix her memories while revealing their fragility. In a second time, the artist collects « orphan » photographs found in recycling center and flea markets, transforming and reinterpreting them in order to define the contours of a collective intimacy.
Marion Ellena was in residency at the Bellegarde Cultural Center from March 01 to April 30, 2023.
The oceanic of memory
Marion Ellena's work questions the enigma of memory, and the way in which our memories are constituted, by recomposing the elements of an essentially elusive reality. By working experimentally on the very matter of the image, captured, found, 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 therefore questioned the capacity of the memory to regenerate itself according to the environments in which the subject finds himself.
But, how can we approach the present if our past is an arch floating in the elusive?
Where are we really if what we take for our visual biography is an ephemeral construction of an often deceptive nature?
From orphaned photographs recovered in the public space or taken with his Smartphone, then transferred to paper, before being subjected to baths of chemical degradation, the artist questions the spectrality of images, their constitutive precariousness, as well as their capacity of remanence, of resonance, of adventure. The enterprise is both metaphysical - concern for identity, for the boundaries of the self - and deeply dreamlike. By the composite strength of her images, and the energetic colors that structure them, Marion Ellena overcomes the possible melancholy concerning the disappearance of the past by making the spectator enter the world of the sublime and of reverie (...)
The aesthetic of the artist proceeds from the superposition and the effects of transparency, ghostly beings like pieces of landscapes in dormancy.
The photographed is duplicated, taken back, photographed again, the poetic act operated here coming from both the reappropriation and the desire of drifting.
The memory is a mesh, a tear, a holed skull.
The exile is not to be deplored, as one could have believed when one lost one's native land, it is simply an ontological fact, the very condition of the human torn from his birth to the maternal oceanic.
One seeks the amniotic warmth of the past, and with Marion Ellena one discovers a totally unprecedented, new, enchanting future.
The Centre de Recherches sur la Cognition Animale at the Centre de Biologie Intégrative de Toulouse, is a CNRS / Université Toulouse 3 research laboratory which studies cognitive processes in various animal models. The REMEMBeR team seeks to identify the brain plasticity processes leading to memory formation, in both healthy and pathological brains.
