A Tertiary World
Searching for lost time and how to recapture it was Marcel Proust’s main quest in life. Retrieving the permanent and the significant from the hidden layers of our memory would, he believed, help find continuity in a rapidly changing world. Free-flowing events or feelings from our past conjured up without volition are sometimes called ‘Proustian memories’. They are a phenomenon of ‘natural’ memory, while memories elicited by a will to remember are a manifestation of ‘artificial’ memory.
Domenico de Clario’s latest installation, a tertiary world, evokes a remembered world of Proustian resonance: the artist outwardly explores the past rather than the present, the personal rather than the social. He links the local area in inner city Melbourne, where he has spent most of his life, to ‘natural’ memories: by his walking the streets of Carlton, ‘narratives’ of past moments flow to the surface of de Clario’s consciousness. This is an intriguing reversal of a prevalent mnemotechnic developed by the Ancients, which enabled them to store, and recover, astonishing amounts of information. This favourite method of memorizing facts and figures for easy retrieval involved ‘placing’ them in sequential order in a familiar architectural environment. By mentally visiting each location of this urban landscape, the information would be recalled on demand.
De Clario’s narratives are expressed as a text and coded chronologically using the seven colours of the spectrum. These same colours are simultaneously linked to a grid composed of seven parallel streets of Carlton running North-South and seven parallel streets running East-West. Each of the ninety-eight narrative memories (seven for each street re-visited) is offered to the public for contemplation, in a manner reminiscent of the Fourteen Stations of the