rewind, pause & play

REWIND, PAUSE & PLAY, Jean-Pierre Rehm ; text of the press release for the exhibition Traumathèque at the BF15, Lyons.

REW.

Following the survey carried out by a pair of French psychologists, the Henris, about memories from earliest childhood, Freud grapples with this oddity in an essay he penned in 1899. Like a perfect Sherlock Holmes, to begin with, a worthy representative of 19th century positivism, he solved the enigma presented. What are these given memories for going back to earliest childhood ? The master answers : late-in-the-day constructs, much later-in-the-day than their alleged origin. According to an identical process to the one analysed in respect of dreams, these narratives are reconstructions intended to disguise the imprint of traumatic experiences. This kind of insistent detail, very clear in the mind, masks another unbearable incident for the consciousness. The memory reframes, shifts and redistributes important factors. This is why these playlets have an anodyne look about them. Their function is to block out pain, project new images onto this opaque surface, images that are soothing and innocent. Freud thus calls them “screen memories”. But the survey is not over, and the investigator is still at work. And what if, instead of the replacement of one episode by another, he wonders, there was no invention from scratch. And what if, behind these stories, there was nothing authentic. Consequence ? In its initial elucidation, the screen of memory was opened out to camouflage a thoroughly real trauma ; in this second reading, on the other hand, there is nothingness, a void, abyssal expanse, which the screen helps to cover up. Translation ? Rather than surging up out of our childhood, these “screen-memories” merely persist in relating back to it in vain, as they would to a place forever buried. Paradoxical retrospectives which fabricate a cancelled origin, this is what is most remotely retrieved. These inaugural images, at once make-believe and content-less, thus redefine this memory which, it would seem, turns us into these oh-so-strange beings of history. For this memory “starts out” by not remembering a thing : first of all, it makes itself quite at home on a floating, snowy, virgin cloth, which it enhances with the fresh colours of the legendary.

PLAY

What does Trauma Tape show us ? Nothing, electronic snow which nights spent slumped in front of the small screen have accustomed us to. Who are we poking fun at ? The blind onlooker ? Poor interchangeable shows we’ve made him dependent on ? Acquiescent hypnosis ? Maybe. This would be cocking a snook at the protocol to which Christophe Berdaguer & Marie Péjus summon us. Confiding, by dint of desire, in a videotape whose titled box is the sole tangible proof of the mental, invisible images, arranges a comical rite. In an expeditious tribute to Poltergeist, Tron, Videodrome, Ring, and so on, the dancing electrons in it are supposed to attract, and then store – otherwise put, exorcize and stabilize – scenes which are too free not to threaten to return and rant in the skull. Self-hallucination therapy, homemovie of the depths, transfer no longer to the couch but to VHS, the shrink kit is cheap, practical, with free access, discretion guaranteed, etc. So be it. And ? And nothing, in a nutshell. Or this, a dash of humour in black and white, light, light mourning : the “screen memory” is this time unceremoniously reduced to the misty life of the screen itself, to the sole possibility of its existence freed from all content, a simple quivering of grains. As pure imageless memory, what new does Trauma Tape deliver ? That there is almost never any image in front of us – other than those which our very own angst-factories make for us. No other image than us (the aggregate of commotions of which we consist) – with the exception of those we are offered by rare works, to deliver us, as it happens, from ourselves. For the psyche is not “within”, it’s a surface, matrix of impression that is always available: us. Us, in the shop, in the city, in the country, in front of the TV, in the shower, in the trauma centre. Trauma Tape, or the us and its surfeit of scenarios stored away in the archive dormitory, once more available for the PLAY function.