The houses we inhabit are important containers of memory. With each new family, the house becomes a different home and these various layers of memory converge to form a dense palimpsest. Houses function quite literally as memory palaces, as a walk through a childhood home will show; each room conjures up images from the past. Over time, these personal memories become woven together with the cultural memory of countries and generations.
The importance of the home is a central theme in art and several contemporary artists explore the specific relationship between memory and the home. This paper analyses three case studies, to get a deeper understanding of how the home functions and feels like a memory palace, both on an individual and on a collective, cultural level, focusing in particular on the convergence of memories from different times and places.
The first case study concerns artworks from the exhibition Mnemosyne by the artist duo Anne and Patrick Poirier. These works combine interests in architecture, archaeology and psychology, bringing together past, present and future memories. Models of cities and fantastical architectural designs resemble physical structures (such as the brain), architectural metaphors of memory (such as the memory palace), and archaeological remains, essential to our shared cultural memories.
Secondly, works by Do Ho Suh will help us understand the relationship between the home and memory on a more personal level. Outlines of rooms from his former homes, made of colourful, transparent fabric and combined into new structures, provide insights into the way these spaces retain individual memories. The spaces have been emptied out and only the husks remain, bearing witness to the artist's migration from South Korea to the US. Although walls, doors, switches and keyholes are standard, mass-produced elements, found in many homes and devoid of inherent meaning, together they remind us of the emotional significance attached to the muscle memory of spaces we once inhabited.
The third case study concerns an exhibition in a house put up for sale on the Dutch real estate website Funda. The house was built in 1933 by a Jewish family fleeing from Germany. The father and son were later deported and killed and the house was subsequently lived in by a member of the SS. The artists Anne van As and C.A. Wertheim have used the history and memories of the house as a starting point for an exhibition called (T)huis, a combination of the Dutch words for home and house. This case study illustrates the way houses can become containers of conflicting memories and allows us to explore the transition of individual memories into shared, cultural memory, in this case of WWII.
Taken together, the analyses provide a deeper understanding of different facets of the relationship between home and memory, and the ways in which art can represent these. The house comes to function as the locus in which layers of both individual and collective memories converge.
