Serena Gamba

Born in Torino, 1982.

The historian and essayist Frances Yates said "the history of memory embraces the history of culture in its entirety" and "the barriers between various disciplines, natural science and human sciences, art and literature, philosophy and religion, they all disappear in the history of memory".
In this artistic journey, I use memory and oblivion as a way to get my bearings and be led across various fields. From the analysis to the imagination of architectural spaces, from perception words give, to the "deception" of perspective, from the denial of the image to the use of your own. But what is that bounds these different approaches?
The Theater of Camillo had the intention to construct an ideal place that could contain all human knowledge. Instead, I tried to recreate a kind of archive that does not only classify but finds ways to investigate memory and facing the issue of oblivion. If at first memory has made it possible to produce a series of works able to store its rebuses, useful to create new interpretations, in the last session oblivion has taken a key value. It is not denied anymore, but accepted and even desired. 
In some works the act of writing and describing the original painting is a reflection and a testimony of remembrance: it is an attempt to create an intimate encounter between the individual and his own act of remembering and memorizing throughout the History of Art. But it also is a personal exercise aimed at the study of the detail, at the research and acquisition of all possible information hidden in the artwork itself. In this process the language of oblivion, of dream and blurring, comes to life and it overlaps speech. It is a symbol of the natural, psychological, inexorable, constant process that eats the memory, transforming it into new substance.
The slowly hand-sewn letters become a vivid testimony of something that was present and that is now vanishing or soon will. But it is writing that becomes the way to slow down the process and to welcome oblivion, accepting its terrifying but cathartic and tempting side.
Thus, creating an archive, a tool for memory.
In this ideal archive the History of Art in the main and favoured scope of research, so it has to be protected, remembered and revealed.
Memory and oblivion coexist like life and death. The investigation of memory allows me to dive into the dark and sensual guts of oblivion. In this research I define an image without “image”, in which the remembrance and its forgetfulness becomes the heart of it.
Imaginary places, collages, words creations, maps, inverted perspectives, as much as books and carved wax tablets pose a single question: how far will remembrance be able to investigate and/or slow down oblivion?
What is memory? What is oblivion?
I intend oblivion as the natural and inevitable aim of our being and existing, as cancellation of culture (partly represented by art), as a container of the whole. 
I investigate in an “archaeological” way, to give voice to elements and constitutive parts of the same originary form. They are rich of symbols and details which are sometimes hidden by the artist and deliberately made into rebuses, imbued with meanings. Those meanings are not only identified from the artist himself, but they are representative of a precise historical period and expression of religious/political ideologies contemporary to the work. 
This analytical study method of artworks made it possible for me to create a “map” that constantly extends and evolves and donate a new and deeper meaning to my relationship with History of Art.