I've been planning to add something to the blog for some time but somewhat got bogged down trying get my head around 'negative spaces' , wanting to add something meaningful and clever but not getting very far!

One think that strikes me is that in our little world of thoughts, the different mediums of performance,sculpture, architecture and photography are colliding against each threading together the relationship to memory (or what's left behind) and how it applies to the different fields. To talk of the memorial and how we attempt to make a memory physical though sculpture or another architectural way, seems a path worth exploring. Hopefully all our thoughts are shaping our future sculpture in the very second we type our thoughts. Can one type up a scuplture?

I am probably repeating myself but for me:

the need to memorize, to write history, the urge to leave something behind. The marks and scratches on the walls that joc refers to. To state a comment. To take photographs. What does it mean. We didn't visually document our perfomance, we felt empty, perhaps much emptier ifwe had absulutely nothing. So are we memorializing because we all running from away from leading empty lives? Doe it lead back to existentialism, that we feel we need to create meaning and to leave thethe defined meaning behind when we are gone, especially because we will have no control in how they will remember us when we are gone (now we still do).

Why do so many people care what other people think when they die, even when they don't even believe in God.

I read an interesting article (in German) about a famous tattoo artist who went to Afganisthan and offered to tattoo soldiers which were part of a special squad, always at high risk in terms of loosing their lives. He said it was interesting to see what kind of tattos these soldiers wanted. Their choice of tattoo was often a memorial to an event or a person. For example they would have their mothers name inscribed, their children or their wives, people that really mean something to them. It's a living memorial in a way. And it's interesting because it dies with the person, it's one which lives in the now.

The interesting tattoos, are the ones which are linked to nan emotional connection. Some feel so strongly about someone or something that they can't keep it inside, it is not even enough to paint the event on a canvas, they feel they need literally need to embody it. The tattoo is not just a memory of an event but symbolizes what we are or what we want to be. By tattooing we are defining who we are and what we stand for, it's facing a truth in a way.

I am no fan of tattoos but there seems to be a correlation to our discussion, I've never really thought about them in that way.

It's also interesting how memory works and changes all the time, I wonder if the 'ego tunnel' also refers to this. There is so much we could remember but we choose to remember the bits that usually suit us best. Once we have a physical memorial, it defines to some extent what we memorize, it reminds us of a certain truth. It's also fascinating that on the other spectrum all of this you have Stalin who was actually trying to change history, by literally having parts of books ripped out in the thousands, or blackening some people portraits. From this we know that it is difficult to erase history once it has been made, or defined.

I feel there is a thread in all of this, perhaps it is the connection of the physical and the intangible, somewhere architecture creates a sculpture which is related to the memory of leaving something behind. The legacy. Perhaps the negative space of a sculpture is inside it, the place no one really knows or sees.

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