marit lindberg and rachel rosalen

The project post diaries is based on images, texts fragments, short appropriations, an imaginary invention about Japan under a fresh foreigner way to look at this country on the very early moments spent in there.

Time passing was necessary to elaborate these diaries in order to loose the sharpness and to recreate these recordings freely from the necessity imposed by the daily notes to be transparent and to describe a situation. Of course a diary hasn’t the compromise to became a documentary, but it should have some correspondence with the daily experiences. But five years later to write this situation becomes impossible. The disappearance, the deleting, the miscellaneous and the fragmentation of this memories are inevitable. Images became frozen into many tapes loosing their colors into a very smooth time fog. Overwrite this remembering remakes them alive. Also giving then a flow in the internet means not to trap these diaries in a very rigid structure but to open the re-write possibility again and again.

Japan (1602-1898) had a collaborative creation tradition founded on its most important poetry aesthetic movement called renga. Ideal renga aesthetics included a continuous images changing although these image were always referenced in the previous verse. This simple and short structure allowed a creation of poem-based games inspired on renga anthologies. One of these known games played among familiar groups or in between friends is called karuta. The word karuta came from the portuguese word carta (card) and there are different ways to play it. One of them is based on poem combining. Using a hundred cards painted with half poem on each, the main idea is to remember, read and to find out what should be the other half. In a way, it looks like the western memory game or the poem game, when the group of the participants have to remember the place of the similar cards distributed on the table and to look for them. But on karuta, the game is never only about memory, but words combination and a poem composition system.

And what is exactly a memory landscape but a mental combination of experiences’ fragments deformed by the time passing of and always overlapped by another ones?

Post diaries is based on these landscaped and proposes these recordings recreation in order to keep this shared experienced alive. It also proposes a discussion about the time passing effects on our memory. Post diaries opens a discussion on media intense, daily and massively reconstruction of reality effects on our memories and about the created fiction of keeping alive media and memories.

The first happening of this project happened in Malmö at the Victoria Theater on November 2nd, 2009.