On Memory and Family
Francisco Eme, Memory is a Bird - Chicahuaxtla, 2022, multimedia installation
[Image description: Black-and-white images projected on two adjoining walls in a darkened gallery. They show a mountainous background with birds flitting across the foreground. On the right, two adults and two children pose for the camera.]
by Chelsea Behle Fralick
Memory is a construct (mental concept) within a construct (the mind).
Memory is a pixelation within a pixelation.
Memory is at times both solid and contains slippages.
Memory is formed and formless.
These and other thoughts are what crossed my mind during and after viewing Francisco Eme’s “multimedia poem” La Memoria Es Un Pájaro / Memory Is A Bird at Best Practice gallery last winter. [1]
As I enter the darkened gallery room, La Memoria Es Un Pájaro / Memory Is A Bird unfolds like the recalling of each sensation of a distant family memory. I first face a projection of an old family photograph—of two women and two children in a mountain landscape—spread across two conjoined walls, with a third joined wall lined with three black and white drawings, spaced sparingly at eye level. Near the entrance, a group of musical organ-like tubes descend from the ceiling, and are made more mysterious by the room’s darkness. As I face the projection walls, the static photographic image fluctuates with fluttering video layers atop it, and I notice the layers moving in a clockwise fashion around the room. Speakers are placed in the four corners of the space, and a soundscape of musical drones—punctuated with an array of other revolving audio textures—surround the viewer, and immediately involve them in the space.
La Memoria Es Un Pájaro / Memory Is A Bird is so obviously bound up in the constructs of memory that it is almost redundant to deconstruct its layers of meaning here. Yet what makes Eme’s multi-sensorial show most memorable, and beautiful, to me is just how it explores family memory as an intimate and paradoxical creation of the individual mind.
Simply put, memory is both formed and formless—especially when it comes to family memory.
Francisco Eme, Memory is a Bird - Chicahuaxtla (detail), 2022, multimedia installation
[Image description: A pixelated, blurry image of two adults and two small children posing for the camera. Four birds fly in the foreground.]
What I mean by that is similar to how Roland Barthes writes about his mother and her memory in his essay “The Winter Garden Photograph,” in his pivotal book Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1980, in English 1981). In “The Winter Garden Photograph,” Barthes describes in detail a photograph of his mother Henriette from 1898, when she was five years old. As he describes the photograph, however, he also unpacks his memories of the mother he himself knew—memories that exist distinctly from the mother, aged five, depicted in the photo. Yet, as we all know, this younger mother-self is both the same and dramatically different from the mother-self Barthes knew. The text takes on an increasingly emotional tone as it progresses, panning its metaphorical camera lens between remembrance of a person long past and a sadness of a person never truly, fully known.
Loss—both of the person and of the memory—does indeed do this dance. How do we remember, if we never truly knew? Will this partial construct of the individual through family memory ever be enough?
Further, what if memory itself—the individual’s narrative of themselves, their story—begins to leave them long before their remembrance by family is built?
Can it ever be enough?
~~~~~
I viewed this exhibition in mid-December 2022, at a time when the idea of familial memory was strong in my mind. My father, Cary Allen Behle, was rapidly deteriorating from Alzheimer’s disease in a memory care facility in San Diego. His leaves of memory had been in a perpetual fall cycle for years, and his body had begun its downward descent with it. The mind and the body, two sides of the coin of life.
On January 12, 2023, he lost his battle with the disease and died. He was eighty years old.
In the weeks since, I have considered Eme’s metaphor of the bird in La Memoria Es Un Pájaro / Memory Is A Bird in concert with my in-progress remembrance of my father. The bird that swoops across both of our minds is the crow (el cuervo). In Eme’s work, the trademark “caw” of los cuervos whirls like a rushing rotary vortex around the viewer via the series of coordinated audio speakers, sweeping clockwise around the room in darts and bursts. The bird forms cast blurred, black shadows that spin simultaneously with their calls, streaking across the still video-projected image of Eme’s grandmother, mother, and two brothers posing in a mountain landscape: the old grandmother; the mother, seemingly in middle age; and the brothers as children. Eme describes this photo in his exhibition release as being taken in 1974 in the Sierra de Chicahuaxtla in Oaxaca, and how he found it “in the midst of…mourning” the passing of his own mother in 2019. [2]
Eme writes, “Barely visible through the mist, this ghostly image provided a glimpse of memory, a flashback… Memories of my family, in another time, fly like the flock of crows that pass in front of my house each fall. In the morning they go north, and at night they return to the south.” [3]
Two deaths, two families:
The crows
glide,
dive,
depart.
Francisco Eme, Volar en Circulos (Flying in Circles), 2022, drawings on paper
[Image description: Three drawings on white paper hanging on a white wall.]
The bird motif is also featured in one of the words that make up the three spot-lit drawing on the northern wall of the exhibition, forming the outlines of Eme’s young mother (though the identity of “mother” is not made explicit); a black circle; and the same mountain landscape depicted in the projected photograph, with the original photo attached in the center. The portrait of Eme’s mother in particular beautifully renders the give and take of familial memory within the mind through the symbol of the migrating bird. Entirely created through small collaged black-inked word stamps, the portrait of the young woman, eyes gazing upwards and face still and stoic, appears to be only tenuously held together by fluttering pixelations of one single word: “PAJAROS” (“birds”).
When we read the portrait through the lens of familial and personal memory, we might think of the way a memory flees us almost as soon as it’s created. Further, we might look at an old image, photographic or otherwise, of a family member and recognize it as a seemingly idealized version of that person. The present vantagepoint collides with the past representation. Memory fluctuates within the image and around it.
Mystically, memory may be seen as both there and not there, experienced and not experienced. Ever pixelated in the mind. Ever separate, and yet married to, what we see.
The words are memories.
The birds are memories.
The face is a memory.
The place is a memory.
~~~~~
Eme states in his exhibition release that for La Memoria Es Un Pájaro / Memory Is A Bird, he utilized video footage he took of crows that migrate over his house. In my childhood growing up in North County San Diego, on the edge of Lake Hodges, crows also swept down over my family’s house by the thousands every fall, migrating north into the trees in the wide canyon below us. The sound of their cawing was deafening (as it is in the whirring sounds of Eme’s installation at times). Sitting on our back porch, cradled by hills and mountains and crow caws, our family was awed by the swelling, fleeting power of nature.
All the while, my dad took photographs of the crows.
As a semi-professional photographer, my father knew how memory could be stored visually. The photograph is a container of memory; memory is, in part, formed in the photograph. Yet the story we tell about the photograph can also be formless, particularly if another person is made aware of the story, and carries the story on in their own minds. In both cases, the frame creates the first boundary, establishing the centerpoint of the photograph’s evolving narrative. The rest of the constructed memory then becomes either integral (if woven with its oral history and/or further photographic images), or peripheral and lost.
We as humans also pick and choose memory, to a great extent. Just as I often choose the mental image of my younger father from my own youth—when I could still learn about photography from him, for example, before he lost his words through aphasia—Eme appears to choose his younger mother in his “PAJAROS” portrait in the gallery.
The image we feel we most know: the man as “father,” the woman as “mother.”
A photograph is a likeness. But is it really a memory, in the truest sense of family?
~~~~~
Barthes takes a different tactic than Eme and I by discussing a photograph of his mother in her young childhood, pre-motherhood. She is a mother that Barthes has “no hope of ‘finding,’” as she is frozen in “History”: “[I]t was History which separated me from [the photo]…Is History not simply that time when we were not born?” [4] Barthes argues that this History is “constituted only if we consider it…and in order to look at it, we must be excluded from it.” [5] Mother for Barthes, then, is forever a bi-folded construct of the individual (the past “History”) and family (the present state of Barthes’s own reflections and thoughts).
However, if we believe that history (big “H” or not) can further be constituted in the present—even in the moment the lens trains on the subject and flashes the shutter—then the amalgams of present with past, family with individual, necessarily produces a thicker, more detailed palimpsest of the history of personhood. The creation of a memory, then, is produced by both the event (individual) and its future retelling (family), layering the memory’s re-imagining by those (potentially many) close to the memory or person. We develop one exposure of that frame, and overlay it with the other, and another, and another…
As the crows fly over Eme’s static photo, these more present layers (each bird as a re-telling, even) flow wildly yet unidirectionally over the past, as if stating, “I see all views simultaneously here. I assert these together as a shared history of family memory.”
Perhaps this is how I should consider my own father, and his multitudes of photographs of family and nature. They all exist in many layers of history, and therefore of meaning. And my own re-telling here of family remembrance is one of those layers.
Especially in the absence—both mental and physical—of the individual of that history.
~~~~~
The in-person experience of La Memoria Es Un Pájaro / Memory Is A Bird is also undeniably encased within sound. Eme, a sound artist as much as a visual artist, utilizes the potentials of an enveloping soundscape to enhance the ephemeral qualities of memory. This experience, too, is so viscerally familial—and therefore meaningful to this viewer—through two key elements: the spinning, auditory tonal drone loop that dominates the installation’s soundtrack, and the train whistle-like tones produced in the gallery itself.
Francisco Eme, Sibilancias Nocturnas (Nocturne Wheezing), 2022, sound installation
[Image description: A cluster of seven tentacle-like organ pipes hang from the ceiling of the gallery.]
Both the drone-heavy soundscape and the train whistles co-mingle with the visualized birds and landscape, playing against and fluctuating amongst the images. The train whistle sounds are produced by organ-style pipes hanging down from the ceiling of the gallery space, sprouting downward like an inert, wooden mourning bouquet. Drooping in silence, they become suddenly activated partway through the sound loop by pressurized air, roaring life into all of the whistles simultaneously. Carefully timed with additional whirling sounds—including tones reminiscent of moving trains and more discernible crow caws—the soundscape further suggests movement, migration, stillness, and the fleeting memories that come with those disparate actions.
Science currently suggests that hearing is one of the last senses that a person loses before they die. [6] Talking to dying patients, playing music, singing, etc. can therefore give family one of the last ways to communicate with the dying—to bridge the gap between life and death, if only temporarily. I read part of the Tibetan Book of the Dead to my own father as he lay dying in the hospital on his final day, hoping it would help him usher in his final moments of ultimate release in a comforting, life-affirming way. Sound penetrating the stillness of the hospital mourning space.
But ultimately, death is still the biggest and most difficult step the body and mind can take: completely into the unknown. The most sublime moment—terror and awe-struck beauty, merged—if there ever was one.
The reflection of this moment in the days after my father’s death collided with my recalling listening to Eme’s whistles and thinking about Steve Reich’s three-part musical composition Different Trains (1990). This quartet composition chronicles the sounds of trains in America and Europe during WWII, and features samples, in part, from European Jews recalling their harrowing personal experiences on the concentration camp trains in the Holocaust. [7] The string progressions of the quartet repeatedly echo the vocal tones of the audio clips, reverberating further memory through the ether. It’s a powerful, moving piece of music, and the train sounds throughout create a palpable sense of mass cultural migration, bodily terror, and the inescapable burdens of family memory.
Family memory has its burdens, but it also has its multiple senses. These multiple senses can be debilitating, or liberating, or both. Simultaneously, in fact.
Sound is a distortion of a distortion.
Memory is a pixelation of a pixelation.
Sound is at times solid and contains slippages.
Memory is formed and formless.
~~~~
I don’t know how Eme’s mother died. It doesn’t really matter, in the end. What matters is that the construction of family memory is a collection and collaboration—of “history” and “History”—of sounds and images, of stillness and movement.
Barthes distinguishes himself in certain ways from the constructs that Eme and I do with our parents. Yet all of these constructs convey the ways in which we, as a society, tend to look to family photographs to show the formed within the formless, the meaning within the seemingly meaningless event of death. In the end, we seek with our families to hold onto what we have in our minds, our bodily memories, our recorded experiences.
Our constructs, in the end, are all we have.
Notes:
Use of phrase “multimedia poem” quoted from Francisco Eme, “La Memoria Es Un Pájaro / Memory Is A Bird,” Exhibition Release, Best Practice Gallery, November 12 - December 17, 2022.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Roland Barthes, “25. Winter Garden Photograph” in Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill & Wang Publications, 1982): 63.
Ibid.
“Hearing Persists at the End of Life,” Neuroscience News.com, July 8, 2020. Accessed February 23, 2023.
Matthew Schnipper, “Listening to Steve Reich’s Holocaust Opus ‘Different Trains’,” Pitchfork, October 3, 2017. Accessed April 10, 2023.