«All I have of your memories is a map» is a project inspired in the text “A few notes form Extellectual” due to Hiwa K , an artist who narrates that refugees have to prove that come from an unsafe zone answering questions from the border official, who checks the answers on a map. Some of them are sent back from the border because his description of the unsafe zone differs from the border officer map.
Hiwa a K relates a story of a refugee that asked people from an unsafe zone that he had never visited, and draw a map in details. He went to the border and explained the officer in terms of the map and he was accepted for passing.
The living experience of a place is far away from the above point of view of the map. I think this distance is common in all the experiences we tray to share with others by means of our memories and communication. The other experience is an extreme otherness that nobody can really embody.
“All I have from your memory is a map” entails such a metaphor of this distance in shearing the experience through communication.
I asked immigrant people from all over the world, share a memory situated in a specific place of their original towns or places. I looked for such a places in the map using an eyetracker device that record mi efforts to find those reference points of the memory.
Once I find them, I trace the trajectory of my eyes on the map and cut the map following those paths.
The resulting piece of map (as a skeleton) is a way to grasp part of the narrated story, but at the same time, all I can have form their experience.

«All I have of your memories is a map».
by Mariano Sardón in collaboration with Mariano Sigman.

«Images of Journyes, Movement on Space» Exhibition.
The New Pushkin Museum. Moscow.
57^th International Art Exhibition.
VIVA ARTE VIVA.
Biennale di Venezia. 2017.