5: J.R. Plaza Archive Exhibition [4.3.12]

I went to an exhibition while in Barcelona based on the J.R. Plaza Archive, this was a vast archive of photos inherited by an artist from his grandfather; an amature photographer from barcelona.
The photos are mostly people based.

'In the year 2000 Iñaki Bonillas inherited a collection of material from his grandfather, José María Rodríguez Plaza. it included 30 photo albums and 800 slides, two volumes of an encyclopaedia of film and a folder full of various documents. this mized bag of objects and images, which Bonillas would later call the J.R. Plaza Archive, let him to set out on a long process of reflection on the possible uses of an archive of this nature (a collection focused on family-related photography, with the sentimental value that would imply) within the practice of contemporary art.'

The series of photos that interested me the most from this collection were the photos taken from the archive damaged by clothes moth -
'The Tineidae Series. (The name is taken from the Latin word for the moth family).
According to the dictionary definition, the term moth can be applied to 'anything that destroys something slowly and senselessly'' which would be the case of time its self.
  Like with our memories, photographs can tend to fade out.
''It fades, weakens, vanishes; there is nothing left to so but throw it away'' - Roland Barthes.
This even more dramatic if we think that photographs often replace the memories, even though the essence they are not memories at all, working in fact as counter-memories that block out the original recollection. is it not frequent enough that a photograph comes to replace the memory we could have of a certain event (if we have one at all: some memories don't even get the chance to form as such, which is when photographs some into play?) The idea we have of a given moment in life ( here the artist chooses particularly pleasant circumstances)  depended entirely on this image that is now full of holes. it is as if the purpose of the moth where to remind us that what we see has been irremediably left behind.

This exhibition suits my project brilliantly and has inspired so many thought about how to convey memories and their destruction; involuntary or not. I would like to experiment with films, developing techniques and after treatment of prints to to damage or distort them to represent memory.