SYMPTOM OF ABSENCE
“The archive is a place where the struggle between memory and forgetting, between preservation and destruction, takes place.” — Jacques Derrida
Found archive / Single-channel video / Samara / 2025
In today’s world, where information is becoming excessive and digital archives are flooded with millions of amateur videos, new media are replacing the old recording and storage devices that once occupied physical space in attics, storage rooms, and garages. Pushed aside and doomed to oblivion, old media are turning into a scattered mass of objects dispersed across flea markets and classified ads.
This project explores the archive as a site of displaced memory, where technological obsolescence becomes a metaphor for social and cultural forgetting. Working with found amateur videotapes, I collect fragments of the collective unconscious — affective remnants that do not fit into official narratives but preserve traces of trauma, desire, and loss.
The archive as a symptom consists of episodes cut from home videos that, like a tumor, protrude from the smooth surface of memory, revealing the unspoken. The uncanny is not the fear of the unknown, but the fear of what was meant to remain hidden yet suddenly emerges.
The work Symptom of Absence is part of the collective laboratory project No Place.
Curator — Diana Shliman