The Method of Loci or also known as Memory Palace, is the technique we use for committing things to memory. It based on the fact that humans are extremely good at remembering places. A ‘Memory Palace’ is a metaphor for any well-known place that you’re able to easily visualise for example the inside of your home. That familiar place will be your guide to store and recall any kind of information.
Virgil Widrich's Memory Palace is a house of mirrors, projections and light combined with family stories somewhere in between trying to remember and trying to forget. The house is built on wobbly ground, a house that never existed and never can. It has no specific size – and because it will soon be inhabited by new memories, it is empty. But an empty house produces different feelings of emptiness depending on whether somebody is still to arrive, or the last of us have already departed.
The rooms offer no reference points and no orientation between 'inside' and 'outside', they are part of a journey through the memories in a location at different points in time that change with every glance and continue to dissolve. My project is based on a very similar idea of a room of memories. I wanted to create an emotional memory storage room, almost as if you've gone up into someones mind and they have their memories projected onto the walls and filing cabinets of all their memories stored away, like a literal memory palace.
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