Memento Mori
Claudia Schnaider

Claudia Schnaider is one of the artists selected through the Semillero 2018 open call, and her work MEMENTO MORI was presented at the ´aceNITE on November 20th, 2019.

ARTIST STATEMENT

One of the axes of my work is to explore the creative and expressive possibilities of a basic module whose identity is lost within the pattern that contains it. Through this method I began the production of a series that I called Reliquaries, where the pattern was the basis for telling the story of my own identity; just like with the fragmented remembrances that interweave the memory. The series began at a hinge moment of my life in which I had to make decisions and dispose of certain family possessions, among which I found countless objects loaded with symbolic information, whose existence I no longer remembered. They awakened experiences that I didn’t know were kept in me. This work, so intimate, allowed me to experience the importance of building family history and investigating the roots that shaped my individual identity. And as I deepened during the production of these works, I was increasingly aware of the unfathomable emptiness left by absences.

MEMENTO MORI (by Claudia Schnaider)

This work is part of the Reliquaries series and was born with the idea of building my family tree. I was looking for a common element for children of all generations and I remembered the little paper toads I played with at recess, a universal game that ignores borders and time. This object, which was reproduced infinitely and was disarmed or disintegrated with the rain or succumbed to the sole of the foot, was chosen to tell the ephemeral reality of life.

“Who at least once has begun to open the trunk of the memory, always finds new compartments, new contents, no image satisfies him, because he understands that it could unfold, that only in the folded is the authentically proper: that image, that pleasure, that touch that has led us to dissociate everything, to unfold it, and then the memory goes from small to tiny, from tiny to minimal, and what is offered in this microcosm is getting closer and closer. ” Walter Benjamin