Bea Camacho’s soft machines of memory and forgetting

Artist Bea Camacho remembers it well.

Bea’s mother (Kim Camacho) used to keep drawings and paintings made by Bea and her siblings when they were still children in a drawer next to the mom’s bed. If ever the house burned down, that drawer — as Kim’s edict goes — was the first to be carried out of the house, away from the fire. Bea also recalls how as an 11-year-old kid, she had to move away from home in the Philippines to study in England.

“That experience of living away from my family was something I reflected on in my early work as an artist,” explains Bea, who is currently based in Shanghai and is also working as a designer for design and innovation consultancy firm called Ideo. “And it led to lots of artworks that I made about my family — about distance, absence and memory.”

Remembering and its colder, more distant counterpart, Forgetting, are explored in Bea’s latest exhibition, which opens today, Jan. 20, at Mo_Space in Bonifacio Global City. “Memento Obliviscere” which is on view until Feb. 18, deals with memory and the way in which remembering and forgetting (both intentionally and unintentionally) shape our personal, social and cultural truths. 

Dig this series of pieces titled “Memory Apparatus” and how they amplify the theme in particular: typewriters with the letters on the typebars polished off, newspapers with the content removed, as well as photographs of the backs of photographs. These tools of record, which have been modified and rendered record-less, resonate with the idea about how absence creates its own presence.

She shares, “Our memories define our experience, our reality and our identity, but our memories are also fragile and vulnerable. They are malleable and easily manipulated.” Scientific studies have shown that it is possible to erase components of one’s memories by using chemicals, while psychologists maintain that it is also possible to implant false memories into an individual using a variety of methods.”

Bea’s latest show expounds on ideas she has explored in past ones, bringing with it new narratives, fresh angles and more questions about the role of memory as a “mechanism for making the absent present.”

The artist did an 11-hour performance where she crocheted until her body was completely encased in a cocoon of red yarn. The video is titled “Enclose” (2005) which was part of Camacho’s “Blind Transmission” exhibition at the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP). “Efface” (2008) would be shown at Green Papaya Art Projects, while “Enclose II” (2010) centered on a live performance at Tate Modern in London. For her show at Pablo gallery, she explored the idea of how “memories are inherently fictions because they are imperfect reconstructions of past experiences.” For a commissioned piece at Bonifacio High Street (2008) to be later reinstalled at the Queens Museum of Art in New York (2012), Bea invited viewers to watch ice melt. 

The installation is composed of carved blocks of ice that  spell out the word “Remember.”

She explains, “The piece was installed outdoors and then left there to melt away, posing the question of whether something could be designed to live past its physical existence, physically melting away, but continuing to exist in our memories by design.”

Bea remembers growing in a house filled with art and love of art (since her parents, Kim and Lito Camacho, are ardent art collectors).

“My parents have been very influential in shaping my appreciation of art from a young age. As children, my siblings and I went with them to museums and galleries. We grew up surrounded by my parent’s art collection. They have collected exceptional pieces by artists like Yayoi Kusama, Roberto Chabet, Alfonso Ossorio, and the Gutai artists from Japan.  My father also has a talent for drawing — which I think few people know about — and in our house we had some of his works: a large drawing he made of his business school classmates as well as a portrait he drew of my mother.”

Making mementos is also one of Bea’s passions. She does portraits as well as — albeit with a conceptual twist.

In her “Portrait Series,” Bea took a photo of each member of her family, photocopied the photo, then photocopied the photocopy, and continued photocopying each successive photocopy until the image completely disappeared. The last blank page was what she framed and displayed in the gallery as the “portrait.” Sort of a lasting portrait of what is not there.

She concludes, “Each time you photocopy something, the image quality deteriorates. In the same way that each time we recall a memory, we lose some details of that memory — which means that in fact the best way to preserve a memory is never to remember it.”

But a chat with Bea Camacho is fruitful and unforgettable, I should say. And she is still on the cusp of more explorations. More narratives are being birthed. Epiphanies are on the march. Did you know she once recorded her secrets onto a compact disc and broadcast them inside a gallery? Continuously. Using a radio transmitter. Only there were no radio receivers in the gallery, thus no one heard anything at all.

And all her secrets twirled silently in space.

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Bea Camacho’s “Memento Obliviscere” opens today, Jan. 20, and is on view until Feb. 18 at Mo_Space, 3/F MOs Design Bldg., Bonifacio High Street, 9th Ave., Taguig.

For information, call 856-7915 or SMS 0917-5727970, email mospaceph@gmail.com, or visit www.mo-space.net. For information about the artist, visit www.beacamacho.com.