Architecture of Memory

"(…) You see images, you reproduce images, you keep images in your memory. The image is everything but a direct product of the imagination." (Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space)

Can you remember the rooms of your childhood?

Your childhood bedroom, your favorite hiding place or the smell in your grandparents' kitchen? Imagine telling these memories not only with words but also with a drawing. A drawing that does not necessarily depict your memory, but represents a mental and personal note of your memory. Which spatial elements would you draw? Which elements are important for capturing your memory? Architecture of Memory brings together 50 architects and artists from all over Switzerland to address precisely these questions.

Unpublished contributions written for this exhibition by well-known participants ask what mechanisms our mind uses to transform spatial memory into a concrete thought, a design. What are the memories that shape our memory the most? And how does time affect such a spatial memory in the distant past?

The distortion that occurs when sketching from memory is part of a mechanism of translation and assimilation, which is the subject of the Architecture of Memory exhibition. Italo Calvino also writes in Invisible Cities about the traveler who discovers a past that he no longer knew he had. Because maybe it is true that a place does not exist because it is not in our heads. Or it only exists because we have an image of it in our memory.