Could we regard installations as refined siblings of those medieval devices for the oratory and the art of memory? Is there a possibility of approaching images, pictures, installations or any form of art just by its similitude with sets, props and stages? What if in order to experiment with thoughts, memories and recollections — those could be just functioning as a certain but forgotten medieval memory device?

Being this the case, we could relate perhaps certain practices in installation to three key points in time in which images were employed interwoven with memory, space and knowledge: One is Mnemonics, Ars Memoriae -the old art of memory — or Anamnesis, as Greeks used to refer to as the forgotten art and mother of rhetoric. The second is the emblems and alchemical engravings that brandished the Seventeenth century, as well as the freemasons ́ tracing boards. And the third is Tarot cards and its symbols.

These mnemonic devices — used in ancient Greece and so forth- for the placement and storage of large quantities of information in the mind — were based on a one principle: we would navigate with our gaze first through a diagram (or drawing) and memorize it. And then — in the imagination — to picture ourselves going through those diagrams, recalling the memorized. All of this by means of compiling images that transcended the idea/image to become space. Pretty much like the installations of today: a space we enter where thoughts in line (to say, objects) appear in a succession, alignment or progression.

It seems to me that the gallery space, along with the installation of art could somehow operate as a garden in the thoughts of Aldo Rossi when he speaks about the idea of a city. For him (and being in debt with Halbwachs cities and gardens are both mostly recreational places: places that lack a historical time on its surface. For him the idea of a city could be accessed, or regarded as a psychic being, where its previous structures are visible but inaccessible. We might think of them as actually games or gates, but mnemonic tools in the end. Besides, the very same idea of the term topic, relies on the idea of the topos (Greek: site, earth). There used to be a link between the subjects of oratory, debate and speaking with the land, the site, the room and in the end, the place where ideas were meant to be kept. Topics are places but also ideas. To debate, to discuss, was meant to move from a place in memory to another. To navigate from a word, to the next. Gathering from the real, from materiality to the abstract and the immaterial. The more detailed the better.

Perhaps certain installations are but expanded paintings you can navigate through and around and get closer and slip into details and association of ideas. Perhaps those could be read, in the end, as some strange reconstructions of a former time, no longer there, that we cannot fully understand or disguise. And also, perhaps the idea of a blank white space in silence (i.e. Museum, gallery space) is to operate as a resonator – as an absence of distraction. Then the installation: the objects itself could became triggers or devices for distraction to appear. Throughout the free association of images, metaphors, similitude or even absence: images made in order to summarize knowledge that will later be revisited (mentally).

However, what is even more interesting is the fact that in the end, those medieval diagrams only comprised a very simple thing meant to retain all of this meaning. All those visual aids provided to the scholar for remembering, where made from scratch; drawn upon quotidian and ordinary things and objects. Things in space.