The Archive, the Future and Nostalgia in the works of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov and Jorge Luis Borges
Inspired by Tate Modern’s exhibition ‘Ilya and Emilia Kabakov — Not Everyone Will Be Taken Into The Future’, I considered how ideas behind the Kabakovs’ work are reflected in the writings of author Jorge Luis Borges.
The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away is a Kabakovs’ installation which consists of three rooms where a fictional character has gathered all the objects that he came across and collected through his entire life. An endless accumulation of notes, garbage and memories. All the objects are perfectly ordered in shelves with labels describing where they were found. An infinite recording; an archive of the ephemeral, the anecdotal and the trivial. It is a projection of one’s memories, unravelled and materialised, a mind compartmentalised, unfolded and exported into the physical world. If one forgets their memories, did they ever occur? Isn’t it the past that shaped us and made us who we actually are?
Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges wrote Funes the Memorious, a short story about a man who ‘remembered not only every leaf of every tree of every wood but also every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it’ and could reconstruct a whole day in his mind down to every single detail. ‘My memory, sir, is like a garbage heap’, Funes tells the narrator. Memory fascinates many artists and writers. Having grown up in the Soviet Union, Ilya Kabakov broke with his past when he moved to the US. His small-scale works gradually transformed into large-scale installations, creating a new home for himself. Moreover, in spite of the fall of the Soviet Union, Kabakov continued to define himself as a Soviet. Nostalgia is a theme that permeates his work. Although the archive originates in power structures and its name referred to the town hall and official public buildings, it is now thought to be an objective recording of collective memory. However, memory can be, inadvertently or not, altered and sculpted accordingly. Past is always shaped by the future, it suffers from constant revision.
Not Everyone Will Be Taken into the Future
“The headmaster of our school, a very stern, fierce man, said as spring and the end of the year approached: ‘Only those who have deserved it will go to the school’s Young Pioneer camp for the summer. The others will remain here’.”
-Ilya Kabakov
Ilya Kabakov as a child encountered a number of masters. In the school, as well as the teachers, he had to face Bach, Mozart, Pushkin, Dostoyevsky and Malevich. The pupils who diverted from the canon, the ones who didn’t excel according to the set standards, would not follow the rest forward. Clinging to the present, pushed towards the past; if one doesn’t keep moving forward, they are dragged by the past because the present disappears the moment we pronounce it. To create a future, we need to explore, deconstruct and reconstruct the past; to activate it and then move forward. We need a harmony to produce melodies, a steady ground to build a house or even a rocket launch base. But the future is not singular.
‘Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures.’
-Jorge Luis Borges
Borges has been a long time reference for Kabakovs. Despite his preference for the everyday, Kabakovs’ work also includes elements of the infinite and the labyrinthine. Borges’ The Garden of the Forking Paths is a short spy story in which the plot twists upon itself in time as well as in space, while it delineates the future as an infinity of possible directions. The conceptualization of the maze has been a long-term occupation for Borges and he virtuosically blended mathematical precision with literary devices, constructing boundless and intricate worlds.
In Kabakovs’ Labyrinth (My Mother’s Album), a double spiral corridor is populated with a set of pictures and text, the memories of Ilya’s mother.
The memory is presented as a labyrinth that can disorientate one while trying to delve into the past. In the middle of the installation, a room with rubble is accompanied with Ilya’s voice singing Soviet era romantic songs. Nostalgia resurfaces itself elliptically. But what is nostalgia? Isn’t it a longing for a past that never existed?
