The
memorial to the weather of Fray Bentos seeks to reposition the role of the memorial as a place of memory
and mis-memory — not as the reinforcement a specific image, historicization, or
dramaticized orientation of place, but to remember a place through asynchronous
and recursive rituals of the earth.
This work extends themes of “memory” and “memorial;” and seeks to reposition the role of the
memorial — not to immortalize a specific image, single history, or dramaticized
orientation of a place, but to remember a place through asynchronous and
recursive rituals of the earth.The project reframes the memorial not as an archive or collection of pieces, but as a theatre for the senses, a perceptual observatory...
The memory of Fray Bentos is collected in the weather — an embodiment of multiple histories which construct the present — through an assemblage of parts which capture and let go of climatological inflections.
5 ephemeral monuments are moments of reorientation in the industrial landscape, to attenuate wind, temperature, rain, light, and the celestial narrative. Materials of the old meatpacking factory are repositioned as the apparatuses for perception, of remembering and misremembering.
Fray Bentos is the site of Borges, of Funes el Memorioso, an encounter of broken perceptions, perfected orthography, and sensorial adjacencies.
Fray Bentos is the site of a complex mixture of memory, experience, and space, one in which history cannot be reduced to a single orientation.
The vernaculars — fragments of high-orientation memory — and semiotics of Fray Bentos have been fixed in the collective iconography of meat pies, UNESCO-protected industrial landscapes, and internalized nicknames... “El Anglo” — the English, a refrigerator, large hermetic chambers...
The work, located in the vicinity of the Frigorifico Anglo, Fray Bentos, Uruguay, aims not to propose a permanent, collective memory, but to allow the people of Fray Bentos to reclaim a contemporary identity, and share immediacy of place in a memorial for the weather.