Gabriel Esteban Molina’s “Memory Palace”
LIuba GonzÁles De Armas
A video projection in the gallery shows a window in a home looking out to a snowy backyard, slightly distorted. In front of it, a bench is lined up perfectly with the identical one in the video, next to a dog bed. Flanked by other small works.
Memory Palace derives its title from the method of loci: a mnemonic device where a person recreates a familiar space in their mind and spatially encodes information within it. This information can then be retrieved at will by mentally navigating the space.
Gabriel Esteban Molina reassembles his family residence in the gallery through a mix of digital and analogue means, using furniture and objects from home, digital photographs, 360° video, photogrammetry, and virtual and augmented reality. Molina’s Memory Palace follows the floorplan of the original house and is mapped in four sites: the artist’s bedroom, his mother’s bedroom, the living room, and the yard, or the house as a whole. Room by room, the exhibition traces and reanimates memories from the shared lives of the artist, his mother, and their pet Layka embedded in the home.
I. Artist’s Bedroom
A wide videw of the gallery, looking towards the front lobby. The installation from the first image is on the left. On the right, two beds, one in the foregrounda nd one in the distance. Near the far bed is a video projection in the corner.
Working in the mode of still life as self-portraiture, the artist’s bedroom prefaces the rest of the exhibition by offering glimpses of his creative practice. Though curated, the selection of objects scattered across Molina’s desktop—mobile phones, a glucose monitor, an ashtray, plastic wrappers, a camera lens, reference books, crushed cans of local ale—suggest a candid image of the artist at work. These items hint at his preoccupation with digital screens, technological mediation, the monumental, and the otherworldly.
The 360° video of the room blends the intimacy of a memoir with the ambivalence of a surveillance tape. Molina’s practiced choreography reads as a sample of the seemingly unremarkable moments that add up to a life: time spent at work, at leisure, and at rest. Every aspect of the bedroom, from the prints on the wall to the contents of the computer monitor, is marked by the presence of the artist. Yet the space also conveys an ordinariness that verges on banality. It is a room, much like any other known room. There is a bed here, a desk there, some clutter. This familiarity is precisely what enables viewers to insert themselves into the space.
II. Mother’s Bedroom
Laika was a wonderful dog, very quiet and very placid…I wanted to do something nice for [her]. She had only a very short time to live.
—Soviet Air Force Doctor Vladimir Yazdovsky on Laika, the space dog
Looking the other way, the other bed faces a video projection in the corner, showing the same bed in a bedroom. Superimposed in a cell-phone portrait video of a dog on the bed. A small framed piece is to the right.
Memory Palace is a spectral love letter to a dog named Layka. Nowhere is this more evident than in the second bedroom, where Layka stars in an array of home videos taken by the artist’s mother Carmen when he was living abroad. Molina has carefully superimposed these videos on the spherical camera footage to match their precise location in the room. Here video—particularly mobile camera video—becomes a technological proxy for presence and memory. Molina digitizes space by filming the room. His mother creates records that allow him to be there despite physical distance. By annotating videographic space with these moving images, together, they condense time, layering chronologies to recount years of the family’s home life through videos of an aging pet.
In a digital echo of the Proustian effect, where a stimulus triggers a vivid personal memory, the artist has charged the space with augmented reality markers. Using a smartphone and the exhibition’s AR portal, visitors can unlock memories embedded in physical objects. This effect is especially evocative when applied to Layka’s walking garments, which are hung along the wall: a harness, doggy sweaters, a bright yellow raincoat. These digital relics make up a modest monument to the memory of the family’s late canine companion. While profoundly personal, this work also serves as a meditation on loss and grief, and the mediating role of technology in remembering loved ones.
III. Living Room
This gallery is dark, but a couch and some lawn chairs are just visible in the centre. Facing the couch is a corner video of a living room. It's flanked by prints—a photograph of the sky through trees, and two impressionistic 3d models of a house.
Where previous rooms are overshadowed by their content, the living room is where this home begins to reveal its own perspective. The 360° camera’s spherical lens permits a more complete view of the room, but its distortion of three-dimensional space distinguishes it from human vision. The fixed placement of the camera at one end of the living room means moments of intimacy and vulnerability are captured at a distance. It is as if the house were gazing into itself.
The inanimate being gains sentience through the sensory technology of the camera. Its gaze is neither animal nor human, and rarely is it acknowledged by the subjects in the video. Yet there is a moment in the footage, just past dusk, where Layka looks directly at the camera. What makes this encounter so compelling is that it exists beyond human subjectivity. When Layka’s gaze flickers to the camera, the abyss of noncomprehension that separates animal and human is subverted precisely because she is not looking at us, but at a third entity. Her gaze triggers in viewers a desire for recognition which necessarily cannot be fulfilled. This subtle gesture of refusal recalls that the animal, too, had a relationship with the home which surpassed human understanding.
IV. Outside, The House as a Whole
Con el tiempo, estos Mapas Desmesurados no satisficieron y los Colegios de Cartógrafos levantaron un Mapa del Imperio, que tenía el tamaño del Imperio y coincidía puntualmente con él.
In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.
—Jorge Luis Borges, Del rigor en la ciencia (On Exactitude in Science)
A video projected into the corner walls of the gallery, showing the outside of a house at twilight. Superimposed is a daytime phone video of a dog walking along the path, lined up to match the background. Two lawn chairs in silhouette frame the view.
Jorge Luis Borges’ 1946 short story Del rigor en la ciencia (On Exactitude in Science) imagines an empire where Cartography has reached such heights that only a life-size map can effectively communicate the known complexity of the original terrain. So, too, does Memory Palace demand to be experienced at full scale, stretching to fill the entirety of the gallery with a flood of information. Molina created an external 3D model of the house by meticulously piecing together 2,700 photos using a form of photogrammetry, a technology which uses visual information in photographs to estimate the form of physical objects. His intention was to plot this model onto the gallery’s floor plan on a one-to-one scale so that visitors could explore the house by walking around the space. Like Borges’ map, this vision proved strenuous by presenting an array of unforeseen logistical issues. Though the possibility of such a model continues to haunt the artist, he opted to present smaller versions instead. Torn from its real life surroundings and thrust into virtual space, each model of the house bursts with enticing details, fragmented and punctuated by digital noise.
Molina’s task of capturing the essence of his former home and preserving its memory, though more poetic than rigorous, raises questions about the role and limits of digital technology in memorialization. The digital is rooted in the material. We have yet to develop data storage technology that can withstand the ravages of time and entropy. Hard drives become demagnetized by heat. The dye in optical media degrades. Solid-state drives are subject to charge leakage and corrosion. Moreover, as Borges’ fictive map illustrates, the documentation of a space can grow absurdly onerous. At what point does the task of preserving the memory of a place to which one can never return run counter to making home? Molina offers no easy answers, but a thoughtful and compelling exercise in digital memory-keeping.
A grand triangular arrangement of crisp, printed macro photos of blurry natural features, on a grey wall, frames a computer workstation, cluttered with empty drinks, masks, and other debris. The monitor shows another image similar to the prints.
The politics of Memory Palace are inescapable. Housing precarity, in its relation to financial wealth and income, affects cultural workers and artists in particular. Molina’s experience of displacement is all too common. While Memory Palace does not claim to change this fact, the exhibition bears witness to the social and political landscape that produced it.
Memory Palace is the final exhibition Latitude 53 will host at its current home at 10242 106 street. This finality invites recognition of the history and legacies of this institution. By recreating his former home in the gallery, Gabriel Esteban Molina stakes a claim: this place is home. And home is, once again, changing.
Liuba González de Armas (b. 1994) is a cultural worker with roots in Ciudad Nuclear, Cuba. She holds a Master’s in Art History from McGill University (2020) and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Alberta (2018) Together with Ana Ruiz Aguirre, she co-edited Beyond the Gallery: An Anthology of Visual Encounters for Edmonton’s Laberinto Press in 2021. Liuba served as inaugural Halifax’s Young Curator (2020-21) and currently serves on the Board of Directors at Eyelevel Gallery. She has curated exhibitions on domesticity, homemaking, and diaspora at MSVU Art Gallery and Hermes Gallery.