Cassis Cornuta

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  Cassis cornuta | 2015

Souvenir is an object acquired for the memories the owner associates with it. Typically the memories created through experiences in a specific geographic destination. However, the particular mollusk shell used as a model, although bought in one of the numerous souvenir shops on Mediterranean coast is actually a Pacific and Indian ocean native. There is no apparent connection between the shell itself and the place where it was acquired. It has been widely romanticized for the particular hum one hears when he leans the ear towards the shell – hum of ocean waves. It’s “transplant nature” made it perfect for the role of the generic non-identity symbolic object. It has no particular reference to the geographic location or local cultural heritage, in a sense it is a fictional “blank” – a symbolic object integrated into the global tourism iconography – but apart from inscribed personal experience acquired with purchase – it is a merely a surrogate. The work further enforces the generic experience onto the viewer with the cast shells in the installation playing a continuous stream of techno beat loops common to any summertime beach disco party anywhere in the world. On one hand the work questions the possibility of genuine cultural experience in the frameworks of the tourism industry, on the other it elaborates the possibility of the “emotional graft” – our own ability to tie memories and experiences to an object displaced from it’s own native socio geographical loci and unrelated in any meaningful way to the place of purchase. It is a generic memento, memory container constructed from absurdly unrelated components.