"The Warp of Time: Exploration of Cultural Memory, Place, and Artistic Expression" curatorial foreword  by Ekaterina Juskowski

Memory lives simultaneously in time and outside of time. Unlike history, memory lacks linearity and includes the act of forgetting. As our recollections alter every time we attempt to gather them, memory becomes a continuous creative process that fuses imaginary interpretation and historical reality, intertwines poetic and encyclopedic, and blurs the line between myth and reality.

Since Antiquity, memory and place have been inextricably connected in our minds. Ancient Greeks invented the art of memory, which taught how to use architectural spaces to map images and text to aid orators in recollecting their speeches. Because memories are never free-floating, they attach themselves to places turning some of them into the “sites of memory”where the heritage of cultural communities gets crystallized. Philosophers, scientists, psychologists, and artists have written about the importance of memory in understanding the self, going as far as calling it a “pillar of our identity.” Thanks to human creativity, our personal and collective identity persists against the destruction of memory in times of war, political conflict, and radical social shifts. When people die, buildings crumple, societies change, artworks left behind turn into memorials of human skill, emotion, and values.

The narrative thread of this book doesn’t stretch in a straight line.  By mixing history and memory, it distances itself from the chronological retelling of events with contemporary artists, writers, poets, and musicians creating a dialogue with history through their collective selective memory. Staged at the Old Carpet Factory, a historical mansion on Hydra Island, the accompanying exhibition invites the viewer to navigate through the past, remembered, forgotten, and imagined, presenting a warped historiography of the place.