Memory 9ss, 2024

Mihaela Ivanova  

Pigment print on Hahnemühle German Etching 310 fine art paper, limited edition 2/3

Some memories are as fragile as soap bubbles: they appear, gleam, and vanish. They are born of fragmentary images, photographs, stories—and sometimes of our imagination. The real and the invented intertwine, and we cannot tell what was lived and what was shaped by longing.

When Jean Piaget (a Swiss psychologist, considered one of the founders of modern child psychology) was a small child, he believed he remembered very clearly how a man had tried to kidnap him from his pram in the park. In his memory, the nanny struggled with the attacker, she was scratched, and he, little Piaget, remembered lying in the pram and seeing it all—the assault, the fear, the kidnapper's flight. This scene was so vivid in his mind that he told the story with confidence and detail. When Piaget became a teenager, the family received a letter from the nanny, who confessed that the entire “kidnapping" had been a lie. She had invented the story to appear as a heroine who saved the child. There had never been an attacker.  Piaget realized he truly had a clear memory of something that had never happened. The episode impressed him deeply, and he often cited it as an example of how constructive and deceptive human memory is—we do not merely reproduce the past; we recreate and enrich it every time we remember. We can be convinced that something entirely invented is a real memory.

At the heart of this photographic series lies the absence of one presence—and its creation through imagined memories. Ethereal as soap bubbles, indistinct, monochrome, they filled the empty space of a lost image and became reality. A small box of old black-and-white photographs helped me; from them, my imagination shaped the missing recollections. These photographs are an attempt to capture and materialize that space between memory and fantasy, where absence becomes presence, and where memory is born from longing.

— Mihaela Ivanova