CRUCE: A MEMORY THEATER

In the early 16th and 17th centuries, Giulio Camillo and Robert Fludd created memory theaters, based on classical mnemonics. These memory theaters offered "visions of the world"- places and images through which the orders of things could become imprinted on the mind. Camillo's theater reversed the place of the viewer, centering him/her in the middle of the stage, gazing into an auditorium with seven levels signifying the seven layers of the world- up to the Heavens. Fludd's theater placed the viewer in the auditorium, looking down at a stage comprised of two different spheres- one representing worldly, or corporeal manifestations (humans, animals, and inanimate objects)- and the other, representing cosmic and/or mythological images and entities (stars, gods, and goddesses).

This triptych of projected footage from the Camino de Santiago, loosely based on the memory theaters of Camillo and Fludd, invites viewers to look at and be looked at by landscapes that "remember." Through immersion in a thousand-year-old pilgrimage route walked by hundreds of thousands of pilgrims from around the world you become the path and the pilgrim. 

You are part of it. On it, in it, of it.

What is a seed if not the purest kind of memory, a link to every generation that has gone before it."

- Anthony Doerr