🌎 ESPAÑOL // ENGLISH
Regressive Therapy (2012)
Artist: Concepción Huerta
Human memory is selective, regardless of whether this fact can be demonstrated empirically or scientifically. As a mechanism of unconscious or voluntary self-defense, personal memories may evaporate from consciousness, leaving only their trace to the passage of time. Yet, anchored in the subconscious, vestiges remain of experiences that were once memories, preventing both oblivion and the complete release from remembrance.
Regressive therapy is a process that involves induction into the unconscious in order to return—to undertake a temporal journey toward stages of development presumed to have been overcome. These stages may also represent different dimensions of the self, allowing one to experience one’s own being through memory. Such a return promises the reanimation of experience, offering an opportunity to absolve guilt or unease through a moment of self-recognition.
Concepción Huerta’s photographs constitute the visual discourse of a personal regressive therapy. The encounter with the video WAS functions as the beginning of a hypnotic process, subtly persuading the viewer to reflect from the unconscious. Light, shadow, and reflection become elements that induce a regressive state. The testimonial quality of the images presents them as an assessment of damage, as the reconstruction of a memory through the contemplation of “instantaneous” spaces whose stillness and immobility are preceded by a consummated event. These uninhabited spaces suggest a form of humanity that does not require physical occupation in order to be present, but is instead reconstructed through an experience of memory.
The analog treatment of the image is undoubtedly one of the most revealing and nostalgic aspects of Huerta’s work. These fragments of stories seek to recall experiences as vividly as possible, taking advantage of the hypermnesia that follows immediately afterward. The recognition of these spaces attempts an emotional reconstruction of memory through a body of work that possesses a delicate aura and a subtly feminine sensibility.
Approaching these photographs resembles the feeling of being uncertain whether one is experiencing a déjà vu. One may be certain of standing before something familiar, yet unable to determine whether it is a memory, an experience unfolding in the present, or a product of thought—a jamais vu. In this way, Huerta’s regressions do not constitute an autobiographical narrative, but rather brief fragments of a poetry of life that is generous in its familiarity.