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If memory is what constitutes a self, and nations are bound not by blood but by shared memory, then Camacho’s Memento Obliviscere is quietly posing some of the most difficult questions about this in our contemporary time—questions about who we are, what one is, and to what extent individual will can alter our responses to such questions—using art to probe into the dangerous science of the soul.

‘Memento Obliviscere,’ meaning ‘remember and forget,’ picks up from Camacho’s previous solo exhibit titled Standard Fiction, which was about the natural process of reconstructing memories. The use of Latin here is by no means intellectual posturing. Latin, often described as ‘dead,’ is a language whose rules are set in stone and whose lexicon has been door less to the new. It is, in other words, a language through which the meaning of words are preserved in their original instance—and it offers a precise resonance for Camacho, whose works here are positioned to create tension with Latin’s romantic ambition.

Going further than her previous show here, Camacho focuses Memento Obliviscere on the intended or unintended operations that have the power to manipulate memory so that the show is “about the external tools and processes that can be used to alter our memories,” Camacho says.

Indeed, fairly recent advances in science and research show that memory is more open to manipulation than was previously thought. An example is a drug called ‘propranolol,’ which has been used to treat heart conditions but whose effects on memory have been studied. “The drug,” according to Camacho, “works by preventing the emotional component of a memory from being reconsolidated” so that while the memory remains intact, the emotional component of it is rewritten.

Hence we see “Memory Apparatus (Propranolol),” 80 bottles of pills that the collector could use at will. Presented too are works that analyze the tools of creating memory and embody its process of remembering and forgetting. Also titled “Memory Apparatus,” with additional parenthetical designations, are typewriters whose letters have been rubbed out so that effectively, while evoking the nostalgia that has been associated with these machines, these typewriters will fail to record that which they were intended to record.

Finally, we find a series of newspaper spreads, subsequent editions of a national daily, all of whose content has been excised with an X-Acto knife and thus evoking the passage of time, of facts, and the memory of events. 

Bolstered by research in psychological studies and experiments in memory, Camacho’s Memento Obliviscere is a suite of artworks that engage with science where it is almost fantastical. “Fragile, vulnerable, and can be easily manipulated,” she says of memory, and therefore, also, is memory politically fraught. But Camacho stops before the subject tends toward an ethics that could distract viewers from the potency of these things, presenting the works at the level of cold fact and leaving the objects to resonate with neutrality while making the viewer feel his or her agency in the construction of memory instead.

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