Nightingale

 

"Things become duplicated in Tlon; they also come to be effaced and lose their details when they are forgotten. A classic example is the doorway which survived so long as it was visited by a beggar and disappeared at his death. At times some birds, a horse, have saved the ruins of an amphitheatre."

- Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths (1961)   

 

In 2004 I did a residency at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. I was thinking about the process of forgetting and remembering which Borges was describing and which the sculpture archive seemed to have at its core, along with the preponderance of photographs of temples and gazebos, monuments, statues and memorials that occupy so many of its shelves. It was around that time I returned to a piece of film I had shot in the Villa Borghese in Rome and had left aside for a couple of years. The temple ended up being revealed and upheld like a function of the nightingale's song, while this process allowed the song itself to become visible.