"If I forget, am I forgotten too?" 

KYRA VOORDECKERS
When we forget
When we don't recognize
When places disappear
Do I disappear too?
When I forget?
Will I be forgotten too?
Where I lived
Where I ate
Where I loved
Where I was cared for
Where I was never alone
Where I've been big and small
When these places disappear
Do I disappear too?
These spaces only exist in relation to me
Otherwise I wouldn't remember them

NORA FRANCO
Kyra questions and challenges, through the medium of textile, the mental image, built, imagined, modified, destroyed and completed, so many times from memory. She tries to bring back her childhood bedroom, and in doing so, finds that only two perspectives appear clearly in her mind: from the bed, and from the door.

What do we really touch when we touch? Can that gauzy image, which is memory, be touched? That is perhaps the magic of Kyra's work: it can be touched, walked through, entered. And it is through the space we inhabit, through movement, that we come to recognise a place's distances and closenesses, as Isabel de Naverán mentions in her book La ola en la mente.

NF
There is, in all this construction, something of growing up, of maturing, of building a sense of self, of knowing oneself, and (re)recognising oneself in the spaces we have lived and in those of others, letting something stay and something else dissolve, taking a part of who we have been at that time and space, and letting go of other parts.

KV
To remember, to dream, we need to feel safe. Our emotions shape how we remember and what we remember. When we remember, we dream. When we dream, we create memories. But what takes place in our minds is very different from what happens in reality. In trying to translate this, we encounter limits. Walls, details, and sharpness cannot contain the multidimensionality of memory. Incompleteness and fragmentation hold a suggestive, emotional power. They force us toward memory and imagination.

NF
Now, look at this image for a few seconds, then close your eyes. Does your bedroom come back to you? From where are you looking at it? Which details stand out clearly in your mind?

I started with drawing, but the periphery of our eyes is bigger than that of an image. I also saw a memory merely as a vague image, but after experimenting I realised that some things are vague but other things are very sharp. So I started making some individual drawings of bits and pieces that I remembered very well from my room, without thinking about proportions, sizes, perspective, etc. It was never the intention to be recognisable for other people, but more to produce a universal atmosphere of a memory captured in an image…

NF
For her master's in textile design final project, titled If I forget, am I forgotten too?, somewhere between installation and scenography, the presentation in the MAP corridor became a journey of shadows and reflections, like a labyrinth of mirrors that distorts our bodies while preserving something of the original image.

Her textile artworks invite us to linger in the place between memory and imagination, to reflect on what we remember and how we remember what we have lived in a beloved space and time. It happens in her work, as it often happens in the mind, that we fill in the blanks, we complete them. And we feel it at once familiar and strange. Like a déjà vu.

NF
It is beautiful to see how the gazes, and the hundreds of bodies and footsteps that pass through the MAP corridor every day, activate the fragility of Kyra's pieces, silver threads in the sun, which, like those places where we have lived strong emotions, take on a life of their own, live by themselves.

Kyra makes us witnesses, guests in that space, so intimate and so shared. There we encountered fragments of interviews and poems selected by her, which awaken the imagination, trace the space, and make us complete the story.

A room that is not as it was.

publication 10.26
text: Linde Verjans

For this Graduation publication, graduating students engaged in conversations with writers and one another. These conversations gave rise to a varied collection of texts. During their time at our school, our students embarked on an artistic journey that we now pause to reflect upon. You will read about their motivations and the obstacles they have overcome. For them, this is a warm-up, not a finish line.

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