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June 11, 2007
In this review of Marc Augé 's Oblivion (trans. Marjolijn de Jager, Minneapolis, 2004) in Culture Machine Les Roberts says:
In order to remember it is necessary at the same time to forget. The process of remembrance – the ‘flowering’ of the past in the present – is thus as much a process of negation as it is that of retrieval or selection. What is lost in oblivion is not the past (which is already absent) but the traces of its remembrance (its rendering as present), leaving other traces – other remembrances – to flourish and take root in their wake.
Roberts says that tending time and memory in this way is literally manifested in actual ‘gardens of remembrance’, landscaped monuments to personal and collective memory in which oblivion is ritualised in the symbolic and performative context of everyday practice.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, Rosetta Head, Victor Harbor, 2007
If oblivion is a loss of remembrance then it needs to be connected to place.
Roberts says that the relationship between life and death, memory and oblivion can to some degree be observed or ‘staged’ in the flat, empty seascapes of coastal resorts frequented by the elderly. The practice of ‘taking in the view’, in effect a gazing at nothingness sprawled out towards the horizon,

Gary Sauer-Thompson, Rosetta Head #1 Victor Harbor, 2007
We don't gaze at nothingness. We are immersed in a natural time that is quite different from the clocktime of industrial and postindustrial capitalism that defines our work life.
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oh, how amazing, I am going to look at this review.
I am currently trying to put together something about this very topic, and have been struggling to relate my constant reference to horizons and seascapes (in my paintings and drawings)
to the process of remembering, and trying to write about this.
"We don't gaze at nothingness. We are immersed in a natural time that is quite different from the clocktime of industrial and postindustrial capitalism that defines our work life."
and also a kind of multiple temporality, of all time, of the past within the present, of times when this horizon may be crossed, the horizon a liminal place, where one thing becomes another. A metaphor for the possiblity of edging beyond "industrial " time.
Love the photos, love the writing.