Ivan Gundić / Memogram

The starting point of my work Memogram were my family’s black and white gelatin silver prints made before I was born. Using an interdisciplinary and multimedia approach, I present the process of melting layers of silver from family photographs, which I then, by way of a chemical process, turn into a metal coin in a laboratory. The coin weighs around a gram, and is at the same time worthless and invaluable, for the value of the coin as a new representation of family history is not measured in money, but in memory. Aided by my own family history, I observe the medium of photography as a mnemonic tool which serves as an agent in preserving memory, but which at the same time encapsulates mortality and transience. Photographs as an object that evokes memories may withstand a long time, but certainly not forever. Reducing them to the element of silver means they remain an object that evokes memories, but which this time around lasts forever.