Pharmakon
Artist:
Ellie Ga
Date:
2013
Medium:
Typography on paper
Materials:
Paper
Dimensions:
48,26 x 30,48
Collection:
Lafayette anticipations - Fonds de dotation Famille Moulin
Domain:
Dessin
At once remedy and poison, the pharmakon is the ambivalent substance of care that must be taken care of, the liberating instrument as an alienating tool. It gives its name to this typographic work on paper that narrates the birth of the god Thoth and his powers. Among the latter, “the drug of reminding” is the formula of recollection and memory that is writing. From her work on the remains of Alexandria in Egypt, Ellie Ga has developed a reflection on writing as a tool for an archaeology of memory. She also treats this medium of memory as a vector of forgetting: the word, this pharmakon, the externalization and materialization of memory, would also be what distances us from remembered knowledge and the internalized past.