Listening to Living Memory
Life flows into art and becomes memory. Memory and dialogue. Memory and art. Memories of the future constructed with the fables and stories taken from the living sources of the islands, from an orality that aspires to travel through means of audiovisual creation.
Collecting, rescuing and transmitting the ways in which life is experienced through the creativity found in the documentary genre is the purpose of the Magical Memory project, which is exists thanks to the commitment of the teaching staff and the open interest of the students, grandchildren and granddaughters of the interviewees. It comes to life within the framework of the International Environmental Film Festival of the Canary Islands.
This project gathers the experiences of being in the world and feeds off of the daily life of those in our environment, their motives, their dreams, their fears, their achievements and their failures. Life experiences that are shared generously and welcomed with respect by the young listeners, as they offer the opportunity to reflect on the past, (a past that refuses to be idealized or rewritten as the dominant discourse of the present dictates) and to reflect on the uncertainties that the future will bring.
Memory, the memory of a life, is not a memory of the past, but an enlargement and enrichment of the present. To look back is not to look aside. In some cases, without intending to, these people become an example of behaviors and values held. These are the values of help, solidarity, social commitment, respect for the natural environment.
Listening is a solemn act. Listening to the voice of the elderly with attention, respect, without judgment, becomes a therapeutic act for both the speaker and the listener since memories of traumas and sufferings not yet overcome come to the surface. The past is always present in memory. With its burden of pain, since remembering is evoking, stirring up old fears, unhealed wounds. In the act of listening, almost a ceremonial confession of sorts, authentic suffering, authentic tears and authentic laughter are unleashed. This authenticity can be felt by the students and spectators themselves.. An encounter with essential experiences from which we emerge transformed, individually and collectively.
Cirilo Leal
Writer and journalist.