Pauline van der Ghinst
SOMETIMES
WE JUST HAVE
TO ACCEPT IT
AS GOD’S WILL
12.NOV.2025
SOMETIMES
WE JUST HAVE
TO ACCEPT IT
AS GOD’S WILL
12.NOV.2025
How could they not be, since they refer to a bygone past? However, this obvious fact becomes blurred when we consider that memory is never the past itself, but a present construction of the past. In this sense, our memories are not behind us: they are projected in the very act of recalling them. To remember is to produce the past from the present. What constitutes our “memory” is not the persistence of content, but an operation of shaping what is missing; it does not keep things as they were, but reconstructs them. Our memories do not exist in chronological time, but in a temporality of reworking, where we constantly rewrite what has happened. To speak of a past behind us would imply that there is a stable continuity between what has been and what we retain of it.
But this continuity is only a necessary illusion—our experiences are compositions of fragments, gaps, latent images. Memory does not unfold in a straight line; it weaves a network of traces where certain areas fade and others thicken, where the order of time is constantly being recomposed. Remembering is an act of production, inventing the past to make the present habitable. Memories pass through us, sometimes preceding us. Far from being a vestige, they act as a framework for perceiving the world, a structure that guides our gaze even before it settles. They do not function as an archive, but as a dynamic of projected illusions. They maintain the presence of what is no longer there—and of which only outlines remain. Nostalgia expresses an acute awareness of this tension: it is the feeling that what we remember never really happened as such.
a selective logic that determines what can be retained, reconstructed or erased; it is not a reservoir of images, but a filtering device, producing meaning from what has disappeared. Memories do not restore reality, they create a retroactive coherence. Without gaps, without loss, memory would merge with the present. Through these gaps, this emptiness is not the opposite of meaning, but the space from which meaning is configured.
All visible experience is based on an economy of the senses: what is shown is never given entirely, but by contrast with an area of opacity that makes it possible. Form only exists through its partial withdrawal, through the boundary that separates it from its background. Perception, like memory, is not a complete reproduction of reality, but an organisation of thresholds of visibility. This structure produces a constitutive tension between certainty and uncertainty. The gaze, memory and judgement function on the basis of a regime of controlled indeterminacies: we never know everything, and it is this incompleteness that makes knowledge active. Reality is not given, it is negotiated in the relationship between what is shown and what is withheld.
This relationship to illusions therefore presupposes an internal distance: a degree of opacity that guarantees the subject's stability. This opacity is not an external resistance, but a constitutive dimension of experience. It delimits the space of interiority, where memory folds in on itself, fragments and reformulates itself. The subject is constructed in this zone of withdrawal, where what is known and what remains latent coexist without resolution. Repetition is part of this same principle—to repeat is not to reproduce, for what returns is never identical: each repetition inscribes the distance that separates the present from what it attempts to recapture.
In this respect, forgetting serves the same function as secrecy: limiting transparency and protecting a necessary degree of opacity. Just as secrecy regulates access to information in social relationships, forgetting regulates access to memory in our relationship with ourselves. Both establish a form of regulatory distance, a barrier that preserves the possibility of connection without dissolution.
Memory, absence and repetition thus feed into the same system: a balance between absence and form, between disappearance and persistence. Experience does not lie in the full presence of things, but in the tension between what is revealed and what remains unknown. To think of a structure as a secret is to think of an epistemology of lack: knowledge based not on totality, but on limitation. It is not in clarity that reality becomes intelligible, but in the areas of uncertainty that organise it.
If our memories are not behind us, perhaps they are not entirely ours either. They reside in a collective memory, in images, forms, objects,
and stories that circulate around us. What we believe to be intimate is shaped by shared representations, by social and symbolic frameworks. Our individual memories are merely local variations of a common set of traces. Memory, then, is not a look back, but a way of organising the present—a way of giving coherence to what would otherwise be scattered. Our memories are invisible structures that support our forward gaze, like so many forms that we fill with meaning.
And which, otherwise, would drown us.
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Pauline van der Ghinst, Memories or dust?, multiplex, 122 cm × 250 cm, 244 cm × 250 cm, 366 cm × 250 cm
ANALOG PHOTOS Eléonore & Raphaëlle
BAR Eléonore, Renaud & Raphaëlle
Musique Renaud
Aide au montage Eliot Joris