As opposed to history, memory is a past in contention for a future. The immaterial wealth we identify with and strive to preserve proves what kind of society we want to build, our utopia. However, what happens to the past utopias that have been vanquished? How do we understand our parents and their life in the past if we cannot become them? Or can we?

Emily Wardill’s new exhibition deals with the relationship between individual and collective memory and the technological present, interweaving natural and domestic elements, testimonies of the past with images of the present, revisiting ancient imaginations with artificial intelligence software.

A young man seldom portrayed, but who seems to be the character at the centre of these crossroads, tries to understand his mother’s past, whilst we are shown footage of video game actors. As with many intergenerational relationships, filial love is built on admiration, but also on misunderstanding. The disconnection between technology and the recent past is part of the identity gap of the post-memory generation, meaning those who grew up with strong family and social memories that have impacted their consciousness, but which are still second-hand memories. This curiosity and anxiety run through this attempt to reconstruct the twentieth century’s final decades.

To remember legendary feats of resistance, detached from the experience of those who were born into democracy, Isabel do Carmo’s testimony, a member of the Revolutionary Brigades in the 1970s, focuses on the role of women in the fight against the dictatorship, mainly as defenders of illegal housing, but also on utopia and Marxism. If there are video experiments, superimposing the narration of the armed struggle with footage of an inverted implosion, as if building a landscape, there are times when spoken accounts are prioritized, and there are periods of darkness or white noise. Past activism, profoundly committed to the quest for a new world, contrasts with a scientific discourse on statistics and medicine, intercut with the memorial narrative, highlighting the difference between a dream world and the real. The images of the day-to-day boat arrivals and departures to cross the Tagus and head for the capital are a nod to the Portuguese landscape, particularly Lisbon, realigning theoretical debate in a specific context.

As well as recent technologies, the representation of the present includes films in which the shared use of the machine and women is associated. In older theatre and dance pieces, the female body also joins the sound reflections. We focus, therefore, on the female experience in the different time periods included in the work.

The technological experience then takes on Alan Rickman’s voice, a deceased actor, who takes over the words through artificial intelligence. The machine brings back to life an apparently unrecoverable and unrepeatable human fragment: the voice. While it attracts attention because it is someone easily recognizable, this moment is not presented morally, with neither fascination nor disapproval for this gift, but rather its standardization. Contemporaneity allows heirs to reclaim the ability to produce new discourse for those who are no longer alive, temporary returns that feed nostalgia in a material way.

The scenarios presented, only a few of which I would highlight, alternate in their pace, surprising the viewer who never knows what’s coming next.

Isabel do Carmo’s account tells us that discontinuity is a constant in history. The hunt for patterns, says the voice representing science throughout the film, is part of the human instinct. This is the case as it unfolds and the viewer tries to find the schematic thread of the work. The temporal, spatial and linguistic cuts between sci-fi and history, youth and ageing, and even between sound and image, add an aesthetic and conceptual cohesion, but are nonetheless discontinuities that we must bring together into a linear form.

There are attempts to share identity between the concerns of what was and what we want it to be: based on the famous slogan “Sous les pavés, la plage!”, the image of the beach hidden beneath May ’68 is reclaimed for a mother-son fusion: the ultimate embodiment of the unavoidable legacy of memory left to each.

Emily Wardill’s exhibition Night for Day is part of the cycle Pela Liberdade e não por Medo, dedicated to celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Carnation Revolution, and is at Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea – Museu do Chiado until June 23.