"The Chimera of Memory," an exhibition curated by students in the Master's Program in Curatorial Studies, is on view at La Casa Encendida in Madrid

La Casa Encendida hosted the graduates of the MUN Master’s Program in Curatorial Studies to present an exhibition featuring works from its collection. This event serves as a preview and introduction to the exhibition that will be on view at the Museo Universidad de Navarra next season.

Each year, the Museo Universidad de Navarra Master’s Program in Curatorial Studies Museo Universidad de Navarra its students the opportunity to develop an exhibition project based on the collections and works of various museums and cultural institutions.

Last academic year, La Casa Encendida made its space and collections available to master’s students so they could explore them and develop various curatorial proposals.

After a course focused on developing these exhibitions, the student presented his proposals to a panel consisting of the Master’s program faculty, the director of Casa Encendida, and the institution’s co-director of New Audiences. Following this process, one of the projects was selected to be realized and exhibited in the galleries of Museo Universidad de Navarra itself.

“Working with La Casa Encendida has been an extraordinary opportunity,” says Angie Grijalva, one of the curators.“The most enriching aspect of our research was the very nature of the Generaciones Collection. By bringing together works by artists selected between 2010 and 2024, the collection allowed us to observe how a single theme—memory, in our case—has been approached from very diverse contexts. Many of these artists have ties to Spain, but they also bring experiences and references from other cultures and countries. Thanks to that diversity, we were able to understand memory as a phenomenon that transforms depending on the personal stories, places, and cultures from which it is recalled.”

Thus, on September 3, the MUN will open the exhibition *Museum of Fleeting Memories*, curated by alumni Angie Grijalva, ShaLyeen Rae Ouellette, and Elena Stanley Tobin.

In anticipation of this upcoming opening, the students were able to visit La Casa Encendida to present their project, *Museum of Unconscious Memories*, at the venue where they held their exhibition.

The exhibition, which draws on works from the La Casa Encendida collection, stems from a key question that preoccupied its curators: What is memory? Are our memories truly real, or are they constructs we create based on the small fragments we recall?

During their research into these ideas, the curators found a work of literature that directly addressed the theme. Specifically, Jorge Luis Borges had already explored this idea, particularly in his work “Cambridge,” which ends with the following sentence: “We are our memory; we are that chimerical museum of ever-changing forms, that pile of broken mirrors.” In an effort to understand what Borges meant by the concepts of a “chimerical museum” and “broken mirrors,” after an extensive research process, they concluded that Borges was referring to our memories as distorted and reinterpreted fragments. In other words: individual pieces with which we construct the narrative of what we believe happened.

The idea of “chimeric memories” refers to two aspects: on the one hand, that dream or illusion—such as the one we have in the face of uncertainty about the past—and, on the other, the mythological Chimera—a creature composed of parts from various animals—as if it were that memory we construct from multiple fragments.

That chimera of memory—of our mind—comes to life in this exhibition through the works of La Casa Encendida’s Generaciones 2020–2024 Collection. “Our interest in memory arose from our encounter with the works in the Collection itself. We realized that many of the pieces were related to memory and recollections. From there, we found connections to literature—especially Borges’s quote—but we also came to analyze the subject from a scientific perspective. We discovered that many of the conclusions reached by disciplines such as neuroscience—memory as reconstruction, as something fragmentary and in constant transformation—had already been intuited by art and literature.”

Thus, this exhibition draws us into our own chimera, inviting us to reflect on how the mind fills its own voids, layering memories to create what we call memory.