"He would invent his own history, making use of esoteric fragments from what he had read. Instead of being ruled by history, he would create it; instead of relying upon the past, he would re-invent it and venture into a timeless world of his own making" Jorge Luis Borges

T he project "Personal Mythology" represents an artistic journey into the past through symbolic images and objects. It is simultaneously inspired by two interconnected yet opposite experiences: one is my existential itinerary as an immigrant artist encountered with the feelings of displacement and loss of stability; and the other is the search for rootedness and identity through artistic re-articulations of my personal and cultural memory. Precisely this consciously deployed duplicity of voices opens "Archeology of Memory" to multiple interpretations that elude any attempt at stabilization. The vagrant (immigrant) perspective of disconnection and uprootedness is constantly questioned through an imaginary artistic 'return' in the familiar yet distant universe of my childhood memories. In other words, with "Personal Mythology" I ask a number of profoundly personal identity questions: how does the process of displacement define my life trajectory; is it possible to experience authenticity and individual expression in an overwhelmingly new reality; is the abandoned world of childhood and memory lost forever; do I yet exist in the recollections of those whom I had encountered previously? On the one hand, my art is certainly marked by the panic fear related to erasure and obliteration; on the other hand, the fear appears as an enabling force, the driving mechanism of this personal archeology. I started collecting and organizing a wide variety of relics: objects, diaries, and old photos. They all represent multi-vocal embodiments of this subjective past that I want to preserve and re-invent. Ultimately, the memory of this personal archive exhibits and reframes the past through playful experiments with real events and their deeply ingrained subjective interpretations.