Even the most princely doll becomes a capable proletarian comrade in the children’s play commune (Walter Benjamin, “Old Toys” 1928) During our childhood, we have all eviscerated a stuffed animal or disemboweled a toy. Baudelaire interpreted this impulse as a «first metaphysical tendency»: the child looks for the soul of his doll, but when he does not find it, sadness or stupor ensues. What Walter Benjamin would reply to the French poet is that the soul […]
The past is imprinted in the world of objects, in everything that we call “inanimate” even though if it did not have some kind of “anima” it would not encourage the memories. The work of Nathalie Rey pivots around memory, which she guts and sews on her operating table, dissecting recycled stuffed animals, her “little monsters”. Intelligence should not intervene in the archeology of memory, at least at first, in a first approach, wrote Proust, […]
