Maarten Vanden Eynde

Memory of Man, solo show at NOME gallery, Berlin, Germany, 2022

Memory of Man, solo show at NOME gallery, Berlin, Germany, 2022

The externalization of knowledge is perhaps one of the main reasons for the success story of Homo sapiens sapiens. Through the development of mathematics and binary code in Africa, writing eventually emerged as we know it today. The invention of printing further provided an unprecedented multiplication and distribution of knowledge before digital technology pulled out all the stops. 'Memory of Man' is a combination of different historic techniques to externalize memory, ranging from magnetic core memory to Congolese memory boards or Lukasa, that are mounted on a marble slab. The scratches and cuts are traces of the previous use of the marble slab as a cutting table in a stone factory and they reference the seemingly random graphic doodles that are found all around the world in caves and on portable stones and bone fragments. What meaning they have, if any at all, or how to 'read' these abstract symbols might be impossible to find out.