“I am terrified by the idea of altering my memories.” Engrams are imprints on the brain left by our experiences. This video essay began as a conversation between An-Laurence Higgins and Aaron Pollard, two Montreal artists of different generations, with diverging cultural and linguistic backgrounds. This conversation centers on a shared preoccupation with the ways in which memory shapes identity, how the stories we hold onto shift over time and space and how seemingly indelible experiences are transformed and lost to our minds. The making of this work coincided with the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic. This and other global circumstances instigated an international focus on ecology, the human impact on the planet as a whole and the vitality gained from time spent outside in the elements. The natural world figures prominently in Engramme. Humanity appears only fleetingly in front of the lens, yet an anthropic imprint is ever present in its framing, sounds, speech and movement. Through a sequence of scenes, music and texts, Higgins and Pollard offer a dialectics of elements composed and assembled over the spring, summer and fall of 2021. What emerges is a shared ethos of availabilism – they collected the visual material with a variety of small cameras and devices – and a layered approach to image and sound following a poetic logic.
