Dane Mitchell

Remedies for Remembering (Ai) & Forgetting (NaCi)

2016 (armature 2026).

Homeopathic remedies, water pump, hosing, mild steel, micro sprinkler, IBC

Remedies for Remembering (Al) and Forgetting (NaCl) asks how objects might exceed their physical substance, employing homeopathic logic – correspondence, contagion and dilution – as a framework for understanding (and misunderstanding) how meaning might be inscribed in matter.

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In the practice of homeopathy, it is believed not only that "like cures like", but that water has the capacity to "remember" substances mixed with it, even when those substances are no longer traceable within it. After processes of succussion and dilution, water is said to become potentised – able to transmit effects when consumed. The two substances at the heart of this work are aluminium (Al), commonly prescribed by homeopaths to aid remembering, and sodium chloride (NaCl), prescribed to aid forgetting, often in the context of overcoming trauma. Acting to contrary ends, they produce a productive impasse, a system in a state of perpetual negotiation with itself.

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Quite literally a System Release, Remedies for Remembering (Al) and Forgetting (NaCl) are fused and sprayed onto the museum; it is doused so that we might imagine the potential of encountering a museum in a state of constant reappraisal, fluidity and adaptability. The museum – that supposedly stable custodian of the past – is here subject to the same logic of dissolution and potentisation as the substances it might contain. What is remembered and what is forgotten, what is preserved and what is allowed to fade, are revealed as choices rather than certainties: the institution, like the homeopathic solution, holds its contents through memory rather than molecule.