The poem by Emily Dickinson, It Sifts from Leaden Sieves—which inspired the title of this exhibition by Lola Zoido (Badajoz, 1994), describes the tension between the beauty of order and nature’s transformation, and the chaotic human experience of time and memory. These heavy “leaden sieves,” like snow, sift through the landscape of our memory, altering our recollections, which are always selective and always subjective. The poem, imbued with melancholy, is particularly fitting for an artist who has been aptly described as a “weaver of the organic.”

Zoido’s work finds its meaning in a world where an overwhelming flood of images has been normalized—a world in which identity construction aligns with the logic of image consumption. Moving away from essentialisms, the creation of subjectivity emerges as a process centered on digital representations, They are the fictions of the self, in which technology and memory are intertwined in service of a personal narrative. Our world unfolds with each choice of images and each interpretation within this “lawless archive”—as Brea described it—that is the digital realm, a chaotic archive where any classification (and thus, any interpretation) is possible.

Zoido is interested in the construction of a personal narrative—a pressing issue of our time—aware of the mediation of mobile devices in shaping our perception of reality. While the passage of time acts upon our experiences and memory filters these recollections, preserving only some, the photo gallery on our phones allows us to unlock seemingly forgotten memories (Freud claimed that forgetting does not exist) and revisit a magma of accumulated experiences as an unconscious collection of images. It is from these retrieved memories, captured through a technological device that serves as a filter between us and the photographed subject, that It makes an even face speaks to us. If lightness is a characteristic of the digital and fragility is a hallmark of memory, the artist restores solidity to these memories, materializing them onto a physical medium as a palimpsest, layering all the elements that configure our memories—memories tainted by ritual gestures (now generational), so habitual, obsessive, and automatic, like the swipe of fingers across a screen or the gestures we made with our hands to capture the moment, which in interacting with the images, add endless layers of meaning. Zoido thus invites the viewer to question their own relationship with images, with memory, and consequently, with time.

In her quest for lost time, the artist materializes it, presenting it as something open and manipulable. As in Dickinson, there is a touch of melancholy in this sort of Proustian madeleine, evoking a world in constant deconstruction and reconstruction. Ultimately, the artist echoes a generational way of confronting memories—a questioning of contemporary memory, which nevertheless retains the original purpose of image-making. Perhaps AI or image-editing tools will be able to “enhance our memories” by allowing us to manipulate images at will. The extent to which these images are real or not is one of the great debates in the history of photography. But here we are not talking about documents but about memories. And, as Buñuel said regarding memory, “we may end up making a truth of our lies, which, for that matter, holds only relative importance, as one is just as vital and personal as the other.”