Proust’s Creative Intuition
The “stream of consciousness” style of prose, pioneered by Marcel Proust, uses incidental, often trivial memories as a gateway to the impetuous nature of conscious thoughts and self-identity. Proust skilfully weaves the fringe of various memories into a smooth experience of the ever-expanding narrator’s world as the story unveils. This exhibition is an attempt to transfer the principle of Proust’s theory of conscious experience into a physical space, while also introducing the viewer to the sensory world of the author's greatest novel.
Marcel Proust was a French writer, essayist, and literary critic, widely regarded as one of the greatest observers of memory. His most renowned novel, In Search of Lost Time, marked a decisive break from the realist, plot-driven novels of the 19th century, shifting the focus from a structured narrative and coherent development to a multiplicity of perspectives and the formation of subjective experience. Proust argues that the function of art is to indirectly evoke the underlying associative network in the observer's mind, using carefully chosen sensory stimulation to guide the flow of consciousness. He was the first to coin the term 'involuntary memory,' also known as 'the Madeleine moment,' after one of the most famous episodes in his novel. His work transports the reader into an infinite labyrinth of memories, often triggered by sensory stimuli such as the taste of a pastry or a familiar sound. Forms, Flows, and Metaphors is a dedicated collection of essays that further investigates the nature of this phenomenon from neurological, linguistic, and phenomenological perspectives.