The Mnemosyne: inside Carolina Aguirre's curated moodboard

The Mnemosyne: inside curated moodboards is where we ask artists to walk us through their artistic research with an archive of visual bits (archived images, camera roll pictures, book pages, videos), to contrast algorithmic feeds and restore the fun in personally curated visual boards...

July 7, 2026

Arianna Caserta

Spotlight

In this chapter, we present Carolina Aguirre, who is currently showing her immersive installation ‘it murmurs’ at Palmer Gallery, London (until June 13th). She graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2023, and since then she has been working on the links between body, land, memory, migration and transformation, investigating the construction of mythopoetic landscapes.

Ana Mendieta’s 1974 blood writing ‘She got love’ - hope, spell, curse, epitaph, plea. I go back to her work all the time. The title of my video piece, ‘I’ve got you’, is a small nod to her.

‘I’ve got you’. Death as companion / director, distils script to its essence… Destroyer archetype. Being on screen felt raw, and I nearly cancelled the piece; I had some recent heartache = shaky confidence. But then I thought…

This, always this. The message at the heart of the show. Because it’s freeing and cuts the ego and reframes our responsibilities to Earth and each other.

Just showing off my favourite rock. Flint flaunting. Sediment lodges itself in an ancient sea creature’s home, solidifies into rock, and creates a cast. Like a deep sea, deep time, Rachel Whiteread (with similar readings)

William Basinki’s ‘The Disintegration Loops’. Digitising a composition, each playback degraded the tape, distorting the sound. We hear the tape’s gradual death. The beauty of decomposition is its capacity to generate something new. Both film + installation reference this. And a lesson for the studio too, notice everything.

I was throwing sculptural fragments out of my mezzanine. I came down from the ladder; they were sprawled, precarious, balancing, broken. The sight/accident was sad but full of potential. I felt something in my stomach, and that’s how the idea for the show happened.

Don Juan spitting truth in ‘Journey to Ixtlan; the lessons of Don Juan’ by Carlos Castaneda. I got onto Don Juan through Ana Mendieta. I’d heard she’d read it, and I wanted to eat what she ate. (But you want to start with the first book, ‘A Yaqui Way of Knowledge’).