Blinked myself awake by Bieke Depoorter

Bieke Depoorter’s exploration of memory loss through the lens of astronomy becomes a profound meditation on the fragility and fluidity of human recollection. Her work draws on the ephemeral nature of starlight, a metaphor for the way memories linger—faint, fractured, and sometimes wholly reimagined—long after their origins have faded. Just as the light from distant stars takes centuries to reach us, even from celestial bodies that may no longer exist, memory is an imperfect archive: a constellation of moments, some clear and bright, others dim or irretrievably lost.

Depoorter’s approach transforms this cosmic metaphor into a deeply personal and tactile experience. In Blinked Myself Awake, she intertwines her personal history with the shared act of stargazing, inviting the audience to reflect on their own relationship with memory. Through photographs of amateur astronomers, historical fragments of forgotten female pioneers, and diaristic texts, she constructs a layered narrative that mimics the act of remembering itself—nonlinear, disjointed, and inherently incomplete. Her imagery fluctuates between sharp focus and abstraction, employing double exposures, blurred outlines, and fading light to evoke the shifting boundaries between clarity and forgetting.

The design of her work deepens these themes, treating the book as a living object rather than a static artifact. The unconventional use of materials—thick, paper for personal texts and thin, recycled pages for archival photographs and research—reinforces the precariousness of memory. The recycled paper, fragile and fleeting, mirrors the transience of historical narratives, while the weight of her words demands a tactile intimacy, encouraging readers to confront the materiality of memory itself. Over time, as the pages wear or fade with handling, the book physically enacts the process of forgetting, leaving behind only traces of what once was.

Through this intricate blending of form and content, Depoorter also draws on the symbolic interplay of light and darkness. Her photographs echo the cosmic duality of starlight: overexposed images dissolve into whiteness, while underexposed ones are veiled in shadow, paralleling the way memory alternates between revelation and obscurity. By juxtaposing historical fragments with her personal narrative, she underscores how memory—both individual and collective—is a selective and often unreliable construction, one shaped as much by absences as by what remains.

Depoorter’s work also invites participation, making space for the audience to become active contributors to the act of remembering. Through interactive design, such as fold-out pages, hidden texts, or materials that degrade over time, she transforms the viewer’s experience into a meditation on loss. The book becomes an artifact not only of her journey but of the audience’s engagement with it—a collaboration where the act of observation mirrors the process of remembering and forgetting.

The inclusion of celestial motifs further ties memory to the cosmos. Maps of constellations become metaphors for fragmented recollections, their points of light connected by human imagination to form narratives of meaning. Some stars, like forgotten memories, have already vanished; others endure, distant and faint, waiting to be rediscovered. In these choices, Depoorter mirrors humanity’s need to reconstruct and reinterpret its past, just as astronomers have charted the heavens for centuries, seeking to impose order on the vast unknown.

Ultimately, Blinked Myself Awake is an invitation to embrace the impermanence of memory as a vital part of the human experience. It is a work of layered complexities, where design, photography, and narrative intertwine to echo the beauty and melancholy of forgetting. By connecting the personal to the universal, the ephemeral to the enduring, Depoorter transforms the loss of memory into a shared act of wonder—like starlight, illuminating even as it fades.