Against Forgetting: Marine Zonca, Mnemonic Sculpture and the Counter-Time of Resistance

Sunday, March 30, 2025

In an era of hyperacceleration and digital amnesia, memory becomes not only a terrain of struggle but a radical gesture of refusal. The work of Marine Zonca, sculptor and researcher at EHESS, operates precisely at this intersection—where time, flesh, and thought intertwine to form sculptural gestures that resist the flattening logic of capitalist temporality.

Since 2019, Zonca’s practice has been dedicated to reconfiguring the body-spirit relation through forms that blur the boundaries between the organic and the artificial, between the mental diagram and the tactile trace. This effort to reconcile corporeal sculpture and mental drawing is not simply aesthetic—it is ontological and political. By invoking anachronism as a critical tool, Zonca reclaims the obsolete, the out-of-joint, the discarded metaphors of spirit and mind—the mausoleum, the library, the mask—not as nostalgic relics but as mnemonic resistances to the totalizing flow of presentism.

Her recent performative workshop Exercices de contre-mémoire (“Exercises in Counter-Memory”), creates mnemonic rituals that fracture the 24/7 continuity of the capitalist time regime. Through the crafting of objects, writing techniques, and embodied memory tools inspired by 19th-century mnemonics, Zonca stages moments of discontinuity, rituals of care for attention, and micro-resistances to the entropy of cognitive capitalism.

Memory as Resistance in the Age of Acceleration

Zonca’s practice unfolds within the context of what contemporary theorists call accelerationism—the experience of time collapsing into a feedback loop of intensification, where social and psychic tempos are synchronized with the algorithmic demands of capital. As Bernard Stiegler notes, we are witnessing a proletarianization of attention, where memory, desire, and individuation are outsourced to machines and monetized systems of data capture. The human subject becomes a residual figure, dismembered from its own time.

Against this backdrop, Zonca’s mnemonic objects are not nostalgic—they are insurgent. They create temporal bifurcations: moments that do not flow with the stream but crystallize experience. She does not attempt to “slow down” time—a common trope in reactionary anti-modernism—but to fold it, to complicate it, to open ruptures within it.

Her engagement with the Lukasa, a Congolese mnemonic device studied in anthropology, embodies this counter-temporality: a memory tool that is both physical and symbolic, narrative and performative, tactile and cognitive. In integrating such objects into her sculptural language, Zonca performs a decolonial gesture as well—a refusal of the Eurocentric linear archive in favor of embodied, spatialized, and plural modes of knowing.

Counter-Temporality as Sculptural Method

If capitalist temporality is a homogenized continuum—flat, metric, and future-oriented—then counter-temporality, in Zonca’s practice, is a textured, recursive, and speculative approach to form. She does not abandon the history of art but filters it through a mirror of critical deformation. The cube, the fresco, the packaging—the modernist, the sacred, and the commercial—are recombined into a visual lexicon that resists clarity. Her works act as opaque nodes of resonance.

Zonca proposes that the future can only be seen in the distorted mirror of the past, and vice versa. This dialectical reversal echoes Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history,” looking backward while being pulled forward by the storm of progress. But unlike Benjamin’s angel, paralyzed in horror, Zonca’s sculptures are agents of intervention—they compose with ruin and delay, with residue and refiguration.

Mnemonic Ecologies

What Marine Zonca offers is not just an artistic language but a method of survival. In a system that thrives on speed, erasure, and the industrialization of the mind, memory becomes a subversive act. Her ecology of attention does not idealize slowness but invokes singularity—a precise, embodied, and contextual gesture that resists replication.

In this way, Zonca’s work is not only contemporary—it is urgent. It reminds us that the future, if it is to be livable, must be sculpted through the discontinuities of memory, through the folds of time that refuse capture. To remember is not to regress. It is to take position in a world that seeks to flatten all difference into data. Her work sculpts against that forgetting.