Across artistic history, certain forms continue to reappear despite shifts in symbolic systems, belief structures, and cultural contexts. This raises a persistent question: why do certain forms endure across time even when their original meanings lose centrality? This paper addresses this question by examining the persistence of form as an effect of material continuity, grounded in artistic research. Drawing from sculptural and pictorial practice, the study proposes the concept of operational memory of form to describe how certain structures endure through repetition, bodily engagement, and material negotiation. Here, form is understood as sustained by operative conditions rather than by symbolic transmission alone. Descriptive attributes — such as weight, balance, gesture, and resistance — function as material affordances that generate formal stability across time, enabling continuity beyond narrative or mythic frameworks. At the same time, material continuity does not operate in isolation. Forms also persist through perceptual experience, generating experiential coherence that precedes language, tradition, or belief. Through the combined action of material processes and perception, forms shape spatial experience and produce a sense of presence and awe, contributing to states of well-being that are felt before being interpreted. Within this framework, the mythic is understood as a pre-discursive structure of recognition embedded in material practice and lived experience. Through selected transcultural examples, the presentation reframes persistence of form as a process-driven phenomenon, offering a material–aesthetic account of how artistic structures survive, transform, and remain operative across temporal and cultural contexts.

Authors:
Olga Cuxart Oriol, Independent Scholar, Spain

About the Presenter(s)
Dr. Olga Cuxart Oriol is an independent artist-researcher working between Asia and Europe. Her practice-based research engages with materiality and form within contemporary artistic practice.

See this presentation on the full schedule – Tuesday Schedule

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