Nomination: Drempelprijs 2018
What is left after the performance?
If memories have no assigned place in time, what do we remember? A girl spots a way to break out of a continuous struggle with her memory. The audience is present when the girl finds out she is just a product of a constructed timeline in someone else's reality.
A raw dance performance with live video mixing and sound art about memories. What is left after the performance? For the exhibition, I research how to present a memory of what we have done. As I think a live performance cannot be presented as a video-documentation.
Because of the importance of being present for a memory to exist, I made a live performance. Five artists who never met before, carrying different references and emotions, needed to connect live on stage by being in the moment, reacting on temperature, spatial density and timing. Therefore, the piece, the memory, is always different. Highly improvised within a clear framework of directions.
With projectors, I’ve created a space where everything can be a screen. The images on the crumbling styrofoam décor (“the brain”) represent memory, live constructed with webcams and video-software. With video-mixers I shift the time of the image. The protagonist and audience are constantly placed in different dimensions. “If memories have no assigned place in time, what do we remember?”
Another film-element is the live sound-foley that predicts the protagonist's actions and makes her remember how to break out of a continuous struggle with her memory. She finds out she is just the product of a constructed timeline in the reality of the technicians. After the performance, the audience processes their thoughts onto the destructed décor. This act of recollection forms the memory of the performance, which is being presented as the aftermath.
I wish people wouldn’t recall an experience by watching back digital images that never change over time. Instead, I want to give them the freedom to interpret their thoughts, by digging into their memory that crumbles over time. I’d love to continue this research to explore the wider meaning of filmmaking. The story should decide how the medium is put into practice.
There’s no truth in how we remember.
My project is about the essence of temporality. We experience “now”, and what happens “afterwards”? As a filmmaker, I am not redefining film, but researching the broader possibilities of the medium, by focusing on the elements ‘time’ and ‘space’, which are not always taken into account in a cinema space. In a self-arranged project-venue, I influenced the complete journey of the audience. With my research, I shine a critical light on my own art practice as an audiovisual filmmaker, by embracing the flexibility of the medium and the audience’s existence. Reminiscence comes from a fascination for the subjective character of memory and our perception of time. Memories are often perceived as our past, but in contrary, we shape them in the present. There’s no truth in how we remember. We should allow ourselves to rewrite our memory every moment: whether it is through remembering, reinterpreting or forgetting.
